Adam Richman’s love for food is well-documented courtesy of his breakout hit show on the Travel Channel “Man vs. Food” where he took on ridiculously American eating challenges, scarfing down gargantuan amounts of pizza, burgers and wings in painfully brief amounts of time.
The Emory University graduate, who lived in Atlanta for six-plus years in the 1990s, retired from that job after four years in 2012 and has since dabbled in other healthier projects for Travel Channel, NBC, BBC and Facebook Watch, to name a few.
Now, he’s working with one of his favorite networks, History, and has rebooted the network’s old staple “Modern Marvels.” The original show, which ran nearly 700 episodes from 1992 to 2015, was narrated by different men over the years and covered every topic under the sun, from the Empire State Building to balloons to monster trucks.
Richman hosts the revived version, which debuted this past Sunday, and he appears on camera and interacts with the subjects.
It’s being paired with Season 2 of “The Food That Built America,” which focuses on the history of famous American brands and the entrepreneurs that created them like Cheetos, Oreos and Pizza Hut. Richman is an expert on that show as well. The early “Modern Marvel” episodes are all focused on food. (Future “Modern Marvels” will be linked with spin-off shows such as “The Machines That Built America” and “The Toys That Built America.”)
“I can say ‘The Food That Built America’ is about the legend,” Richman said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “‘Modern Marvels’ is about the legacy.”
Rebooting “Modern Marvels,” to him, is like a baseball fan getting to play with the New York Yankees: “Can I sign this contract twice?”
While Richman fashions himself as a food expert, he said he is no Alton Brown. He is more a food enthusiast, readily apparent while he’s, say, sampling mint chocolate chip ice cream at a Turkey Hill Ice Cream plant with unalloyed joy.
“I am the audience,” he said. “I am a cypher for you.”
The first three episodes tackle three yummy topics: cookies, cheese and ice cream. All were shot under COVID-19 conditions, so Richman and his subjects wear masks. In the episode that debuted this past Sunday, Richman visits an Entenmann’s chocolate cookie plant in Horsham, Pennsylvania, and is pleasantly surprised that the cookies largely use the same ingredients home bakers would use in their kitchen. It’s just done on a massive scale.
Richman was able to enjoy the smell of fresh-baked cookies writ large and even sample a warm one right off the line. The quality control employees would pluck 10 pieces of cookie dough at a time and weigh them to ensure that they were all within the same proper weight. Richman nabbed 10 himself, squashed the dough together, weighed them, then gleefully threw the ball of dough into the vat like a jump shot on a basketball court.
He loved that “Modern Marvels” offers airtime and respect to loyal blue-collar employees, many who have worked at these factories for decades and take deep pride in what they do, whether it’s creating a bag of potato chips or high-end ricotta cheese.
The show is sprinkled with a potpourri of factoids. The cookie episode features tidbits about Girl Scout cookies and fortune cookies, including a factory that still folds the cookies by hand. “I love learning cool nickel knowledge,” he said.
And he felt oddly comforted by what he saw inside the factories.
“Food production facilities are the best places on earth to be now,” Richman said. “The people involved had even more stringent standards of cleanliness than I do.”
He also enjoyed visiting factories that go back decades, including the oldest known confectioner that opened in the 1860s and used kettles that have been around for more than a century. And he even spent time learning how military ready-made meals (MREs) are created and was impressed how tasty they were — even the tube meals created for fighter pilots.
“I took home two tubes of the truffle mac and cheese and three sleeves of fries,” he said.
Richman also worked a drive-thru line at a White Castle and learned to appreciate how hard that job is.
“There is no replacing the value of humans doing an honest day’s work,” he said. “It is the most Herculean feat to provide a hot, delicious meal for someone within that time frame they do it.”
WHERE TO WATCH
“The Food That Built America,” 9 p.m. Sundays, History
“Modern Marvels,” 10 p.m. Sundays, History
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