I am a middle-aged man living in the American Midwest, and I am slowly starving to death. This should not be happening. I am not incapable of cooking. I once recorded sixteen consecutive hours of Iron Chef and won a Food Network Iron Chef Trivia challenge. I have a hat to prove it, which, by the way, will get you better treatment at a startup restaurant than “I’m Patty Spitler’s cousin,” it turns out.

The point is, if you hand me a shopping cart, a propane torch, and an ingredient nobody should reasonably attempt to turn into ice cream (cat food, for example), I have strong ideas.

What I cannot reliably do is make Tuesday dinner. I have a kitchen. I have money with which to purchase ingredients. I own several pans. I understand the basic scientific principle by which applying heat to food makes it less raw. Most importantly, I have watched hundreds of hours of cooking television from multiple countries.

And yet, at about 7:30 every evening, I stand in front of the refrigerator and stare at a package of chicken breasts like an Australopithecus encountering an iPad.

Television has failed me.

American television seems convinced that cooking is an extreme sport. I don’t know when this happened. Julia Child used to stand in a kitchen and explain how to make dinner. Alton Brown was nice, if not distracted. Rachel Ray is okay, if you’re a 6-year-old picky eater. Somewhere along the way, television executives apparently decided the Food Network lacked sufficient opportunities for psychological trauma.

These days, American cooking shows feature seventeen chefs sprinting through an industrial kitchen while some furious man screams that someone has YOU RUINED THE RISOTTO, YOUR RECIPE IS CRAP, YOUR TRAINING IS CRAP, YOUR MOTHER IS CRAP!

There is ominous music. There are flames. Someone is crying in the walk-in freezer. A chef from Boise explains that his grandmother taught him everything he knows, then attempts to make crème brûlée using venison, breakfast cereal, and something he found in a vending machine.

A clock counts down.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Someone has forgotten the sauce.

Two.

A plate hits the floor.

One.

CHEF: STEP AWAY FROM YOUR STATION!

At no point have I learned how long to cook a pork chop.

So I turn to British television. Ohhhhh, BBC Food, where the situation initially appears much more promising. Nobody is screaming. There are lovely kitchens. There are gardens. There are reassuring accents. Someone has put flowers in a vase for no apparent reason. Surely these people will finally teach me how to make dinner.

Instead, I encounter Rachel Khoo. Rachel doesn’t so much host a cooking program as play the adorably cute daughter I apparently abandoned in a foreign country twenty years ago. Oh, my God, what have I done?! She’s living in a tiny French apartment. She’s shopping at little markets. She’s making something charming in a kitchen approximately the size of the passenger compartment of a Honda Civic. I have no idea what she’s cooking because I’ve become emotionally invested in whether she looks like she’s been getting enough sleep. Is she dating anyone nice?

This is useless.

So I try Nigella Lawson. Oooookay, now. Nigella understands that cooking is fundamentally about appetites … erm … ALL appetites … simultaneously. Nigella cannot say, “I’m going to drizzle some chocolate over this cake” without making me wonder whether I accidentally switched to a channel my cable provider should scramble and charge me extra for. Seriously, she doesn’t retrieve something from the refrigerator. She slips downstairs in the middle of the night in a silk robe. She doesn’t eat leftovers. She has her, “typical midnight indulgence.” Nigella can make eating cold chicken under a refrigerator light seem like something that requires consent forms.

I still haven’t learned how to cook the chicken.

Next up: Jamie Oliver. Jamie seems cool. Jamie seems to genuinely want to help me. Unfortunately, Jamie moves at approximately 3.7 times normal human speed.

“Right, mate, dead simple, bit of olive oil, garlic, onions, tomatoes, lovely bit of basil, whack that in there, bish bash bosh, two quick pinches of gargarmorand, a dash of budesiffil, not the red kind, and gorgeous!”

Wait. What did you do after the onions?

Why is there suddenly a finished lasagna in front of you?

Where did that pan come from? Was that always in the oven?

