Chefs cook, gourmets chew, and one chewed up metaphor

On one of the many culinary competitions produced on the Food Network guest epicure Julia Rutland, a pleasant enough judge who writes for Coastal Living Magazine in Birmingham, Alabama, may wish to regurgitate a metaphor.

The show Ms. Rutland appeared on was entitled "The Great American Seafood Cook-Off II." The specific dish Rutland was sampling apparently contained too many ingredients, themselves competing with one another while producing an unsavory result. Rutland's comment, "A lot of difficult elements (here)...they bit off more than they could chew." We are assuming that the antecedent for the pronoun "they" is not the "elements" in the dish; otherwise, you would have the ingredients of the dish cannibalizing themselves. Instead, the "they" Rutland was referring to are the chefs who had prepared the dish, though usually the competitions are head-to-head, one chef competing against another.

Though metaphors are figures of speech, they still must make some sense as used in context. In a cooking competition beamed out to a national audience, we would not expect to see or imagine a chef eating his or her own dish. Sample yes, eating no, and certainly not "biting off more than he or she could chew."

This, perhaps, is something to chew over.