MOULTRIE — Occasionally I will watch one of those food shows on cable television. I find them more curious than I do entertaining. And sometimes, with only 100 channels at my disposal, I have to settle for curious.

I guess I had just never paid much attention to it, but some of the chefs use the term “presentation” as they prepare a dish. Mostly this happens in restaurants I can’t afford. Presentation involves arrangement of the food on the plate so that it’s pretty, an act wasted on me. I have to go along with the late Andy Rooney on “presentation.” He said, “I don't like food that's too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I'd buy a painting.”

So I watched this chef describe in great detail his pains of preparing a meal ... a meal that I could hold in the palm of my hand. This is one of those meals that requires a bologna sandwich before you leave home. It’s carefully layered in the plate with a sprig of parsley curled around one side.

I tried to draw some comparison to that parsley thing in my world. A sprig of parsley in this instance is like breaking off a branch of dog fennel and laying it beside a plate of baby back ribs. But to the dog fennel’s credit, if it’s big enough you can shoo off the gnats with it. It can have purpose.

I guess “presentation” has different connotations. My mom presented chicken and dumplings in a big crockery bowl, and she presented cream corn in a big Pyrex dish. But the fact is, she could have left them in the pot she cooked them in, and it wouldn’t have mattered to us field hands. And there wasn’t a thing on her table we couldn’t pronounce.

But then I got to thinking about all of that great country cooking and I guess it did have “presentation.” When I walked into that dining room and cast my eyes upon all that food, it was indeed sort of a painting ... a piece of art, but more in the line of Norman Rockwell than a Rembrandt.

Now what I’m really curious about is that when that chef I was watching “presented” a few morsels of some kind of sea creature, I wonder if the diner left there and went to Burger King to finish things off.

 Now don’t get me wrong, I know that we should eat smaller portions. But reality is what it is.

On the Travel Channel, there is this bald-headed guy who goes around the world eating really weird stuff. Now I think he’s lying to us. I don’t think he really enjoys all of that raunchy food that he smacks his lips about. I think some of it is as phony as professional wrestling and campaign promises.

There he is on the stern of a fishing boat. He hauls in a huge sea bass and they filet it right there and begin to serve it up raw. But first, this guy eats an eyeball. He says in some cultures fish eyeballs are considered delicacies. Yet, none of those cultures have ever put a man on the moon nor discovered a cure for any kind of disease. And it’s my understanding that cannibalism still exists in some parts. To their credit, though, they have discovered fire and they cook their fish.

I think this guy is trying to shock us by what he eats. I doubt many of us will go into a fancy restaurant and say to the waiter, “Bring me the menu where you’ve dug the food out of a rotten stump.”

But I won’t rule out some socially redeeming value in these shows. If you’re ever invited to one of those fancy restaurants, you know to grab a cheese burger before you go. And if you’re ever stranded on a deserted island, you know that you can eat it if it doesn’t eat you first.

(Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)