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posted by janrinok on Thursday December 29 2016, @07:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the cooking-something-up dept.

Tom Secker of SpyCulture.com on the CIA and Top Chef

The CIA finally jumped on the cooking-themed reality TV propaganda bandwagon in 2010 when they hosted an episode of Top Chef. This week we take a look at the episode in question, how it flattered the CIA, and how Top Chef has involved numerous government agencies and departments. We round off looking at some of the reasons why cooking programmes make for effective propaganda.

[...] So, while the Pentagon seem to be obsessed with using reality TV to promote themselves and their agendas, and other institutions like the Department of Homeland Security also quite regularly appear in some form in these programmes, the CIA have been a bit late to the party. So we're going to step down into the fourth circle of hell that is reality TV and go for a taste of Top Chef. The episode in question is from 2010 and is called Covert Cuisine. Essentially, the contestants were each given a 'classic dish' which they had to try to disguise and then serve to the CIA at Langley. And yes, it's absolutely as dumb and ridiculous as that sounds.

[...] So, just to draw out the obvious, these are ordinary people being inducted – very briefly and in a trivial way – into the secret world of the CIA. Willing fools and so on. And they're all 'OMG, we're so privileged' and 'like, how cool is the CIA?' about it. So that's rather simple from a propaganda point of view – the contestants are a vehicle for us, the audience, to be inducted into the CIA's desired public view of themselves. In return, the programme gets added production value to inject a bit of originality into a very tired and repetitive format. They're doing the same thing they do every week, but in a new location.

[...] So there are a lot of bad jokes in there that people politely laughed at and the whole thing is kind of jolly and daft so the unassuming viewer might not realise what they're being told. The critical moment comes when then CIA director Leon Panetta is interrupted by a waiter with a slip of paper. Panetta reads it under the table, makes his excuses and leaves.

[Continues...]

Now, there are three ways of looking at this:

– First, this was authentic – Panetta really was called away on some important business. But the director of the CIA isn't usually involved in anything urgent. He's a political appointee, increasingly so as time goes on, he's not running live operations. So I find that unconvincing, though possible.

– Second, Panetta actually hated having to do this and arranged beforehand for a flunky to give him an excuse to get out of it halfway through. The presenter of the show is a bit of a disaster area – she has one of those faces that's had so much plastic surgery and botox that she can't actually pull any expressions any more. So if Panetta did consider himself above all this, I can't really blame him.

– Third, that this was staged both to add a little spice to proceedings and to emphasise how important people like Panetta are compared to the plebs watching the show. It helps maintain this sense that Panetta and the CIA are coming down to our level, they're playing along with us for a bit of fun but when duty calls they've got more important stuff to do, and we haven't.

[...] I will point out that this was not the only episode of season 7 of Top Chef that involved the government or politics. Episode 3 was called Capitol Grill, where they had to 'prepare a classic picnic feast for Capitol Hill interns at Mount Vernon, the home of the first U.S. president, George Washington.' Episode 6 was called Cold War, where 'The chefs battle it out in a culinary version of the Cold War. The chef'testants are divided into two groups and each team must create one cold entrée.' Episode 8 was called Foreign Affairs and 'The chefs must cook exotic Ethiopian cuisine for the quickfire, and for the elimination are tasked with creating a dish based on one of the foreign embassies in D.C. Chefs, ambassadors and dignitaries representing each country join in the judging.' There were other episodes based around the House of Representatives and NASA. The US Army and Marine Corps have also been involved in this series.

So why Top Chef?

Honestly, I don't know. There is no real indication from any of the available documents why so many branches and agencies of the government are so into using reality TV cookery programmes as a means for propaganda. So we can only speculate, but I'll take an educated guess and throw you a few ideas.

1) Cookery shows of all kinds are watched by women more than by men. Women are harder to reach through the usual methods because sports, action movies, spy films are a lot more popular among male audiences than female audiences. Likewise, women are less interested in on screen violence than men. Not exclusively and entirely, but as a general rule of thumb. A film like Lone Survivor probably wouldn't attract a lot of women, and those that it did attract would be more impressed by the emotional content, the braveness and determination of the surviving soldier rather than the extensive scenes of them shooting brown people. But something like Top Chef is much more likely to appeal to conventional feminine sensibilities and thus the propaganda reaches a target audience that's otherwise a bit elusive for the security state.

2) People like food. Across all demographics, people like food, for obvious reasons. People like looking at food on TV. While some of the entries in the military entertainment liaison office reports do cite specific audience demographic data, cookery shows reach all kinds of different people. Since these aren't really recruitment tools but are more general propaganda, they're effective from that point of view.

3) The desire for food is a natural instinct, a necessary instinct. Watching food shows does one thing, guaranteed – it makes people hungry. When people are hungry they feel a little insecure. There's nothing that provokes unrest and revolutions more than a starving population. So hunger makes people willing to fight, or at least to see other people fight on their behalf. This might sound absurd, but I genuinely think that when people are hungry they're more psychologically vulnerable, they feel less secure. As such, messages telling them who is providing them with security are more likely to hit home when they're hungry.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 29 2016, @05:17PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday December 29 2016, @05:17PM (#447136) Journal

    Exactly. I think whoever wrote this story and had the theories at the end about the connection missed the most obvious one -- one of the most prominent culinary schools in the U.S. is the CIA, i.e., Culinary institute of America. Anyone who has hung out with any chefs will have some sort of story about jokes confusing the two.

    Surely there had to be some sort of pun about people from the CIA cooking for the CIA? Or maybe if they did make such jokes, the guy just didn't get it, because he admits he doesn't usually watch such shows.

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  • (Score: 2) by n1 on Thursday December 29 2016, @08:40PM

    by n1 (993) on Thursday December 29 2016, @08:40PM (#447183) Journal

    I'd be surprised if you get the chance to film at the CIA HQ and get to feature the CIA Director in your TV show just because it would be good for a pun... TFS also makes note of how many other government/military tie-ins the series had.

    That said, i'm sure there was some kind of jokes in there, but it I can't imagine it being the reason the CIA was happy to open their doors to reality television. The entertainment liaison offices, by their own criteria have to get some benefit out of participating in these shows... Usually it's because they think it will help recruitment and promote the overall image of the department/agency. This can be seen in the successful Freedom of Information requests Tom Secker has received from the DoD and other agencies.

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday December 30 2016, @04:41AM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday December 30 2016, @04:41AM (#447281) Journal

      I wasn't saying this was ONLY used to make a pun -- just that it's a joke made all the time in the culinary world and the idea that any cooking show could do something with the CIA without that being considered or without any references to that seems somewhat unlikely.