The following article evolved out of a paper presented at the 2020 Southwestern Popular/American Culture Association Conference.
The first episode of The French Chef with Julia Child aired February 1963 on PBS out of Boston, Massachusetts. In the pilot, the credits open over a grand, Old World kitchen where Ms Child stands at an island the size of Greenland conducting a symphony of many steaming pots and pans. A jaunty tune, almost like “Yankee Doodle” whistles along, and then the host says, “Welcome to The French Chef. I’m Julia Child. This is probably the most famous stew in all the world. This is beouf bourgignon!” 1
The host is charming already. She’s… a bit odd in her voice and in her stature. But she’s confident, she’s capable, and she’s jovial—all over a scene that would probably leave the rest of us pulling our hair out.
This is the format almost every cooking show would adopt in the 60 years since its debut. Alton Brown refers to this as the “plop-and-stir” model: a charming personality plopping foods and stirring them at a kitchen island larger than you could ever afford, showing you how to make one dish, ‘beouff bourgignon’.
Shannon and Weaver Model of Communication
That same year, 1963, the paperback edition of The Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver was released. It was based on a paper published by Claude Shannon in Bell Systems Technical Journal in 1948 which cemented Shannon as the ‘father of Information Theory’.
The paper concerned itself with defining the path information takes from a Source to a Destination (fun fact: it’s also where we get the term ‘bit’ from as a unit of information). And with the help of Warren Weaver, Shannon was able to apply this mathematical theory even more broadly to every form of communication.
The theory works like this:
“The information source selects a desired message out of a set of possible messages… The selected message may consist of written or spoken words, or of pictures, music, etc. The transmitter changes this message into the signal which is actually sent over the communication channel from the transmitter to the receiver… The receiver is a sort of inverse transmitter, changing the transmitted signal back into a message, and banding this message on to the destination. When I talk to you, my brain is the information source, yours the destination; my vocal system is the transmitter, and your ear and the associated eighth nerve is the receiver.” 2
So for example, you in your head think, hunger. You send that Message to you mouth which sends the Signal, “Hey, could you get me some chips from the cabinet?” Your friend’s ear picks up the signal, decodes it and send the message, get off the couch, to your friend’s brain.
The Introduction of Noise
Now, you’ll notice that there is a big difference between the original Message, hunger, and the arriving Message, get off the couch. And that’s because an inherent part of this communications system is the introduction of Noise. The original Message is never the same as the arriving Message. There are too many variables in place to ever send a perfect Message. As Weaver says:
“In the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the information source… All of these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise.“
This implies that the goal of any technical communicator is to reduce the amount of Noise as much as possible. Weaver defines communication as “all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another”—in other words, a clear and perfect Message from the Source to the Destination.
Julia Child is the Source. ‘Beouff bourgignon’ is the Message. You are the Destination.
‘Good Eats’ Re-Invents the Cooking Show
But in July 1998, a different kind of cooking show first aired on PBS. To take you back, chefs were hot. There was Bobby Flay, Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, Paula Dean (some of those we’re not allowed to talk about anymore)—but it was clear that people who knew how to cook were becoming cool. Even, kinda badass. The personalities became bigger. Live studio audiences were brought in. And yet, for the most part, the shows were the same as Julia’s. Except for Good Eats.
Maya Phillips of the New Yorker says, “Many cooking shows adopt the mode of instruction—Julia Child counselling aspiring chefs from the screen. But, in Good Eats, Brown delivers a performance that is equal parts lecture, theatre, and winking conversation between friends.” 3
In an interview with Kevin Pang for The Takeout, Alton Brown, the creator of Good Eats, describes the shows as “heavily influenced by Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Mr. Rogers. I wanted to build a world, and a world had to have recurring characters, it had to have a visual and sound style.” 4
And there were recurring characters: There was Sid, the sleazy talent agent who represented foods no one wanted to eat. There was Lady of the Refrigerator, a beautiful, ethereal woman who, in real life, is an actual dietitian. And there’s uncle Bob Boatwright who was literally just Alton doing an over-the-top Colonel Sanders impression.
