Alton Brown is uncomfortable with many things.
Hugs.
Camera phones.
Autographing things that are alive. (He will sign your book, or your spatula, just not your skin.)
The list goes on. And on. You can read it on under the heading “My Fanifesto.”
It’s unclear whether Brown posted the “fanifesto” in an attempt to create buzz before his book tour, if it’s a genuine set of rules he expects fans to follow or if it’s just the rant of an oversensitive “cable-ebrity,” as Brown calls himself.
What is certain is that the fanifesto has gotten people talking. While some fans have defended him, others have been less kind about the cooking show host’s desire to keep his personal and private lives separate.
In the past couple of months, Brown’s ambivalence about his own fame played out in a creepy incident on Twitter, where someone pretending to be Brown’s wife used a profile photo of his family without his permission. Brown flew the coop, only to return a month later with a promise to answer questions on Tuesday and Friday mornings.
The Twitter kerfuffle coincides with the taping of the final season of “Good Eats” and the beginning of Brown’s tour to promote the third book of recipes from the show. Part of marketing the book is doing interviews with people like me.
Not long after Brown’s return to Twitter, I posted that I’d be interviewing him and asked readers to suggest questions. Brown replied with this: “Do most journalists leave their work to Twitterers?”
Reporters and celebrities alike use social media to connect with their audiences. Brown says he finds “the whole social technology thing a little frustrating. I’m getting into this having long said I never would.”
His recently launched Facebook page has more than 200,000 fans already. He returns to television Oct. 30 as the play-by-play analyst on Season 4 of “Iron Chef America.” He is working on publishing e-books and a mini-series, “Foods That Changed the World.”
An acknowledged “control freak,” Brown didn’t just dump the projects from his Food Network show into his latest cookbook. He reworked the recipes from “Good Eats” the TV show for “Good Eats 3” the cookbook.
The show has retired after 250 episodes, but Brown’s persnickety persona lives on in his latest book and, to some extent, in his online self.
After tracking the comments and questions on the show’s recipes at , Brown “decided to dismantle them all and rebuild them from scratch.”
“If you cook a recipe from one of these books and you follow the instructions, it will work,” he promises.
“I’m still just trying to make the same meatloaf that’s in your head, but I’m going to probably get there by some method you haven’t thought of. I erase all the known routes and start over with what I know, and climb the way I climb. I approach everything like an alien.”
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com
Meet the author
Alton Brown will discuss and sign “Good Eats 3: The Later Years” at The Tattered Cover LoDo on Oct. 13. Free numbered tickets for a place in the signing line are available with the purchase of “Good Eats 3” ($37.50, Abrams) at any Tattered Cover location. Each ticket will admit one person into the event and the signing line.
Seating for the presentation prior to the booksigning is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis to ticketed customers. The event hall will open for seating at 6:30 p.m. Request a signed copy by e-mail, books@tatteredcover.com. Tattered Cover LoDo, 1628 16th St., 303-436-1070.
