Alton: I’ve told this story before — it's not a new story — but when I really got interested in cooking was when I was still directing TV commercials here in Atlanta. I remember I was watching food shows, and I was like, "God, these are boring. I'm not really learning anything." I got a recipe, OK, but I don't know anything. I didn't even learn a technique. To learn means to really understand. You never got those out of those shows. I remember writing down one day: “Julia Child / Mr. Wizard / Monty Python.” I wrote those three things and I thought, "If I could come up with a show to combine those three things," not only the practical knowledge that Julia Child was so good at handing over, but she was also great at making you feel you could do it. She was very good enabler, very good empowerer. Mr. Wizard, the old science show, to explain how everything works and why it works. And then Monty Python because it's freaking funny. I always believed that laughing brings a more absorbent brain. You can entertain people. I had all those years of bad high school to back me up on this: that if you don't entertain, if you're not engaging, people don't learn shit. It's very difficult to teach people. You got to engage brains. I wanted to make a show that was funny and visually engaging. It's got enough science to teach people what's really going on and give them recipes. That was the mission. Then I knew I had to quit my job and go to culinary school.

Chuck: Where'd you go to culinary school?

Alton: I went to New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vermont, which at the time was kind of considered to be a medical school, in a way, because all the restaurants were open to the public and you cooked six, seven days a week. It never stopped. It was a madhouse. They had a very small student/teacher ratio and an older student body. I didn't really want to go back to school at 34 with a bunch of 19-year-olds who were like, "Oh my God, let's drink!" I didn't want to do that. I quit my job. Everybody thought I was insane because I had kind of established a career. But I knew I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing. I quit, went to New England and I loved Vermont, except starting about July 4th this white crap falls out of the sky and it's cold and you fall down on it. I don't go up there anymore. My first culinary internship up there, this hard-ass French restaurant, was was at a ski area in Vermont. Coming home every night, it was so cold, you had to take the battery out of your car every night, unless you had a garage, because just forget it: Your car will not start the next day. Three in the morning after working, being screamed at in French all night, you have to be out there. I couldn't do it with my gloves on, so you'd actually time how long it would be before your fingers would freeze. Oh God.

Chuck: You can't live like that.

Alton: Not for long term, no.

Chuck: No, not at all.

Alton: Vermontsters do, but no.

Chuck: How long was it that “Good Eats” was the only thing you had going on Food Network? Maybe five or six years, something like that?

Alton: Up until they called me up one day about being on a show called “Iron Chef America.” It's funny. Somebody was asking me the other day, "How many years was that on?" I had no freaking idea. I remember it was during season five of Good Eats, so that must have been about 2001 that they called me up and said, "Would you be the culinary commentator on this show?" I was like, "Yeah. Who wouldn't do that?" That's a challenge. I showed up to do that job, it's like, "What the hell is any of this stuff? I don't know what any of this stuff is." Those people were coming in with ingredients. I'm like, "I shop at Kroger, OK?" You don't get 16 different kinds of freaking kelp at Kroger. That was big. It was a learning curve. We shot two of those a day.

Chuck: Two a day? That's incredible.

Alton: The actual battles only lasted an hour, and we never varied from that. If you got all of your pre-show stuff done in a couple of hours and your judging done in about three hours, you could get two done in a day. I lived in New York and did those battles. I would come home at night to the hotel, or wherever, and I remember my then-wife would ask, "What was the battle this morning?" I'm like, "I don't remember. I don't remember." I would flush it. As soon as I was done using it I flushed it. All this research, piles of research.

Chuck: You can't keep all that stuff in your head forever. I’m 55 now. I can’t.

Alton: When it gets bad is doing research. I've got another book coming out — my first book in five years is coming out in September — and I was doing research on a particular subject. I was deep down in the Internet, reading a science paper. It was an academic paper. I hit the thing that I needed. I was like, "Yes! That's what I was looking for. It’s even got a footnote!” So I ran down the footnote, and it was from me! It was from one of my books! I was like, "I can't quote myself," especially if I don't even remember what I said.

Chuck: So what came next?

Alton: “Iron Chef America” was the only other show that I did up until they asked me to do “Food Network Star, which I should have only done one season of.

Chuck: Why do you say that?