USU professor judges national cake challenge
The show that claims to take you to “the biggest and best food battles around the world” recently took one Utah State University professor to Denver, Colo., to be a judge in determining which extreme cake-baking contestant can best embody an urban legend and take home a large cash prize.
Utah State University folklore professor Lynne Sullivan McNeill received the role as judge for the cable television show “Food Network Challenge” after being asked to submit an audition tape earlier this year by show producers. She then received a call informing her that she would be one of four judges to determine which contestant will walk away from the cake challenge with a $10,000 prize.
The show aired Sunday, but was filmed in May. McNeill said filming took 11 hours, but at the end of the day, the decision to award the prize money was truly in the hands of the judges. Contestans were allowed to prepare 50 percent of the cake before the famous giant clock began ticking, and judges were allowed to watch the entire eight hour process.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect; I was too nervous they would do a legend I didn’t know,” McNeill said.
This may have been an unlikely scenario.
McNeill earned her Ph.D in folklore from Memorial University of.
Newfoundland and started teaching at USU while obtaining her master’s degree in American studies and folklore. She also co-founded the USU Folklore Society and currently teaches an online course about urban legends for USU. McNeill also serves as the reviews editor for the premier academic journal devoted to urban legend studies.
McNeill said folklore’s official term for urban legends is “contemporary legends” because all kinds of areas, not just urban, continue to tell stories. She said that legends are a contemporary form of folk narrative that usually travel by mouth, and their details usually change over time. McNeill said the most common legends deal with things we are afraid of but are not always gory. But because some folk beliefs are tied to Halloween, it is likely the show chose that date to air this particular challenge. Also, a lot of the cake designers chose scary legends to portray, despite not knowing the date the show would air.
McNeill said the difference between folk tales and urban legends is that folk tales are told as fiction and legends are told as if they are true and “some of them are true,” McNeill said.
“They are so tenacious; these stories stick around. The power of the narrative is really strong,” she said.
Steve Siporin, director of the folklore program, said while many are happy to share their opinions on folklore, not everyone has the advanced training and specialization in the subject as do those who are the mainstay of the folklore program at USU.
“We also have a long tradition of researching and teaching folklore at USU as well as one of the best folklore archives in the United States, the Fife Folklore Archives, which famously includes the papers of the American Folklore Society,” Siporin said.
Siporin said that the program’s professors are good at being “user-friendly” and are encouraging and approachable.
The expertise in legends was entirely left to McNeill during the cake challenge; the other judges were all pastry chefs.
“The decision was incredibly hard; there were a lot of elements that came together in the designs and all of the cakes were ‘extreme’, ” McNeill said. She said she decided to choose which cake was the best representation of the urban legend the designer chose.
“My thought of cake designing was revolutionized,” she said.
While the episode aired Oct. 31, encore presentations of the show are scheduled for Nov. 1 and Nov. 2 on the Food Network.
– jessie.a.sweat@aggiemail.usu.edu