Jon Favreau, Roy Choi team on “The Chef Show” at Netflix - Realscreen
Jon Favreau, Roy Choi team on “The Chef Show” at Netflix - Realscreen |
- Jon Favreau, Roy Choi team on “The Chef Show” at Netflix - Realscreen
- Eat Food. All the Time. Mostly Junk. - The Atlantic
- The Reign of ‘Emma’ and ‘Liam’ Continues - The Atlantic
- Archive of 1950s Celebrity Autographs to Star in Sterling Associates' March 20 Auction - finebooksmagazine.com
| Jon Favreau, Roy Choi team on “The Chef Show” at Netflix - Realscreen Posted: 21 May 2019 08:01 AM PDT  Global streaming giant Netflix is plating a new food series with actor and Iron Man and The Lion King director Jon Favreau and celebrity food truck chef Roy Choi. The eight-episode series The Chef Show sees Favreau (pictured, right) and Choi (left) blending food and culture, cooking with friends and family and enjoying conversation over a home-cooked meal. The two previously worked together on Favreau's 2014 narrative feature film Chef. Guests on the show include Gwyneth Paltrow (center), Bill Burr, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Holland, Kevin Feige, the Russo brothers, Andrew Rea, Evan Kleiman, Jazz Singsanong, Robert Rodriguez, David Chang, Aaron Franklin and more. The Chef Show is executive produced and directed by Favreau. Choi and Annie Johnson also serve as EPs. "During the production of Chef, I developed a much deeper understanding of the ways in which we express our emotions, share our cultures and seek meaningful connections through the act of cooking and eating," said Favreau in a statement. "I am so nostalgic about that time and those experiences — this series gives me the perfect opportunity to get back in the kitchen and create some new memories." "I've always wanted a straight up cooking show since I was a child," added Choi. "I grew up on Julia Child, Paul Prudhomme, Sara Moulton, and obviously Emeril's first show had a huge impact on my life. There is something timeless and beautiful about cooking straight to camera. The only snafu was, I'm not a natural born entertainer so doing it alone was always out of the question. But then I met Jon and we built such an amazing friendship over the movie, Chef. We both kinda didn't want it to end. And through this friendship I found my cooking soulmate and a child's dream is now a reality. Julia and Jacques meet Jon and Roy." Elsewhere, Netflix is renewing popular culinary shows Chef's Table and Somebody Feed Phil. Chef's Table has received an order for a seventh and eighth season. The series is produced by Supper Club and Boardwalk Pictures. For Supper Club, executive producers are David Gelb and Brian McGinn. For Boardwalk Pictures, Andrew Fried is EP, awith co-executive producer Dane Lillegard. Somebody Feed Phil has been renewed for an undisclosed number of new episodes. The series is produced by Lucky Bastards and Zero Point Zero Production, Inc. For Lucky Bastards, executive producers are Phil Rosenthal, Rich Rosenthal and John Bedolis. For Zero Point Zero, executive producers are Christopher Collins and Lydia Tenaglia. The series orders were announced as part of Netflix's FYSEE Food Day, hosted by Queer Eye's Antoni Porowski. Watch a trailer for The Chef Show below:  |
| Eat Food. All the Time. Mostly Junk. - The Atlantic Posted: 11 May 2019 06:01 AM PDT  The Way We Eat Now: How the Food Revolution Has Transformed Our Lives, Our Bodies, and Our World Basic Books Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It Oxford University Press I can't stop thinking about cupcakes. No, not chic ones from the bakery, swathed in caramel buttercream, $3.95 each—I mean real cupcakes, baked at home by Mom and the kids in a classic ritual of American domesticity. This evening, Ashley—she's one of nine women whose relationships with food are at the center of Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It—is making cupcakes with her two little girls. The family, which includes Ashley's husband and his brother, as well as a cousin who's just gotten out of jail and is temporarily sleeping on a couch, lives in a trailer near Raleigh, North Carolina. The household is busy, often frantic, because all the adults work at Wendy's, in different locations, following unpredictable schedules and accepting every offer of an extra shift. The car is broken, the washing machine is broken, there's no money to fix either of them, and a horror movie is blaring on the TV, but right now Ashley is focused on baking. The cupcakes are a welcome-home gesture for Chris, the cousin released from jail. She opens a box of Betty Crocker Rainbow Chip cake mix and pours it into the old plastic ice-cream tub that serves as a mixing bowl. The girls use child-size forks to stir the batter, tasting avidly as they go until it's all over their hands, faces, and much of the kitchen. As soon as the cupcakes come