Whoa, she must be a flaming hottie!
OK, fair enough. We’ll carry on behind your back.
Given that she’s married and that her husband has a gun (which I gave him), you’re welcome to take a swing. 
My brother is naturally overweight, but when he’s working in a kitchen, he generally gets and then stays quite svelte looking.
It’s thousands of degrees in a kitchen, you’re running around all over, too busy to eat all that much beyond what you’re taste testing–which is generally less than a teaspoon’s worth–and too tired after work to make or eat a large meal.
In some ways, it takes more work to become a fat chef–either that or you need to be supremely lazy as a chef, which probably isn’t the best quality for someone you want making high quality products.
I know, the old saying is, “Never trust a skinny chef.” In practice, though, I know a few excellent chefs who are very lean. They’re always hustling around the kitchen, and they don’t have time to eat.
You seem to be saying it takes only a small amount to taste the food, but a lot more of it to really enjoy and appreciate the food. I don’t think that’s true at all. If a food is truly tasty, it doesn’t take a big portion to truly enjoy it. Bland mediocre food, on the other hand, will only satisfy you by physically filling up your stomach and making you feel full.
In fact many things are better in small quantities. One time in northern pacific coast of Japan, my colleagues and I were walking by the docks in a fishing village and was offered a taste of freshly caught sea urchin - maybe a spoonful each. That was possibly one of the best things I’ve tasted. A couple of days later I went into a restaurant close to there and I had a “sea urchin bowl” which turned out to be a huge bowl of rice (maybe 8" diameter) completely covered with fresh sea urchin. I enjoyed it immensely at first, but by the time I finished it I was feeling sick, almost disgusted.
Link doesn’t work.
Wonder why. Here it is again;
In the event that that one doesn’t work, here’s a different one.
http://vtmiller.blogs.com/webinfarmation/images/2007/07/23/giadadelaurentiis10807.jpg
Can’t speak to being on TV, but as someone who has worked as a professional chef, it’s a sport. Working in a restaurant that does any kind of business, you’re running around all day like a chicken with its head cut off. Most of the really talented and productive chefs I’ve known or worked for look more like Tony Bourdain than Paul Proudhomme. I would also conjecture that a job that keeps you on your feet tends to lead to an active lifestyle in your free time. In my rare jobs that involved sitting at a desk in front of a computer, I’ve been much more likely to get home from work and sit in front of the television for a few hours. When I’ve worked in kitchens, I get off work, down a few beers, then go biking or running because I’m not ready to slow down. Just my personal experience.
I’ll take Nigella Lawson any day.
I hear she cooks, too.
Link works fine. They’re trying to stop hot-linking. Copy and paste it.
Padma was a model and fashion writer, and dabbled in acting, and a home cook and gourmand. She wrote her first cookbook in 1999 (with the provocative title “Easy Exotic” and her picture on the cover) and parlayed that into hosting one of the Melting Pot series segments for Food Network in the early 2000’s. She’s done several cookbooks since.
So she’s not a chef, but doesn’t pretend to be one. It was a major publishing house imprint that put out her books, so her recipes have been tested and vetted, so there is some semi-objective proof that she “gets” food. She’s also fluent with the language of professional cooking, and has TV ability and presence, hence hosting Top Chef.
With regard to Padma’s role as a judge on the show, I think she represents an important factor. Chefs can analyze cooked food for technique and skills in one way, but someone who just has a passion for food will have an entirely different take on it. While the chef tastes the dish and thinks “hmm, rosemary, I would’ve gone an entirely different way, and his knifework is awful, look at this dice, it’s pathetic!” the food lover tastes the dish and thinks “this tastes like medicine, there are too many herbs, and it’s hard to eat” and both are valid perspectives on the same issues, but put into two different presentations. On a show that’s geared toward foodies in the home audience, having someone there to have that audience accessible voice is crucial. It’s where Billy Joel’s child bride failed as a host, she was incapable of bridging the gap between cuisine and food for the viewers. (And she was a super skinny woman who didn’t seem to love food at all, and dull as dishwater generally, but that’s another story.)
I’m definitely not rail-thin, but I’m someone who cooks more and eats more healthily when I have someone to cook for. To me, having someone who can critique the meal is about 90% of the enjoyment of cooking it; eating? Yeah, I like eating, but mostly I eat cos I need fuel. Being a chef (or a member of a Gastronomic Society) is the ultimate food high, much more than eating the food.
My last team was made up of 7 food-lovers (1), plus the roomie of two of them, and gee, 7 out of 8 had this problem! The only one who doesn’t would eat the table itself if he could, anyway.
Chefs on Spanish TV don’t promote any kind of obsession with food; they promote variety in food. Arguiñano isn’t rail-thin, but he’s a splinter of a man by Basque standards, same as several of his colleagues. Watching him cook (there’s a bunch of videos in YouTube) is like watching a toddler at play, he only stops moving when it’s time to give the ad-rant. Often he has recipes which are similar to others we already do at home, but with a different touch; for example, “cod pil-pil” is a traditional Basque dish, but pil-pil is just the name of the sauce: he may come up and say “hey, why not do it with other white fish? People in olden times didn’t because they didn’t have other white fish available, if they lived inland… let’s give it a try!”
(1) 6 and the roomie were Basque by genetics or birth. That carries “food-lover” in the definition. I once asked my agent not to ever place me in a specific 5-star hotel in Bilbao again, he asked how come, it’s a great place, my answer was “one day I got there too late to have dinner outside and the food from room service was bad. Bad food in Bilbao!” It’s like the Pope coming out as an atheist, it strictly-speaking can happen but you sure don’t expect it.
emphasis added
Now see, as an ex-smoker, no way I would trust a smoking chef. Everything tastes like dirty socks to a smoker.
A smokin’ chef like Giada, on the other hand…
When I worked in restaurants as a kid, the last thing I wanted to do was eat during work or be around food after work. In a restaurant, the sweat, the smoke, the grease, the smell gets everywhere on you. It gets into the leather and laces of your shoes, the hinges and pads of your glasses, your hair, and into the pores of your skin. After work I wanted a long shower, maybe a plain salad, soup, or sandwich and a big glass of water. The one exception was Pizza Hut, not that much stress and being around pizza all day did make me one to take one home.
When I worked as a waitress, I became desensitized to food. The stimulus-response connection between “see/smell food” and “want to eat it” was conditioned away, for the most part, temporarily.
[hijack] Ooh. I just Google Imaged Padma, and I have to say she’s worth a death fatwah from an ayatolluh to hook up with.
[/hijack]
In case you missed it, check out the slide show on Flickr (NSFW):
http://
8602301@N04/1956322322/in/set-72157603071325985/
She has certainly been well done. 