Sciencey ‘Good Eats’
Viewers will typically describe Good Eats as Bill Nye the Science Guy, but with food. The show is very sciencey. In a 2014 interview on Larry King Now, Alton admits, “It was a very science-oriented show… It was about why does this work, and how do we find a way to use knowledge about food to make it better.” 5 Every episode of Good Eats will feature some expert explaining the nuts and bolts of why things work the way they work. Over the course of the show we meet a culinary anthropologist, a dietitian, historians, hardware experts, and even a butcher explaining why the shoulder of a pig is actually called the Boston butt.
And each episode of Good Eats revolves around a single food or food topic. Sometimes it’s an entire episode about carrots, sometimes it’s egg nog, sometimes it’s okra. But it’s not always a food item. Good Eats has had entire episodes on knife skills: how to take care of them, how to use them properly, which ones you actually need. Good Eats has episodes on water and why you should a care about it; on sustainable fishing and the eating of fish; on Alton Brown’s diet and how he lost so much weight between seasons 12 and 13.
Its episodes cover more than one dish—they are about food culture and the technical and ethical aspects of food culture. But this jumbled mess of science and tech stuff sort of muddles that very direct communication pioneered by Julia Child. It introduces a lot of Noise.
Introducing ‘Wankiness’ into Communications Systems
Good Eats is not just a science program. The show is also wacky and silly and kinda stupid. In the interview with Larry King, Alton says, “We used to have a sign above the studio door that said, ‘Laughing brains are more absorbent.’ I didn’t try to teach, I tried to entertain. And if I happened to infect you with some knowledge along the way, then great. But I never lost sight of the fact that the first job was to entertain for half an hour.”
And it shows. In the interview with Kevin Pang, Alton says, “I know what the DNA of the show is. I know what its bones are. A certain wankiness—whether it’s sock puppets or some effect where you can see the wires—is important.” And that is effective. For some reason, we learn more from the wanky Good Eats than from any other plop-and-stir cooking show.
Humanist Communication
And for that reason, the Mathematical Theory of Communication seems to fall apart. Shannon and Weaver’s model is a very humanistic idea of how communication works: it implies an individual existing in a vacuum (the Information Source) has a unique Message and attempts to transfer that Message to another individual (the Destination) while removing any other variables. Remember, Weaver defines communication as a procedure by which “one mind may affect another.”
In other words, I take a Message from my brain, and I insert it into your brain. And if it doesn’t go in right, well then I try to streamline that Message until it gets in there and you think what I told you to think.
But that’s just not how natural communication works. Sometimes I have no idea why the words I just said came out of my mouth. Sometimes we learn through dialectic. And sometimes I don’t communicate for you, I communicate for me because it was fun. Sometimes we just want to entertain. Sometimes we just want to have fun and make art.
Therefore, Noise is not something that corrupts a Message. Noise is something to embrace! And Good Eats embraces the ‘wankiness’, not just in the aesthetics of the show, but in its core message as well.
‘The Dough Also Rises’: Learning from the Unexpected
Season 1, episode 7 of Good Eats, “The Dough Also Rises”, aired in 1999. The theme of the episode was biscuits, and the purpose of the episode was to teach us, the viewers, how to make biscuits as good as Alton’s real life grandmother, Ma Mae.
“I’ve been studying how to make them at her knee like Luke Skywalker at Yoda’s place… Ma Mae here taught me how to make biscuits and every biscuit that I’ve ever had is basically trying to live up to hers.” 6
Over the course of the episode, Ma Mae makes her classic biscuits, but Alton makes a few changes to his. Their recipes diverge early on. Ma Mae measures by eye while Alton prefers exact measurements and procedures developed through research and logic. Alton himself will say that baking is more science than art. More than any other kind of cooking, baking can be broken down to absolute figures, equations and procedures. In a talk at Google in 2011, Alton said:
The thing that people have to realize about baking is, it doesn’t forgive. It is engineering… If you monkey with this over here, you’ve got to do this over here. And once an equation gets out of kilter, you’re done. Game over… It’s real easy to talk about baking from a historical standpoint or traditional standpoints, because we think of baking as this very kind of homey craft. But it’s rocket science. It’s absolute rocket science. 7
Naturally, engineering should translate well to technical communication. Figures, equations and procedures can be recorded and replicated. You can fit it into an instructional cooking show pretty easily. But for some reason, Ma Mae’s biscuit recipe doesn’t.