out of the oven, the girls dig into a container of Betty Crocker frosting—which quickly melts since the cupcakes are still hot—and then shower their creations with pink sprinkles. The scene becomes a melee of excited children, smashed cupcakes, and raucous video games. As for Chris, he refuses the offer of a cupcake and steps outside the trailer to have a beer with a heavy-drinking friend from his old crowd. Ashley's gesture hasn't been received as she had planned, but she hopes a sense of the family's goodwill and support will get through to him. I confess that my instinctive reaction to Ashley's story had to do with the Betty Crocker cake mix. Like many others who write about the history of home cooking, I want the food industry to have a much smaller footprint in the American kitchen. What could be easier than mixing butter and sugar, adding eggs and flour, and putting a pan in the oven? As far as I'm concerned, cake mixes should be treated like controlled substances and made available only by prescription. But the image of this determined mother pulling out a plastic ice-cream tub to use as a mixing bowl will be emblazoned in my memory for all time. I'm still at war with the food industry, but I think Ashley deserves a medal. We're now 50 years or so into an unprecedented run of culinary activism known as "the food revolution"—a loose term, but in general think farmers' markets, school-lunch reforms, chefs rampant on TV, and middle-class kitchens stocked with olive oil and preserved lemons. That revolution is driving the politics of food, too: Federal policies targeting agriculture, hunger, nutrition, and food safety have jumped to the headlines and spurred a tremendous amount of local and national organizing. And, of course, we have celebrities—including chefs, nutritionists, movie stars, and Michelle Obama—telling us how to eat for optimal health and reminding us of the sacred importance of family dinner.  As you've noticed—especially if you're one of the countless home cooks who won't be serving wild-caught king salmon at $30 a pound tonight, despite its impressive omega-3 status—the ideals of the food revolution may be everywhere, but the reality hasn't reached everyone and isn't likely to. The revolution's evil twin, by contrast, has been stunningly efficient in its spread. As Bee Wilson points out in The Way We Eat Now: How the Food Revolution Has Transformed Our Lives, Our Bodies, and Our World, junk food has overwhelmed traditional diets pretty much everywhere in the world, and at an astonishing speed. This revolution is making massive numbers of people fat and sick. Both revolutions sprang from the 1960s, and both were aimed at bringing about a radical transformation of our relationship with food—emphasis on radical, which may account for the wildly divergent outcomes. During that decade, the counterculture was putting a political and environmental spin on the whole question of food. People who had been raised on Wonder Bread sandwiches and frozen blocks of vegetables had started growing their own bean sprouts, kneading their own whole-wheat dough, making their own yogurt, even trying their damnedest to master organic farming. It was this sensibility, combined with cheap and head-spinning travel to Europe, that inspired young gastronomes such as Alice Waters to make "fresh and local" the basis for an entire culinary philosophy. Although she soon became famous as a restaurateur, Waters's writing and politicking have always focused on rethinking home cooking. As she once wrote, "My favorite recipe is: 'Go cut some mint from the garden, boil water, and pour it over the mint. Wait. And then drink.' " She opened Chez Panisse in 1971, and the good-food revolution was on its way. B. R. Myers: The moral crusade against foodies The manufacturers of packaged foods saw the '60s very differently. From their viewpoint, it was a victory decade, the time when homemakers were finally getting comfortable with the idea that boxes and jars belonged at the center of their cooking. Ketchup, pancake mix, salad dressing, Jell-O—items like these had been in widespread use before the war, but more ambitious products introduced in the '50s had been slow to catch on. Cake mixes and most frozen foods were greeted with indifference at first; more dramatic innovations like canned whole chicken never did reach the mainstream. By the '60s, however, resistance had abated. Speed, convenience, and the addictive nature of salt and sugar had done the trick, aided of course by voluminous advertising. Read: Marc Ambinder on beating obesity This winning formula proved to be just as successful in Canada, Britain, and other wealthy countries as it was in the U.S. Within a couple of decades, a huge swath of the population on both sides of the Atlantic was eating in a way people had never eaten before. They had