Mr food art ginsburg mr food

Art Ginsburg is Mr. Food on WJRT-TV.

How did you get into the kitchen?

I hope God put me on Earth to be cooking. I was born to it. My father was a butcher. I'm a butcher, too. Even when I was 7 years old, I would ask my mom if I could make lunch. Mixing all the ingredients together, it made me feel like a scientist. I was creating something. I loved it.

Who taught you to cook?

I was educated in cooking by my mom, my sister, and my aunts. We lived in a very ethnically mixed neighborhood. Mrs. Franco helped Mrs. Gonzales. When they stopped in to visit, they'd give people food.

I had a very adventurous childhood. My father was a cattle dealer. I saw the seasons traveling with him. In those days, you had broccoli and cauliflower four weeks a year. We knew when everything was ripe. We learned the signs.

You were picking things off the vine, rubbing them on your shirt and eating them. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. I didn't realize it, but I was learning.

We'd get a couple bushels of cauliflower, apples, nothing went to waste in our house. The first week we had cauliflower every which way possible. The rest of it was put by, canned, and we had it through the winter. Even now, if you are loaded with tomatoes, all you have to do is just freeze them the way they are. You don't have to peel them or anything. Then when you want to, you can take them out anytime to make your own sauce with all the wonderful flavor.

Have you been to culinary school?

Being a chef who was never trained has stood me in good stead. Chefs cook for other chefs. They've lost track of how America cooks. I cook for America, the way America cooks. There's no sin today in using a cake mix if it's going to get your family around the table. You can take a bottled sauce, sauté a little onion, add a little garlic and make it your own.

I'd rather have somebody pay for what

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Art Ginsburg, the delightfully dorky television chef known as Mr. Food, died at his home in Weston, Fla., Wednesday following a struggle with pancreatic cancer. He was 81.

Ginsburg - who enticed viewers for decades with a can-do focus on easy weeknight cooking and the tagline "Ooh! It's so good!" - was diagnosed just over a year ago. The cancer had gone into remission following early treatments and surgery, but returned earlier this month.

"Art's commitment to anyone-can-do recipes and passion for helping others made him well-loved among his peers and among television viewers and website visitors. He was one of the first television celebrity chefs and paved a road for many who came after him," a note on his website explained. "His greatest love was for his wife, Ethel, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his daily visit into your homes via the television."

Ginsburg had an unlikely formula for success in this era of reality cooking shows, flashy chefs and artisanal foods. With a pleasantly goofy, grandfatherly manner and a willingness to embrace processed foods, Ginsburg endeared himself to millions of home cooks via 90-second segments syndicated to 125 local television stations around the country.

And though he published 52 Mr. Food-related cookbooks, selling more than 8 million copies, he was little known to the nation's foodies and mostly ignored by the glossy magazines. That was the way he liked it.

"They're on the Food Network. They're getting a lot of national publicity. And they're getting big money," he said of fellow food celebrities during a 2010 interview with The Associated Press. "I was always the hometown guy. I don't want to be the super celebrity. When you need bodyguards, that's not my deal."

Ginsburg grew up in the meat business, and eventually started his own catering company. He made his television debut in 1975 in upstate New York on a local morning program. His Mr. Food vignettes were syndicated in n

This article is about an American television chef. For the comedy character Mr Food, see Steve Wright In The Afternoon.

American television chef

Art Ginsburg (July 29, 1931 – November 21, 2012), commonly known as Mr. Food, was an American television chef and best selling author of cookbooks. He was known for ending each of his TV segments with the catch phrase "Ooh! It's so good!" The signature phrase, as spoken by Mr. Food, is registered as a sound trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Ginsburg was a pioneer of "quick & easy cooking" who, for over 30 years, paved the way for other TV food personalities to follow. With his enthusiastic style, Mr. Food specialized in practical food preparation techniques, using readily available ingredients. He extolled an "anybody can do it" philosophy of cooking and remains today as one of the early pioneers of cooking on modern television.

Career

Ginsburg was originally a butcher. He owned and ran a catering business prior to his work in television. In 1975, Ginsburg turned his flair for acting into a local television food program at WRGB in Schenectady, New York. It is believed that he filmed 1 or 2 episodes at KWWL in Waterloo, Iowa. By 1980, his 90-second Mr. Food segments were being syndicated to nine U.S. television markets, including WKBN-TV in Youngstown, Ohio, which still airs the "Mr. Food's Test Kitchen" segments today. At its peak in 2007, the program appeared on 168 television stations through King World Productions.

In addition to his television career, Ginsburg became a prolific writer, with 52 cookbooks published and sales of over 8 million copies. Three of Ginsburg's cookbooks were devoted to recipes for people with diabetes and published by the American Diabetes Association; one of these has also been published in Span