I would first like to thank you all for entertaining this little project of mine. I have no idea if it is going to be good or how long I will do it but let’s see!
As the days of self-isolation drag on, I find myself increasingly falling into the infinity of the internet. For me, that manifests itself in endlessly scrolling through Twitter and falling down the YouTube algorithm. A few days ago, I found myself doing just this, spending the late afternoon of a beautiful day sitting inside browsing. I fell down a rabbit hole of a few Bon Appetit videos and came to a conclusion:
I put my phone down and went to eat dinner, a lovely assortment of leftovers from the night prior. Over the meal my family and I chatted about how everyone spent their day —at no point during this quarantine have any of us been more than 15 feet away from one another— and placed bets on how long we would be under house arrest. Afterwards, I plopped down onto my bed with the intention of continuing my eternal scroll. Instead, I had a deluge of new texts from friends and foes alike, furious at my Bon Appetit take. How dare I suggest Claire Saffitz is anything other than a queen? Naturally, I doubled down. One of my friends was kind/stubborn enough to lead me on a viewing of BA’s greatest hits. The videos were enjoyable enough, and I soon realized my true beef was not with BA but rather with Claire herself, a topic for a later date. During this 3-hr binge, one video in particular fascinated me, Natalie Portman Tries to Keep up With a Professional Chef.
As with most content at that scale, the video was not made simply for fun. It was a marketing ploy. The movie Portman was promoting at the time was a food documentary bankrolled by IFC Films, a subsidiary of AMC Networks. AMC Networks is worth $1.25B. Bon Appetit is an imprint of Conde Nast, one of the largest media companies in the world. In most cases, the fact that a video is a business partnership between two massive corporations doesn’t matter. Hot Ones is still fun despite the fact Complex is half owned by Verizon. But in this case, the context does matter. The entire video is more comprehensible when you realize that Portman is only there due to a contractual obligation.
The premise of the series that this video is a part of is that a professional chef, angel Carla, leads celebs through cooking a dish as they stand back to back. The dish for today is a carpaccio, which I’m pretty sure is just a summer salad. At the onset of the video, Portman states that she has no clue what she’s doing in the kitchen and is legitimately afraid of hurting herself. Carla thus reassures her that speed is the most important aspect of the afternoon. Resultingly, Portman almost smashes her finger while attempting to crack open a coconut (a process which involves a screwdriver), and nearly slices her hand open while cutting a watermelon. All the while seeming increasingly flustered and frustrated at the task at hand. This is to speak nothing of the dish itself. Personally, I hate any attempt to treat a fruit such as like watermelon as something savory. So, you can then imagine my horror as the two chefs slice the melon into thin pieces resembling ham and dump olive oil on it. Such an atrocity is one thing, but the inclusion of raw zucchini into the salad is the culinary equivalent to a Selena Gomez song. The idea of it seems enjoyable enough, but in practice it is an affront to the craft. Zucchini when cooked is a lovely, hearty vegetable. Zucchini when raw is one of the grossest things I have ever had the displeasure of coming across. The chefs plate their salads and Portman elects to lay her zucchini out a star formation, like the spokes of a wheel. This gives her plate an unsettling “pizza” quality to it, something that haunts me still. Carla’s plate, for what it’s worth, looks lovely.
Thankfully, the video eventually comes to an end. The two chefs spin around, displaying their projects. Both let out simultaneous little “oh”s and one can’t help but wonder if the 2010 Academy Award Winner for Best Actress might be practicing her craft. After awkward niceties and a SINGLE bite of salad, the chefs look to camera, afraid of what just happened. There is something haunting about the last shot. The viewer is left, in silence, to make direct eye contact with both chefs over their corporate salads that took them exactly 20 minutes to make, not a second more.
(I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the greatest Back to Back video of all time)