Writers, are we losing our originality?
If you watch many of the shows on the Food Network, you know that while those of us at home cook with A-1 Sauce, Campbell's condensed soups, Hamburger Helper and processed everything, chefs in competition are expected to make meals from scratch. Theoretically, writers are encouraged to do this, too.
The show "Chopped" takes a different approach. It specializes in giving competing chefs odd combinations of strange ingredients which must then be artfully combined into an appetizer, an entre and a desert in timed cooking rushes. The ingredients often include many unregonizable "foods" (like squid ink) that you can't find at your neighborhood Kroger along with many foods that we all know and love such as fig bars, cheese crackers and a variety of cereals displayed in a generic sense so that nobody can scream "product placement."
Chefs competing on "Chopped" quickly learn that ALL of the weird stuff in their baskets of mandatory ingredients must be combined into the meal. Woe be unto the chef who thinks s/he can shake the cheese crackers on top of an entre like croutons or that the squid ink can go into a bowl for dipping or sipping. The word of choice on the show is "re-purposing." This means taking recognizable products and grinding, dicing, and otherwise destroying them to that they are born again out of the ashes of the chefs' new creations.
"Re-purposing" is an interresting concept on "Chopped," especially when most other cooking shows shun the use of any pre-processed food of any kind. As I watch "Chopped," it's clear to me that the producers and directors learned their trade well in college English, Journalism, and Creative Writing courses where the use of pre-processed works (like "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" or Hemingway's war reporting) was considered plagiarism while disgusing it was considered creative.
In "the old days" teachers had to trudge over to the library when they found unattributed sentences and paragraphs in a student's theme, essay, book report or term paper that sounded oddly familiar--"pre-processed," so to speak. Now colleges have plagarism software that can ferret out copyrighted material in the blink of an eye. Colleges, as I discovered both as a student and an instructor, have long-favored "re-purposing" based on the dogmas that there's nothing new under the sun and that there are only X number of stories out there and they were all written years ago.
Students are encouraged to go to the great canon of novels, non-fiction books, articles and short stories (and now, the Internet) and grind up what they find there and make something new out of it. This is rather pragmatic in a fast-food, low-attention-span world where time is short when it comes to anything from a movie to a novel to a meatloaf out of original ingredients.
If you sprinkle fig bars or triscuits on top of your salad on "Chopped," you will be chopped--that is to say, eliminated from the competition. If you sprinkle slabs of prose wirtten by Betty Smith or Hemingway into your short story or term paper in a college class, you'll also be chopped--that is to say, in most colleges such behavior is an automatic F in the course. Crafty re-purposing is championed with $10,000 on "Chopped" and a magna cum laude graduation from a college writing class or MFA program.
I fear the day will come when no cook or writer will know that original ingredients exist. "You mean, ketchup doesn't come right out of the garden and novels aren't created by combining a cup of blog material, several teaspoons of wikpedia and a dash of Grisham or Gabaldon for seasoning?"
The show "Chopped" takes a different approach. It specializes in giving competing chefs odd combinations of strange ingredients which must then be artfully combined into an appetizer, an entre and a desert in timed cooking rushes. The ingredients often include many unregonizable "foods" (like squid ink) that you can't find at your neighborhood Kroger along with many foods that we all know and love such as fig bars, cheese crackers and a variety of cereals displayed in a generic sense so that nobody can scream "product placement."
Chefs competing on "Chopped" quickly learn that ALL of the weird stuff in their baskets of mandatory ingredients must be combined into the meal. Woe be unto the chef who thinks s/he can shake the cheese crackers on top of an entre like croutons or that the squid ink can go into a bowl for dipping or sipping. The word of choice on the show is "re-purposing." This means taking recognizable products and grinding, dicing, and otherwise destroying them to that they are born again out of the ashes of the chefs' new creations.
"Re-purposing" is an interresting concept on "Chopped," especially when most other cooking shows shun the use of any pre-processed food of any kind. As I watch "Chopped," it's clear to me that the producers and directors learned their trade well in college English, Journalism, and Creative Writing courses where the use of pre-processed works (like "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" or Hemingway's war reporting) was considered plagiarism while disgusing it was considered creative.
In "the old days" teachers had to trudge over to the library when they found unattributed sentences and paragraphs in a student's theme, essay, book report or term paper that sounded oddly familiar--"pre-processed," so to speak. Now colleges have plagarism software that can ferret out copyrighted material in the blink of an eye. Colleges, as I discovered both as a student and an instructor, have long-favored "re-purposing" based on the dogmas that there's nothing new under the sun and that there are only X number of stories out there and they were all written years ago.
Students are encouraged to go to the great canon of novels, non-fiction books, articles and short stories (and now, the Internet) and grind up what they find there and make something new out of it. This is rather pragmatic in a fast-food, low-attention-span world where time is short when it comes to anything from a movie to a novel to a meatloaf out of original ingredients.
If you sprinkle fig bars or triscuits on top of your salad on "Chopped," you will be chopped--that is to say, eliminated from the competition. If you sprinkle slabs of prose wirtten by Betty Smith or Hemingway into your short story or term paper in a college class, you'll also be chopped--that is to say, in most colleges such behavior is an automatic F in the course. Crafty re-purposing is championed with $10,000 on "Chopped" and a magna cum laude graduation from a college writing class or MFA program.
I fear the day will come when no cook or writer will know that original ingredients exist. "You mean, ketchup doesn't come right out of the garden and novels aren't created by combining a cup of blog material, several teaspoons of wikpedia and a dash of Grisham or Gabaldon for seasoning?"
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