Somebody Stop Feeding Phil

My husband wants to go to Japan. To this end, he has amassed a few friends who also want to go, and begun constructing a wall of convincingness around me. But I don’t travel easily. I worry about leaving my dogs for two weeks. I worry about something happening to my mother while I’m gone (my father died while my brother and I were in Cancun). I worry about my airplane getting tired mid-flight, or, like Gary Larson’s Far Side cows suddenly realizing they are eating grass, waking to the reality of itself hurtling through the air and plummeting to the ground in icy terror.

One of my friends, who harbors a hatful of travel worries of her own, said the Kyoto episode of Somebody Feed Philmade her eager to go. Somebody Feed Phil is a Netflix documentary series that features inveterate eater Philip Rosenthal traveling to various countries with a television crew in tow, and sampling all manner of regional foods.

According the thedailymeal.com, the point of the show isn’t about food or travel—although without these two elements there would only be Phil, staring in his slightly crazed way into a camera—but about human connection, “…specifically, the type of connection that’s only possible when you travel and experience different countries, cultures and people…”

This description of what Phil is [ostensibly] doing with his show brings to mind the legendary Anthony Bourdain, whose forays to far-flung countries brilliantly tapped into the food, customs, and ethos of wherever he found himself.

But Phil Rosenthal is no Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain was a graduate of the Culinary Art Institute in Hyde Park, New York. While by his own admission he was not a great chef, he knew and respected all manner of food and methods of cooking, which was apparent in the way he discussed, dissected, and described them in his numerous successful TV series, including Parts Unknown, No Reservations, and The Layover.

Bourdain had a commanding on-screen presence, and a commanding presence on the page as well: he brought a raw honesty to his many books, including the well-known Kitchen Confidential, in which he treats readers to page after page of meticulously rendered accounts of events, meals, kitchens, people, and the challenges he encountered along the way to becoming a chef and a television personality.

Phil Rosenthal is many things—a political activist, a successful TV script writer, and a co-producer of shows like Everybody Loves Raymond—but he is not a chef, and perhaps more importantly where his show is concerned, he is not a competent storyteller. He seems to be a man in possession of very few adjectives, and the ones he possesses are simply not up to the task he has set before himself in Somebody Feed Phil.

A few examples: In the Kyoto episode, which I watched in preparation for either going or not going to Japan, Phil sampled a fried wolf eel that his food guide told him retains the ability to bite even after its head is severed from its body.

Now, I, at that point, was curious about a few things, first and foremost being how this is possible. But as Phil did not ask this question, I had to Google it myself. I discovered that cold-blooded animals have greater oxygen efficiency than warm-blooded ones, which means their oxygen-hogging brains can continue to function for a short time after decapitation.

Had Phil done that five seconds of research, he could have relayed the information to his viewers, all of whom, I’m positive, were curious. Instead he just ate the eel, looked goofily into the camera, and said, “Tasty!”

That was all we got. Tasty? Tasty how, I wondered. It would have been so easy for him to just compare the wolf eel to a food those of us watching might have tried. But he didn’t. So again, I had to figure it out for myself. According to the internet, which Phil apparently either cannot access or does not know about, wolf eel tastes like wild trout. There. How hard was that?

After the wolf eel debacle, Phil sampled an oversized hunk of marinated mackerel sushi, but a wide-eyed “Mmm,” is all we got. When he was served mug wort tea, he admitted he didn’t know what it was. Again, the most cursory search of the internet turned up that it is a plant native to Asia whose roots are believed to have anti-inflammatory properties. I’m not saying I need to have a dissertation’s worth of knowledge about everything Phil eats; I’m just saying that a teensy bit of description and backstory would give poor incurious Phil’s show a touch more gravitas than “Mmm” and “Tasty.”

I could go on but I think I’ve made my case against anyone continuing to feed Phil, at least on camera. That said, I did find the images of Kyoto to be spectacular, which made me somewhat less enraged at Phil in general, and did pique my interest in a trip to Japan. As my friend with her own hatful of travel worries suggested, maybe we can plan to go a year or two from now, so that we can indulge our respective anxieties for as long as possible.

To which I say a resounding “Mmm!”

Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. You can find more at Danashavin.com, and follow her on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes. Email her at [email protected].