Did you seriously just order takeout while I looked away for the garlic powder?

Jamie has prepared a nutritious dinner for six in fifteen minutes. I have spent those same fifteen minutes trying to peel the plastic safety seal off the olive oil.

Then there are the Hemsley sisters. I watch them for hours at a time, but I still don’t quite understand their relationship. I don’t mean that I don’t understand whether they’re sisters. I understand that part. I mean that whenever they’re together, I cannot determine whether they are best friends or whether one of them has recently discovered the other changed the beneficiary on their father’s life-insurance policy. They smile. They laugh. They finish each other’s sentences. Then, occasionally, one looks at the other for half a second too long, and suddenly it gets all “true crime.” I don’t know what they’re making because I’m watching for the knife.

Eventually I arrive at Rick Stein. Okay, seriously, I love Rick Stein. Rick is wonderful. When he comes on, I watch for a couple of hours, and then, if it’s a rerun I’ve seen, I will roll over and let him lull me into a peaceful night’s sleep while I dream I’m part of his film crew. Seriously, Rick travels somewhere beautiful, sits beside an elderly fisherman, and tells me the history of a fish. Not fish in general. A fish. That specific fish. The one caught during the second week of September in one inlet off the coast of Portugal by three families who have maintained a traditional fishing technique since the reign of João II. Rick eats it. Rick closes his eyes. Rick says it’s magnificent. Rick tells me it tastes of the sea. Then Rick explains that the dish is incredibly simple and that I can easily make it myself.

Excellent! Thanks, Rick! Wait … I live in Indiana. My local Kroger has salmon, tilapia, tuna, something labeled “whitefish,” which seems less like a species than an admission that nobody working there knows what the hell it really is. There is no wizened Portuguese fisherman, just some kid named Brandon working the seafood counter, and Brandon would very much like me to stop asking questions about the fish because his shift ends at eight.

So this is me. I have learned that professional kitchens operate according to the organizational principles of the Roman Colosseum. I have learned that Nigella can make the phrase “leftover pudding” sap the strength out of my lower body. I have learned that Jamie Oliver can apparently manipulate spacetime. I have learned to worry about Rachel Khoo. I remain deeply suspicious of the Hemsley sisters. I know considerably more than I ever expected to know about the migratory habits of Mediterranean fish.

I still don’t know what I’m having for dinner.

What the stream-connected world actually needs is a cooking program called “Middle-Aged Single Guy in Indiana Has to Eat Something Tonight.”  No competition. No travel. No artisanal ingredients harvested by monks.

The host opens an ordinary American refrigerator.

“Okay. You’ve got chicken thighs, half an onion, some questionable celery, Dijon mustard, some “Korean fish sauce” you bought for a recipe in 2022, and seventeen different bottles of hot sauce your stepfather gave you for Christmas.” (Painfully accurate joke material there.)

“Okay, we’re going to make dinner.”

Now we’re talking.

“And don’t worry. You can substitute ingredients.”

Thank God.

“You don’t have fresh tarragon?”

I don’t even know what tarragon looks like.

“Doesn’t matter.”

I love you.

“Take a bunch of shallots…”

I have a green onion I regrew and cloned six times in my hydroponic garden…

“Good enough…”

Finally, someone understands me.

“And that jar in the back of the refrigerator expired three years ago.”

I was wondering about that.

“Throw it away, Darrin.”

Fine.

This is the cooking show I need. Not Hell’s Kitchen. Not Chef to the Death. Not Rick Stein Visits a Village You Cannot Afford to Fly To and Eats an Animal Neverbefore Encountered on Your Continent. Just somebody teaching a man standing in a suburban Midwestern kitchen how to convert the random crap he already owns into food.

Until someone makes that show, however, I suppose I’ll keep watching British cooking television. Mostly because at least one of the Hemsley sisters has to be single, and Nigella is about to make brownies. I don’t know what she’s going to do to the brownies, but I strongly suspect it will be NSFW.