dropped away from old-fashioned meals, even from tap water, in favor of soft drinks and all-day snacking. "Many people are scarcely acquainted with the feeling of hunger anymore," Wilson writes. "The new pattern is a series of solitary snacks that we often hardly notice or enjoy as they pass through our gullet." Today a third of all the calories consumed by an American adult comes from chips, protein bars, and the like. Soft drinks have had an especially pernicious impact: In America, consumption of them took a big leap in the '70s, and with that came unprecedented rates of obesity. After conquering the West, the same denatured, heavily processed foods marched on through the rest of the world like an army of high-calorie invaders. "Over just eleven years, from 1988 to 1999," Wilson reports, "the number of overweight and obese people in Mexico nearly doubled." Wilson makes a point of acknowledging both versions of the food revolution, the beneficent as well as the disastrous, and it's true that for those who can afford organically raised beef and like trying new varieties of chard at the farmers' market, culinary life has never been more bountiful. But if Wilson has the big picture, the authors of Pressure Cooker have the close-up. Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott—sociologists from, respectively, North Carolina State, Ithaca College, and the University of British Columbia—did everything short of moving in with the nine Raleigh-area women they write about. They've produced an extraordinary report on how the values of the good-food revolution play out amid real-world struggles.  The women in the book, some of whose stories are drawn from a larger research project involving 120 households over five years, are mostly low-income. They know perfectly well what they're supposed to do: shop for bargain groceries, buy fresh produce, cook healthful meals, get everyone to the table at the same time. They try. But buying in bulk at the supermarket is impossible if you have no car. Serving healthful meals is impossible if the food pantry sends you home with frozen pizza, chocolate peanut-butter crackers, and spinach-artichoke dip. Staging a picture-perfect family dinner is impossible if you have no table or too few chairs, or if you're due at work at 5 p.m. Turning the pages of these two books, I wondered whether it was time to jettison my long-held belief that the best way to counter the food industry is to actually cook meals from scratch. Certainly the authors of Pressure Cooker have discarded any such notion. After all, they emphasize, it's not just Cokes and Doritos that are making American households sick, stressed, and chaotic. The stumbling blocks these women encounter hour by hour make it clear that our food crisis is deeply intertwined with related crises, including income inequality, a fragile safety net, inadequate public transportation, and the scarcity of affordable housing. We're not going to fix all of this with a nice pot of homemade chili. "Trying to solve the environmental and social ills of our food system by demanding that we return to our kitchens en masse is unrealistic," they write, adding, "We need to uncouple the 'package deal' that links good mothering with preparing wholesome family dinners from scratch." Among other initiatives, they'd like to see schools, churches, and similar institutions with commercial kitchens pool their resources, maybe teaming up with local farms and providing "hearty, affordable" meals for families to pick up and take home. Wilson, for her part, isn't fussy about whether the food is cooked at home or somewhere else; she just wants it to be nutritious and delicious. Her own extensive reporting indicates persuasively that the most effective way to counter a toxic food system is with government regulation. In Amsterdam, fast-food advertising is strictly controlled and no sweets or sodas are allowed in schools—and obesity rates among children have dropped by 12 percent since the rule was imposed in 2012. Three years ago, Chile passed what Wilson calls "the most aggressive range of laws against unhealthy foods that the world has yet seen," including an 18 percent soda tax and a ban on using cartoon characters to market breakfast cereals. Packaged foods high in sugar, salt, or fat now carry prominent black labels identifying the products as unhealthful, and surveys show that some 40 percent of Chileans shop with the labels in mind. It's hard to imagine American politicians pushing back with such vigor against the food industry. All the focus on nutrition and food safety, and all the celebrity activism, is no match for the ferocious lobbying of big agriculture and industrial food producers. Some pretty effective brainwashing has been done, too. Many consumers, including the affluent, are now convinced that they can make what the