...Michelle T. King Fu Pei-mei (1931–2004), cookbook author and television personality in postwar Taiwan, was often called the “Julia Child of Chinese Cooking.” While Child sought to introduce American audiences to the unfamiliar tastes and traditions of French cuisine, Fu was demonstrating Chinese...

... sophistication by swallowing what the chef feeds him is also taking in the unknown, the mysterious, the potentially defiling and disgusting. Television chefdom solves this problem, at once making the chef famous, exposing him as ordinary, and putting him in his place through the mechanisms of reality TV...