When I was a kid, long before The Food Network, you had just a couple of choices if you wanted to see chefs on television. One, of course, was Julia Child. The other was Graham Kerr, known as The Galloping Gourmet. Even as a kid I loved watching this guy bounce around the room and cook, drinking wine and laughing.
Today I was channel surfing and came across a repeat of his show from the early-mid 90s on American Life, the one where he would take a classic dish and make a more nutritionial, low-fat version. This episode was from 1993 and it got me thinking: what is Graham Kerr up to now?
He's still going strong. He has a web site, travels around the world with his wife speaking about food and nutrition, releases cookbooks on a regular basis, and has several of his TV shows (it's really amazing how many shows he's had over the decades) currently airing on various networks (American Life, PBS, other stations). Repeats of his 1994-2000 series The Gathering Place air on stations around the country and Canada, but I'd like to see him on TV with a new show again. I'm surprised Food Network doesn't get him back on the air. He's a legend, and that network could use a dose of someone with a strong personality and humor who knows what he's doing.
This Wikipedia page has some interesting info I didn't know, including the fact that The Galloping Gourmet ended in the early 70s because Kerr was in a serious car accident (he was temporarily paralyzed). And the reason why Kerr started getting into more healthy forms of cooking was because his wife Treena had a heart attack in the mid 80s.
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