industry loves to call "healthy choices" simply by turning to reformulated versions of familiar products: low-fat chips, reduced-fat cookies, sugar-free soda, "all natural" frozen burritos. Meanwhile, one of the industry's most resounding successes is to have retrained our culinary sensibilities, not merely our palates. Whenever we feel hungry or even just sense that mealtime is hovering, an ever-ready yen for something—anything—with a familiar brand name kicks in. If we can afford the more expensive version, we might even believe that we're eating well. We aren't. Whether it's potato chips or air-popped organic corn puffs, "smart" frozen entrées or conventional frozen versions, these products are doing way more good for the companies producing them than they're doing for us. I'm not trying to force the exhausted women in Pressure Cooker to start massaging fresh kale for salad, I promise. We'll always need shortcuts, takeout, and convenience products to fall back on. But junk food, plain or fancy, stopped being a convenience a long time ago. Today it lives right in the house with us, greets us on the street, finds us at work, and raises our children for us. Our relationship with food, wholly transformed since the '60s in ways both heartening and horrifying, has lost touch with a truth none of us can afford to leave behind: Cooking isn't a luxury; it's a survival skill. This article appears in the June 2019 print edition with the headline "Eat Food. All the Time. Mostly Junk." We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.  |
| The Reign of ‘Emma’ and ‘Liam’ Continues - The Atlantic Posted: 10 May 2019 12:00 AM PDT  The age of Emma is not over yet. On Friday morning, the Social Security Administration released data on the most popular baby names of 2018 in the United States, and perched atop the list of popular names for girls—as it has been for the past five years—is Emma. The rest of the top 10, in descending order, are Olivia, Ava, Isabella, Sophia, Charlotte, Mia, Amelia, Harper, and Evelyn; the top five names, it's worth noting, hew closely to the 2017 trend toward names for baby girls made up of 50 percent vowels or more—a trend identified by my colleague Alia Wong, whose first name is 75 percent vowels. The name Abigail, 10th on the overall popularity rankings in 2017, dropped one slot to No. 11 and has been replaced in the top 10 by Harper, which narrowly missed 2017's top 10 but surged to No. 9 in 2018. However, the name dropped significantly in popularity as a name for baby boys, from the 800th most popular boys' name in 2017 to the 971st in 2018. Read: Girl names for baby boys aren't a thing Meanwhile, as baby boys are born, many promptly become Liams, Noahs, and Williams: Those three boys' names have held the top three spots for three years running and appear on this year's list in that order. Completing the rest of the top 10 are James, Oliver, Benjamin, Elijah, Lucas, Mason, and Logan, all of which appeared on the 2017 list save for Lucas. The name Jacob dropped out of the top 10 to No. 13 this year; it held the No. 1 spot for more than a decade before it was dethroned by Noah in 2013. In other words, the most popular baby names of 2018 look a lot like the most popular baby names of the past half decade. At the top of the popularity heap, most names are just trading places. Some of the most telling developments in baby-naming, however, are visible within the Social Security Administration's data on the names with the most increased, and decreased, popularity since the last survey. Atop the list of girls' names that increased in popularity from 2017 is Meghan, à la Meghan Markle, the 37-year-old former TV actress whose wedding ceremony to Prince Harry in 2018 was watched by more than 29.2 million Americans. Meghan went from the 1,404th most popular baby name in 2017 to the 703rd in 2018. Initially, the resurgence of Meghan as a baby name surprised both Laura Wattenberg, the founder of Namerology, and Pamela Redmond Satran, a co-founder of Nameberry. "Meghan is one of the 1980s and 1990s names that are becoming mom names, rather than baby names"—like Jessica, Amanda, and Ashley, Satran wrote to me in an email. "But Meghan Markle's influence is obviously strong enough to give the name a big boost." Of course, a new member of the British royal family has been known to have that effect. Satran notes that the name Charlotte, on an upswing since the year 2000, has broken into the top 10 since the birth of the English Princess Charlotte, now 4, who is fourth in line for the throne. Archie, the name of Meghan and Harry's new baby, will likely also get a boost in the coming year—though the name's popularity was already increasing before the birth. Names of other celebrities and public figures who made headlines in 2018 also got a boost in popularity, though not quite to the