I was watching the inappropriately named Travel Channel the other day when they were showing an interview with one of their show hosts. He said that once, while in Europe, he was having a pizza with clams on it and being an adventurous traveler…so he thought that he should go ahead and bite into the clam shells. Unsurprisingly, even being in Europe, a clam shell is incredibly hard and the host had to be told not to eat them.
By now you’re probably asking yourself where I’m going with this? Travel Channel used to show programming that actually was about travel; they’d send Samantha Brown to various interesting locations and she would tell us interesting things about them. The kind of interesting things that you might expect to get from a travel channel…a brief glimpse of the local scenery and culture, just enough to make you want to…say…travel to some of these places.
Then there is the Travel Channel of now, which would be more accurate to call it the We Send Someone Somewhere to Overeat Channel. Anthony Bourdain has the closest thing to a good show on that network, and he recently assailed Paula Dean for her horrible cooking style that makes people fat. Around the same time his remarks were printed and were gaining traction, Travel Channel was airing a special about the best places to get fried foods, such as fried twinkies, fried ice cream, fried candy bars, and other such bastions of healthy eating. Their other shows include such things as Best Places to Pig Out, Man V Food (which is the host going from city to city taking on how much can you eat challenges), Best Truck Stop Foods, etc.
When you look at the shows on Travel Channel, the one thing they have in common is someone going somewhere to see how much they can eat, and the one thing that they all lack is any travel. I’m not sure how the rest of the world is, but I don’t really plan my vacations around where I can get a hamburger with 17 beef patties, so I don’t really consider that a travel show. Seeing some guy try to eat a six pound burrito doesn’t draw me to Santa Fe, or really make me want to go there at all.
All that being said, isn’t it time for Travel Channel to change its name to The Gluttony Channel? To help them along their way, I’ve even come up with a couple of shows they could add to their line-up (assuming they can fit them in around their haunted this or that shows.)
- Best Places to Have Heart Surgery
- Top Places to Pig Out While Ignoring Scenery
- Bacon Sculpting
- Ghost Hunting At The Buffet
- Cellulite Masters
- Scariest Places (featuring Weight Watchers and Gyms)
- Deep Fried Vegetarian Foods
- Travel Tips for People Who Can’t Fit Into Normal Seats
- Making Surface Tension Work for You At the Soda Fountain