Thoughts on Diary of a Foodie

I caught the first episode ("One Billion Foodies") of Diary of a Foodie yesterday on PBS and found it to be both good and bad at the same time. I'm not sure how that's possible, but that was my reaction. The bad: The show tried way too hard to be hip and cool. The camera work was annoying. All the shots of faces were so tight either the face didn't fit in the frame, or off center, so you saw half a face. And they kept framing an object (a branch, a vegetable) and changing the focus from the foreground to the background, over and over. At the end of the program, Ruth Reichl introduced some common sauces in Chinese cooking and the saturation was out of control. And they must have used the word "foodie" a billion times. If the show had been longer than half an hour, my eyes and ears may have started to bleed.

On the plus side, the people they visited in China (a rural doctor outside of Beijing, a traditional dumpling maker, a Peking duck specialist in Beijing, and a "New Shanghainese" chef in Shanghai) were really interesting. I loved the shots of a woman cooking an entire meal in a wood-fired wok in the countryside, as people have done for eons in China. And it was great to watch the prep work that goes into making the Peking duck. During the scene about dumpling-making, there was a great, unforced banter between the visitors making their first dumplings (badly) and those that create hundreds of them a day. For me, the best parts of the show happened when they just let the camera roll on people making food in China.

I plan to watch the next few episodes, but I'm not convinced (yet) this is a must-watch program for me. Did you watch it? What did you think? Maybe I'm being too harsh…