Good Eats - History

History

The pilot for Good Eats first aired on the Chicago, Illinois, PBS affiliate WTTW in July 1998. The show was picked up in July 1999 by Food Network, which now owns exclusive rights to the show. As of Summer 2009, episodes air Monday nights at 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., as well as every weeknight at 11 p.m. Each airing has a late-night replay at 2 a.m. New episodes, when available, debut in the early Monday slot.

New episodes aired on Wednesdays in the late evenings from 1999—2007, when they were moved to Mondays at 8 p.m. From July 9, 2007, until Summer 2009, at least two different episodes aired each weeknight (8 p.m. and 11 p.m., along with late-night replays at 2 a.m.), with a third airing on Wednesday nights at 8:30 p.m.; additional episodes were occasionally added (usually coinciding with a Food Network series or event).

On Food Network Canada, the show generally airs on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. The time appears to change from week to week, but it tends to air sometime before 2:30 a.m. and/or after 7 p.m. on the aforementioned days. Only one episode, "Cran Opening", aired in Canada before the U.S.

On October 10, 2009, Good Eats celebrated its 10th anniversary with an hour-long live stage show aired on the Food Network. Guests included Ted Allen of Food Detectives and Chopped. One of the demonstrations in the show proved that a fire extinguisher was not a unitasker, as Brown constantly repeated in regular episodes that the fire extinguisher was the only unitasker in the kitchen.

On the January 4, 2010 episode, Good Eats revealed Alton Brown's changed eating habits that led to his losing 50 pounds in 9 months. Brown emphasized that he was not on a diet; in spite of this claim, however, Brown went on to describe a regimen that prescribes certain healthful foods with specific degrees of regularity (daily, once every two days, etc.) while proscribing unhealthy foods. He did, however, make clear that this was not a diet in the modern American sense of the word, but in the original Greek meaning. Prescribed foods included breakfast every day (usually a fruit smoothie), oily fish, whole grains, etc. The episode comically claimed the entire story was in Brown's new book, "Buff Like Me".