Team Christine.

Christine Ha, of Houston, TX, is a contestant on FOX's cooking/reality show MasterChef.  For those unaffiliated, MasterChef is hosted by three very qualified and accomplished but also difficult and discriminating chefs - Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot and Joe Bastianich - who tour the country in food trucks and audition and hand select 100 amateur chefs to compete for a quarter-million dollars, the title of MasterChef and a cookbook of that chef's favorite recipes.  The first three or so episodes involve the auditions, then an immediate reduction by two-thirds of contestants based on a few quick challenges.  The challenges usually involve properly chopping onions, apples, cooking an entree with ground beef and so on.  At the end of the day, fewer than 20 chefs move on to the normal weekly episodes which involve more typical reality fare - timed cooking challenges, elimination rounds, themed services of two teams to determine who will face going home, etc.

Ordinarily I don't watch cooking shows, and reality shows even less, but Christine fascinates me.  Her Asian-inspired recipes and flavors are consistently eloquent without pretense, confident without arrogance and attractively presented without overexertion or trendy "abstract art" plating.  These are not only clear marks towards making a great chef, but made even more impressive by the two facts that Christine is completely blind - her vision was lost to an immune deficiency disease over a decade ago - and that she receives no help whatsoever with the actual cooking or preparation of her dishes.  While she is seen maybe once per episode being assisted walking around some more confusing locations (rocky terrains, intricately-furnished restaurants or kitchens, etc), or having an assistant grab some ingredients of Christine's choosing from the MasterChef kitchen ("I'll need a stalk of celery, one bunch of cilantro" etc), and sometimes fellow contestants will tell her how other contestants' dishes look ("Ryan just walked his molten lava cake up and it's just soup - it didn't hold together at all"), Christine has consistently prepped, cooked, tasted, plated and served her own dishes entirely herself, to the pleasant surprise of the judges and audience.  One night, a contestant who had won a challenge tried to throw her a curve ball by choosing a live crab for her to kill and cook - "A blind girl and a live crab?  I don't think so," he said - and she rose to the occasion and passed with flying colors.

Ok, but what about special treatment?  As the judges told her at her audition, "We all have obstacles we need to overcome.  You need to understand you'll be judged and treated the same as any other MasterChef contestant - on the taste and presentation of every dish you cook here" - a mantra they have since repeated to an Iraq veteran whose son had drowned and inspired him to compete - and so far they've held up their end of that claim.  In fact two of Christine's most inspiring moments on MasterChef have come from this aspect of the show.  On one episode she had to bake an apple pie and of course couldn't look at the pie crust in the oven to determine its texture.  She instead judged it by touch, the way many backyard grill cooks will judge a steak's wellness by its firmness, and was nervous to the point of tears as she approached the judges.  Gordon Ramsay, world famous for his sharp tongue, scraped the back of a butcher knife along the crust and asked her what it sounded like - it was a crisp, light crust that all three judges determined tasted and felt superb - and told her her biggest obstacle was her confidence.  Secondly, on the aforementioned crab challenge, Christine successfully killed, gutted, cooked and plated the crab in a ceviche for the judges.  Upon tasting it, the judges required some of the other contestants taste the ceviche (specifically the chef who had assigned her the crab) to confirm that not only was she not receiving any favoritism or slack, but she'd managed to make one of the night's finest dishes.  Many of the chefs sheepishly admitted that Christine's ceviche tasted and even looked better than their own.

During another challenge, Christine found herself the head of a team of chefs required to prep and cook 130 breakfast orders for hotel guests in under three hours.  Another female contestant, by the name of Felix, was responsible for the role of expediter - she helped consolidate and arrange the completed cooked food items onto plates, then compile the plates into complete orders and give them to the hotel's service staff to be brought to the guests' rooms.  Christine and her team evenly split up cooking duties - Christine delegated each chef to cook to his or her strengths - and led them by voice alone to a 60/40 vote of victory as determined by the hotel guests' enjoyment of their breakfasts.  Throughout the three hours, Christine consistently reprimanded and corrected Felix for falling silent and breaking down communication when she should have been the most vocal person in the room and earned praise from the judges and the other team for multitasking and leading her team so consistently.  One curious point specifically regarding Christine's sensory disadvantage arose when, as the team ran low on Hollandaise sauce for Eggs Benedict, Felix began drizzling small amounts of the sauce onto the plates and was caught by Ramsay for cheating guests out of the proper dish.  In a side interview, Christine mentioned how frustrating it was that she had trusted Felix to be properly saucing and preparing the dishes and was able to circumvent Christine's leadership and the team's quality of service by, intentionally or not, taking advantage of Christine's inability to visually verify the quality of Felix's plating.

There's a very delicate balance as to why Christine is such an important part of MasterChef.  The inherent, if unspoken, claim of the show is that any home/amateur chef in the country can become "America's next MasterChef," a prestigious title.  You can come from any walk of life and have just as much talent as another person, which is a lesson I do appreciate - you don't have to be the richest person with the most expensive ingredients and tools to create a delicious meal.  However, the problem with anybody at all saying "Anybody can do this or that" can imply a derogatory, non-verbal tag following it.  "Anybody can be the next MasterChef - even _______ people," and that can not only sound discriminatory if taken the wrong way but can seem gimmicky or exploitative on the part of the person in question or the show itself.  Christine's cooking has, by this point at least, proven to most audience members that the judges haven't picked her for ratings.  Many gimmicky tryout chefs - a guy with a monkey, a ventriloquist, etc - didn't pass their auditions, but Christine's flavors and presentations continue to shine.  She also isn't there to fulfill a demographic - I simply don't believe the FOX execs found they were losing "the blind audience" and needed to solve that problem by undeservedly passing through a chef of lesser quality than another.  Christine's personality has also saved her from simply being labeled "that one blind chef."  She's funny, educated, polite, quirky and her cooking has a successful voice of being highlighted - but not defined - by modern and classic light Asian cuisine.

Throughout its three-year run, MasterChef has featured contestants from all walks of life.  The contestants' diversities in age, gender, ethnicity, vocations, sexual identity, cooking styles, personalities and more have come to back up the show's claim that the culinary arts know no discrimination beyond what ends up on the plate.  I don't want Christine to win MasterChef because of her disadvantage - if for any reason she's unable to meet the same requirements set for the other contestants, she should fairly and indiscriminately find herself at the end of her time on the show just as the others to depart before her have as well.  As always, I want the best chef to come out on top this year.  If that "best chef" is Christine, however, I'll not only be in utter awe but confident through the evidence I've seen in earlier episodes that her win is based on the merit of her cooking, not given to her with special consideration for being blind.

I personally hope that the quality of her dishes, in flavor and presentation, continue to meet the standards she's set for herself this far in the competition.  I like her personality, her ideas in the kitchen and her well-wishing of all the contestants.  She realizes that the show should be about culinary Darwinism, not favoritism, and has been a strong and competent chef.  What's not to like?  I'm Jonny Lupsha and I'm on Team Christine.