Great Moments in Charts: The Secret to Food TV Success

The Mothership discovers a rather brilliant graph in Meatpaper, courtesy of the mind of Chris Ying—aka Plebiscite, aka this past Saturday's guest chef at Mission Street Food. The chart's hypothesis is that the attractiveness of the host and the repulsiveness of the food should ideally add up to 10. Beautiful hosts eat beautiful food (Giada, Nigella), while the fugly folk (Guy, Andrew Zimmern) are suckered into eating testicles and homewrecker hot dogs. Though it's unclear where Tony Bourdain—who is easy on the eyes (except possibly naked in HD) and eats both delectable and disgusting fare—falls in this scenario (Chris, your thoughts?). Anyway, the advice to network execs: "If our hypothetical TV host is a 2.1 in attractiveness, and we’ve got him going around the world eating macaroons and tea sandwiches, we’ve got to bring the repulsive level of his food to 4.76 before that show gets off the ground."
· Food TV Chart of the Day [Reuters]
· Meatpaper [Official Site]