Acronyms, for your convenience.

Or not. It's no secret I'm not a big fan of Rachael Ray. For those of you who don't know who this is, have a look around. Really. Her Jokeresque grin is used to sell Nabisco products, Dunkin' Donuts breakfast sandwiches (really?), even my beloved Wheat Thins. Target carries her line of pots, pans, knives, and some odd-looking and entirely unnecessary device called a "Garbage Bowl." My local Kroger sells RR-branded olive oil - no, wait, "EVOO" - for a mere $14.99 for 12 oz. But more on this particular aggravation later.

She hasn't always been wretched. My mom and I used to watch her show a few years ago, when she made mostly simple meals that actually looked edible, and wasn't so reliant on gimmicks and gadgets. But now she's taken over the Food Network, and that's not a good thing (to paraphrase another overmarketed domestician). I actually enjoy several shows on the Food Network, mostly because they're on in the evenings and I like to have something on in the background while I complete mountains of homework. "Good Eats" with Alton Brown's a particular favorite; they tell you cooking's a science, but until you watch this show you have no idea how true that is. And I really enjoy watching "Iron Chef America," where two professionals take one ingredient and, in an hour, create a five-course menu featuring it. It's not exactly educational television, but it's entertaining.

But what distinguishes Alton Brown, the Iron Chefs, and even that Duff guy from "Ace of Cakes" from Rachael Ray is that they care about their product, and they know their food. Alton Brown can tell you why overkneading bread makes it tough (it's all about glutens), and the Iron Chef can tell you why he grilled oysters with mangoes (it's influenced by a Vietnamese dish he had. In Vietnam.). But when Rachael Ray "cooks," or rather throws things into a giant "stoup" pot (that's because it's thicker than a soup, thinner than a stew, geddit?), she spouts any nonsense that comes to mind, just to keep the noise level up. "I like using ground chicken instead of beef because you can eat twice as much!" she says, as she cross-contaminates her salad by not washing the hands that just shaped meatballs. Never mind that ground chicken contains as much fat and calories as 80% lean ground beef. "If you use whole wheat pasta you can eat more and still feel good!" she yells, after admitting that she didn't know that pasta came in whole wheat until she read the box. Apparently she didn't read the nutrition facts, though, because she'd have noticed that whole wheat pasta still has the same number of calories as its less-trendy durum semolina cousin.

And then there's her pernicious use of acronyms. She uses a host of them, most prominently "GB" (for garbage bowl) and "EVOO" (for extra-virgin olive oil). This last one, shamefully, made it into the dictionary last year. But Ray doesn't trust her audience enough to understand these, so she then defines them. I thought the point of acronyms was to save having to define them each time: you don't hear someone say "RADAR, that's Radio Detection and Ranging." But each time it's, "We'll slather this with EVOO, that's Extra-Virgin Olive Oil." It's painful, not only because if something has become so widely-known that it's in the dictionary, it doesn't have to be defined each and every time it's used, but because she uses "EVOO" in everything. I'm a bit of a foodie myself, and - ironically, largely because of the Food Network - even I know that olive oil comes in many kinds for a reason. Extra-virgin is the most delicate, it has a very low smoke point (meaning it burns easily), and it should only really be used in salad dressings and uncooked elements of the dish. So why are we using it three or four times in every dish, Rachael? Why is that grill pan you just slathered with it heating up to 400 degrees? Is it because it just doesn't sound cool enough to use "OO"?

What bothers me is not that she's boisterous. It's that she's ill-informed. She misuses her beloved "EVOO" in ways that harm the integrity of her ingredients and compromise the quality of her food. She insists that you can use "anything you like" in her dish, to the point of not even differentiating between Chinese duck sauce and plum sauce in a recipe. But if I can use anything I like, why do I need her recipe? What makes her such an authority? With Julia Child, I know where I stand. If I want coq au vin, I need to use strong red wine and full-fat bacon. Wine spritzers and turkey bacon won't cut it, at least if you're at all interested in the quality of what you produce. But this doesn't seem to concern Ray. She just goes right on making her "tacosagnas" and "sammies" (because I guess "sandwiches" isn't a cute enough name).

But perhaps more dangerous, and certainly more troublesome, she promotes her food as healthy to a widely under-educated America who will believe her. A recent dish, "Mini Cheeseburger Salad," was a bed of lettuce with cheeseburger patties on top and a ketchup-and-mustard vinaigrette. No, I am not kidding. The total fat for this dish, at over 32 grams, was higher than a Wendy's double cheeseburger. And yet, because there's some mistreated green under the mound of meat and cheese, it's "healthy." And nobody stops her. To the contrary, she is touted as "the next Martha Stewart," a savior of working women everywhere who provides healthy and fast recipes for the whole family. This is, let's not forget, the same woman who was just selling Nabisco snack cakes and Dunkin' Donuts on tv. There's a disconnect there that somehow strikes at the center of so much that is wrong with American consumerism: if it's fast and cheap, it's right. Don't read nutrition labels; don't take time to put thought and care into a dish that really tastes good, just whip up something quick. If you cover it with enough cheese, it'll taste okay. The important thing is marketing: package something in bright orange and give it a cutesy name, but don't worry about whether it will give you a heart attack a year later. It's the "Baconator" mentality in all its glory, and it's overtaken what used to be a fairly entertaining network supposedly dedicated to food, not just cheese-covered crap.