same degree as Meghan. Third on the list of boys' names that increased in popularity is Baker, like the 2018 No. 1 overall NFL draft pick Baker Mayfield; the name jumped 431 spots to become the 712th most popular boys' name in 2018. Saint, the name of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian's 3-year-old son, jumped 438 spots. Saoirse, the first name of the 25-year-old Irish actress nominated for an Oscar in 2018 for her performance in Lady Bird, jumped 128 spots. Idris, the first name of the 46-year-old Englishman whom People named last year's Sexiest Man Alive, climbed 91 spots. Names of popular TV and movie characters—such as Kylo (Star Wars), Yara (Game of Thrones), and Xiomara (Jane the Virgin)—also saw significant increases in popularity. (Other names viewers know from Game of Thrones have been popular choices for babies for a while—most notably Arya, which traveled from No. 135 in the 2017 rankings to No. 119 in 2018.) And Elon, the first name of a South African tech billionaire who mostly made headlines last year as a result of his erratic behavior, climbed 118 spots. No one knows how many people are naming their kids for these characters or public figures, of course. (Though in the case of a name like Khaleesi—the 549th most popular name in 2018 and the name of 560 American female infants, as well as a title in a made-up language from Game of Thrones—the connection is pretty clear.) And often, it doesn't matter to incipient parents whether a name is most closely associated with a hero, a pariah, or someone in between. When they like a name, they like a name. "Elon is a really good example of the No. 1 principle of celebrity naming, which is that it's not about the fame, it's about the name," Wattenberg says. Sometimes, for example, a villain's name in a hit movie will become a hotter baby name than the hero's, despite the negative connotation, she says. "Parents will take an appealing name wherever they can find it." Plus, Wattenberg adds, Elon has all the same ingredients as the trendiest baby names of the moment. Like Liam and Emma, it's short, it's dominated by vowels, and its consonant sounds are smooth rather than percussive. It has the ending letter n, which Wattenberg says "dominates" among boys' names. In 2018, boys' names starting with "K" appear to have risen in popularity as well: Kairo, Kenzo, Karsyn, Kamdyn, Kashton, Krew, and Koda all jumped more than 150 spots in the rankings from 2017 to 2018. Kabir, Kamryn, Korbyn, Koa, and Kaiser all jumped more than 100 spots. By Wattenberg's calculation, however, the overall commonality of "K" names for boys has only risen about 1 percent over 2017; it's easy for a name to jump an impressive number of slots, she points out, when there aren't that many babies being given that name in the first place. And "K," she notes, is a particularly "volatile" letter. "It's a letter that creative namers like to use to personalize and transform names," Wattenberg says; in other words, the change from a traditional "C" to a funkier "K"—à la Kourtney and Khloe Kardashian—is one of the more common ways to create variant spellings of a familiar name. "So when a new name is hot, variant spellings rise and fall faster than the original spelling." The data on names that have decreased in popularity also tell a compelling story—about trends, about politics, and even about tech. Elsa—which peaked at No. 286 in 2014, the year after the hit animated film Frozen featured a lead character with the name—has dropped ever since, falling to 888th in this year's rankings of baby-girl names. Melania, the name of the current first lady of the United States, which entered the top 1,000 baby-girl names for the first time in 2017 at No. 933, has dropped back out of the top 1,000, and currently sits at No. 1,081. And Alexa, the 65th most popular name for baby girls in 2017, fell to 90th in 2018, making it, by Wattenberg's calculation, the "fastest-falling" name of the year in terms of the actual number of babies given the name. Just 3,053 American girls were named Alexa in 2018, down from 3,833 in 2017 and more than 6,000 in 2015. "Apparently," she says, "parents don't like the idea of everybody telling their daughter what to do." We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.  Ashley Fetters is a staff writer at The Atlantic.  |
| Posted: 01 May 2019 05:12 PM PDT [unable to retrieve full-text content]Archive of 1950s Celebrity Autographs to Star in Sterling Associates' March 20 Auction finebooksmagazine.com Norwood, NJ - Sterling Associates is known for its eclectic auctions of fine art, furniture, lighting and other quality collectibles sourced from tri-state-area estates.  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from "celebrity movie archive" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
Comments
Post a Comment