From Helen Razor at The Daily Review:
It has been more than 15 years since Nigella Lawson first did publicly as many couples with plastic sheets had long done privately when she mingled food with sex. Even today, the goddess incurvate is remarkable for her capacity to take a kipfler potato and infuse it with the scents of both rosemary and pudenda. She remains magnificent. We know that there has been and likely can be no individual able to say, “I cannot eat lamb without cumin” as Nigella does and get away with it. As such, no one has been so foolish as to wed cooking with lust. Well, not until last Thursday night on ABC1.
I cannot be absolutely sure that Silvia’s Italian Table is history’s most disastrous culinary experiment, as I have never eaten camel—a meat, as the late food and drink writer Mark Shield once told me, “tastes exactly like a full Huggies”. But, we can be sure that this show is packed with shit. And not because its host Silvia Colloca fails to be as frankly, warmly filthy as Lawson—who doesn’t?—but because it strives to conceal a truth even dirtier than sex. This is a weekly half-hour instruction in self-hatred.
To be even, Colloca does not seem to hate herself. Nor should she. She is tall, striking and apparently lives on about a jillion dollars’ worth of absolute beachfront reserve. She is also able to fund tonnes of the finest farina and hectares of premium b-roll, in which she features, always in slow motion, often in a glorious Tuscan meadow and frequently with a blurry, ancient labourer hauling crops in the foreground as she twirls a bit of Genovese basil in her manicure. Such a tableau should be generally unlawful, but seriously criminal when it features a woman over 35. I am aware this may seem “sexist”, but so do whimsical flowers and withered straps of calico on the adult female head. Act your age, not your dress size.
These falsely confessional images that concoct a “simple girl” from country couture and expensive travel make Eat. Pray. Love. seem like a serious work of ethnography. And, no, Ms “Why Can’t You Just Enjoy Something Like a Normal Person?”, I’m not expecting cultural insights from a cooking show. Like everyone, I hope for one or two achievable recipes and, perhaps, a little pleasure. But, Silvia’s table serves up bitter poison between the carbs and the cutaways of darling-little-curios-that-we-picked-up-on-our-family-holiday that makes it impossible to like. It’s a big old plate of spoiling ideology that nobody from this decade ordered, or wants.
The “aspiration” here could not be contained in all the October graduate application letters to Goldman Sachs. I mean, shit. Is it truly acceptable at the ABC to offer pornographic flashes of one-off modernist architecture on Sydney’s northern beaches? And if, so, why? If you’re going for a “simple” show whose participants eat “real” food and talk “humbly” and fucking “bravely” about what it really means to be human-in-the-nineties, did you not think this might come off better in a dwelling whose access is not achieved with a line of credit, a security clearance and a high-end tinnie?