Perfect Noise
On the surface, the Information Source is Ma Mae, and the Destination is the viewer. But that doesn’t hold up. The Destination was never intended to be us. The destination was Alton. He wanted his grandmother’s biscuit recipe, because Ma Mae was a very old woman, and she was going to die one day. And he wanted to hold on to a part of her.
In the Mathematical Theory of Communication, all of that is noise. None of it matters. The Information Source is Ma Mae, the Message is her biscuit recipe. But ultimately that Message fails, because Alton’s biscuits don’t turn out as good as his grandmother’s. A technical communicator might say, ‘We need to find out where the Message failed so that we can properly replicate your grandmother’s biscuit recipe in the clearest fidelity possible.’
But they would be wrong here, because the message wasn’t actually the biscuit recipe. The Source Message was love, the Signal was biscuits, and the Destination Message that Alton receives is love. And in that case, it actually does the impossible. It’s actually perfect communication!
Ma Mae died in November 2001. And Alton Brown has admitted that he never perfected her biscuit recipe. But that episode lives on as a monument to his grandmother. And not just that.
The Message We Receive
When I watch “The Dough Also Rises”, I think of my own grandmother. I think of my Vovo who doesn’t speak English. And I don’t speak Kriolu (her language). But my Vovo does cook, and she is the best cook in our community. She makes the best pastels and gufong. She makes these really rich, moist, decadent doughnuts with coconut shavings on the outside, and she make the best cachupa—which is the national dish of her home in Cabo Verde.
And when I watch “The Dough Also Rises”, I think of how much I love my Vovo…and I think, why does she refuse to show me any of her damn recipes!
That is the successful communication of “The Dough Also Rises”. We’ll never learn how to make biscuits as good as Ma Mae, because no one can. The only reason those biscuits are so good, is because Ma Mae made them. But we do experience the love between a grandmother and her grandson. Alton himself says in his talk at Google, “No one will feed you as well as somebody who loves you… there’s a tangible, transferable value of love in cooking for people.”
The Good Eats episode makes me think of my own relationship with my grandmother, and it makes me think of other relationships I create with people I love through food. And we become better cooks and better eaters through that.
Art and Wankiness
So the cooking show worked. It delivered its message. And delivered it in a wanky, awkward sort of way that wouldn’t have worked if it were just another plop-and-stir cooking show.
It’s not that Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication is broken. The model is still present. It’s just that it is infinitely more complicated than that linear path.
Noise, wankiness, a back and forth process that involves an entire community of ideas rather than simply a Source and a Destination does not corrupt communication. Wankiness is another tool that we might be able to learn to use. And if we can never really learn it, we can at least embrace it rather than try to banish it. We can embrace the Art of communication, rather than the math of it. Sure, that art complicates something that we are tryin to make concise, but that art is also…well it’s also just good eats.
- Child, Julia | s01e01: “Beouf Bourgignon” | The French Chef | 1963
- Weaver, Warren | “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication” | The Mathematical Theory of Communication | 1949
- Phillips, Maya | ““Good Eats,” the One Cooking Show to Rule Them All” | The New Yorker | 26 Nov 2019
- Pang, Kevin | “Alton Brown on the return of Good Eats, filmmaking, and embracing wankiness” | The Takeout | 22 Aug 2019
- King, Larry | “Alton Brown on “Larry King Now” – Full Episode in the U.S. on Ora.TV” | Larry King Now | 2014
- Brown, Alton | s01e07: “The Dough Also Rises” | Good Eats | 1999
- Google | “Alton Brown: “Good Eats 3, the Later Years” | Talks at Google” | Talks at Google | 2011