Name and identifying details are omitted to protect the guilty, but someone at the contest/show actually posited that chef challenges and/or upscale cooking are boojwah. And if I hadn’t passed out flyers with a union boss for my next-door neighbor last October when he was running for Manhattan DA I might not have objected — that organized father of boys said his kids were cooking thanks to the seduction of all the food on the teevee. But I contend that food is the only area of American life in which trickle-down actually applies. I’ve been eating for a living for a very long time, and I’ve seen how the tastes and indulgences at the top work their way to the masses. If you had told me back when most fish was frozen that sushi would one day be sold in every supermarket, I would have wondered what truffle oil you were huffing.