Since When Do We Bring Daggers to a Salmon Cake?

The reviews hit my feed before the show did.

"Move over, Gordon Ramsay's beef Wellington. Make room for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s roadkill rigatoni." Roadkill. Another one skipped reviewing the actual recipe and wrote a fake one, for "roadkill ratatouille," which somebody clearly thought was hilarious. A third went with "roadkill anyone?" A fourth called it a rich person's solution to a poor person's problem, over a can of salmon that costs less than a latte, and never once checked the price.

I read about fifteen of these before I ever watched a minute of the thing. By the time I actually sat down to watch, I was braced for something outrageous. Some reason for all the knives.

It was a cooking show. A man made salmon cakes. A can of salmon, an egg, some breadcrumbs, a hot pan. Five dollars a serving, healthy, easy enough that a tired parent would believe they could pull it off. I have run BakeSpace for almost twenty years (and most recently BakeBot, so I know what makes a family stop scrolling and try a recipe, and it was all right there. I kept waiting for the part that earned the roadkill jokes. It never came.

Fifteen professional food writers, and not one of them told me the only thing a cooking show is supposed to tell me. Are the salmon cakes good. Do they hold together or fall apart. Can a family actually make this for five bucks. They were too busy sharpening knives over the guy holding the spatula to look at the plate.

Food is the one thing we all still have in common. It does not care how you vote, it never has. I have watched people who agree on absolutely nothing sit down at the same table, discover they both put too much garlic in everything, and walk away friends. A pot of beans, a roast chicken, a salmon cake made from a can. Everybody eats. Everybody has a grandmother or a neighbor who made the thing that tastes like home. In a country that cannot agree on the weather, that might be the best thing we have left.

And here comes a show whose whole pitch is help families eat better without spending a fortune. That is a good thing. That is basically what I have been doing since 2006. Instead of anybody saying more of this please, fifteen people whose entire job is food reached for the daggers because they did not care for the man holding the spatula.

Why? What is in a five dollar salmon cake that makes a grown professional write a fake roadkill recipe instead of telling a mom whether the real one is any good?

I got curious enough to look at the food the way none of them would. So I turned to SmartFocus.ai, a company my husband co-founded, which allows anyone to run AI-powered focus groups. I built a focus group specifically to see what home cooks really want in a cooking show. AI cooks, not real people, and I am saying that up front because iI can see the irony here. But after reading all the reviews, they were the most human responses so far. I showed them the recipe with no headline, no host, no idea whose show it was. Just the food. I half expected the same daggers, since AI is trained, modified and lassoed in by humans with biases.

But I was delighted to see they talked about dinner, just like home cooks. How wet is the mixture, how hot is the pan, will the cakes hold or fall apart, do they reheat for lunch. One retired mechanic from Maine said a nice picture doesn't get supper on the table. I've heard that echoed on BakeSpace for years. None of them asked who made it.

My favorite was the school cafeteria cook, a woman who would feed a couple hundred kids by noon on a budget that does not stretch. She priced the recipe in her head and said she would make it, once, with canned salmon, if the amounts were clear, because salmon cakes fall apart on you and she is not gambling a family dinner on a maybe. That is the whole job, done in one sentence, by a cook I invented out of thin air. Fifteen professional writers with one job could not get there. A pretend lunch lady got there before the 20 min focus group ended.

I am not here to tell you how to feel about the man. Feel whatever you want. But I'd like to ring the bell... and remind us all that food is supposed to be the table we can all still sit at, the place we put the daggers down. And when a cheap, healthy dinner for families shows up and the first instinct is to sharpen the knives over who served it, we have lost the plot.

It was a salmon cake. It cost five dollars. Somewhere under all the roadkill jokes, that was the story, and it is a shame so few people were hungry enough to notice.

I'f you'd like to see the show for yourself...