HESTON'S CROWN

Watched the SBS show about Heston Blunenthal's move of his restaurant from England to Crown Casino with intermingled feelings of fascination and revulsion. The shows are hour-long advertainments for Crown, punctuated by ads for, yes, Crown. But the level of fussiness over food, the search for ever more bizarre incarnations of edibles in the name of culture, is a bit, well, stomach-turning. The insane fastidiousness even of table settings, not to mention the $525 price tag in a world where most people subsist on a dollar or two a day, is hard to abide. While one has admire him for his tenacity, creativity and hard work over the years, at this level of fastidiousness food becomes little more than high-end very conspicuous consumption and cult of celebrity.