is anyone watching the food network's "feasting on asphalt" (starring alton brown and his production crew driving tricked-out motorcycles across the USA)?

it's very charming -- the premise is that he wants to travel the "old" roads of the united states, the pre-interstate ones, and look for the last vestiges of that kind of road food -- and he goes from the typical soul-food places and lovingly restored railroad-car diners (getting that out of the way in the first episode) to scenes where he's munching on just-picked kudzu and zooming the camera into bee-infested honey trees. he samples the vending machine coffee at an indiana greyhound station (it's awful, he says) and talks about vended food and Automats, and eats canned cling peaches and cottage cheese with bluehairs at a YWCA tea room (it's great, he says) to track the development of dining options for ladies traveling alone. there's a whole segment on how duncan hines, well before he started the cake-mix juggernaut, was the inventor and primary food critic of the AAA-style hospitality guide -- and having his name on your motel or restaurant was a stamp of quality assurance. alton holds up a tattered book called adventures in good eating, and doesn't even bother to point out an obvious connection. but there's a sense of pure joy that he's got this link to america's forgotten past right there in his hands. he's like huell howser that way. (the obsessive-compulsive marc summers would just flash a fake smile and go wash his hands at the end of the take.)

alton's honest, too: if he doesn't like something he tries, he'll tell us, even if it's not in the presence of the person who prepared it. i loved his theory on why foods like brain sandwiches have survived tiny ethnic enclaves of the USA while never managing to imperialize to the rest of the country -- it may be an acquired taste to broader american audiences, but it's a beloved staple of that culture's culture (in this case, germany), and they're probably proud to hold on to a tradition that n00bz don't wanna get with.

i admit that i cheered when alton went to ted drewe's (the custard parlor in st. louis, at the start of route 66); i insisted on stopping there when a friend and i roadtripped cross-country last year, and the custard was indeed pretty revelatory. alton says that when he announced his plans for feasting on asphalt on the food network's website, he got hundreds of letters beseeching him to check it out. but ted drewe's ALWAYS gets talked about on these food network things, and if AB had known that, maybe he would have kept going, in search of something more blue-highway and obscure. seriously though, that's great custard, and you sorta have to bring up rte. 66 on shows like these.

downsides: as on good eats and the play-by-play of iron chef america, alton has a nasty habit of saying "culinary" and "very very" too many times in one episode. (people in other forums have criticized him for all the "uh"s that pepper his sentences, but i LOVE that; it gives the narration an off-the-cuff, professorial feel, like he's mulling over his words rather than merely reading cue cards.) the other downside, which i think was more of a problem in the first episode than the second, is his somewhat rockist insistence that this early 20C road cuisine is "real" american food -- e.g., denigrating one of his stops for now serving tuna niçoise and starbucks coffee instead of sticking to its pre-interstate roots. but he has a point when he says that if your restaurant is exceptionally good at one thing, it shouldn't stray too far from that basic concept -- it's just good business sense, and virtually all of our most beloved fast-food establishments became famous for adhering to this rule.