Top Chef, King Cake, and the Naked Public Square

Like, I know, several fellow MOJers, I am a fan of the Bravo television show Top Chef. Each season, the show identifies over a dozen up-and-coming chefs from across the country who compete against each other in a series of cooking challenges. The result of this process is that one chef is eliminated at the end of each episode. The ultimate winner earns $100,000 from a sponsor, a spread in Food & Wine magazine, and the title of “Top Chef.” The show is a great source of entertainment, not only for the culinary talents on display (which are considerable) but also for the mix of personalities and human interaction that results from the situations contrived. Last week Bravo aired the Top Chef finale for season five. The show took place in New Orleans where the three finalists were each asked to prepare a fabulous three course meal of their own choosing. The setting for this final meal was New Orleans’ famed Commander’s Palace. After the contestants had planned their menus, but before they began cooking, the judges threw them a twist. They were asked to prepare an additional appetizer using one of three traditional New Orleans ingredients: blue crab, red fish or alligator. To determine who got to cook with which ingredient, the chefs took part in another New Orleans tradition – king cake. As host-chef and chief judge Tom Colicchio explained, inside one of the three pieces of purple, green and yellow frosted king cake was the trinket of a “baby.” The chef lucky enough to find the “the baby” in the cake got to pick his or her appetizer ingredient and to assign the two remaining ingredients to the other two chefs. The show deserves credit for attempting to introduce its audience to some aspects of New Orleans beyond the bacchanalian excesses of Mardi Gras familiar to most viewers. What was missing, however, was any attempt to explain the meaning behind king cake and the significance of the child trinket. At no point did anyone offer that the “baby” was not just any child but a little image of the baby Jesus. Indeed, the origins of king cake are not a pre-Lenten indulgence, but a dessert to mark the celebration of Epiphany – the manifestation of the Christ Child to the magi and thus, by extension, to all the Gentiles. Devoid of this context, the ritual of eating a cake with the image of a small child hidden inside seems utterly perverse – a pseudo form of cannibalism or a bloodless reenactment of the Saturnine myth. And if not perverse, it should strike the uninitiated as simply bizarre – just one of those crazy things those crazy folks from New Orleans do! Of course the show could have briefly and tactfully explained the symbolism behind the trinket, without crossing the line into apologetics! One suspects, however, that the show’s producers felt that they could not provide such an explanation out of fear that they would lose some of their audience – out of a concern that some of their viewers would feel left out, excluded, and so offended. What is worse, this desire to avoid giving offense seems decidedly one-sided. It seems to be operative only when the religion or spirituality in question is Christianity. Indeed, the producers were all too happy to arrange for a voodoo priestess to visit the three chefs the night before the finale, telling fortunes and conjuring spells. Perhaps Christianity and voodoo were treated differently because the show’s producers didn’t expect their viewers to take voodoo seriously such that it was included only for the entertainment value, whereas the claims implicit in the symbolism behind the king cake trinket could be taken seriously such that they might reasonably give offense? Regardless of the answer to this question, the show’s treatment of “the baby” reflects a sad state of affairs here in the United States. It is yet another example of the naked public square – of our inability to openly discuss the meaning of that which is meaningful when the origin of that meaning is a particular religious tradition – and most especially when that tradition is Christianity. It is another example of the transformation of the legal principle of non-establishment of religion embodied in our Constitution (entirely proper in its own right) into a cultural norm – a norm that renders any discussion of religion with any particularity not only impolite, but uncivil, and so beyond the bounds of discourse. But a “secular” society need not be so impoverished and anemic when it comes to the discussion of religious matters. In order to be truly inclusive, truly respectful, we need to be able to acknowledge the origin and meaning behind things like “the baby.” Public discourse on religion need not be limited to the banal good wishes of Hallmark greetings in which every “Valentine’s Day” card has its “Saint” removed. If this is not the case, if we are unable to engage in conversation on the cultural plane without stripping away the religious and specifically Christian meaning of things, will “Patrick’s Day” be long in coming?