When, a week later, they called to tell me they’d set up a meeting, I was annoyed. Actively pissed off. No good would come of this. This, I was certain, was a waste of fucking time. I bothered to neither shave nor shower for the meeting.

I ended up with a show titled, like the book, A Cook’s Tour. Something that necessarily and despite our best efforts quickly evolved into a sort of gonzo-travelogue of vérité footage and thrown together voice-overs. I had assumed my involvement with television would last no longer than the time it took me to write the book. And yet, amazingly enough, the show was picked up for a second season. Even more incredibly, the network, from the beginning, let me do pretty much whatever the fuck I wanted—allowing me to take the show anywhere I pleased, smoke on camera, curse as I needed—and, even more remarkably, along with the camera people/field producers, whom I became increasingly close to over many miles and many months of traveling together—tell stories any way I cared to, making, as it turned out, pretty good television.

I have to admit, I grew to like this life—roaming the globe in search of nothing more than food and kicks. I also came to enjoy the new-to-me process of telling stories with the help of an all-new chest of toys: cameras, editing boards, sound editing—and really creative professionals who knew how to use them. I like making things. And I like telling stories. I like going to Asia. And this TV gig allowed me to do all of those things

I got sucked in—not by fame or money (of which there was precious little). I’d long ago had all the cocaine I’d ever wanted. No sports car was ever going to cure my ills. I became seduced by the world—and the freedom that television had given me—to travel it as I wished. I was also drunk on a new and exciting power to manipulate images and sound in order to tell stories, to make audiences feel about places I’d been the way I wanted them to feel. I was increasingly proud of some of the episodes I and my partners, camera people/producers Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, were making—and how we were making them. I began to appreciate what editors and sound mixers and post-production people can do. Making TV was becoming…fun, and, in more than a few cases, actually creatively satisfying.

I wrote the book and yet continued filming. The tail now wagged the dog. I was hooked on travel, on seeing the world, and on the terms I was seeing it. Simply put? I didn’t want to share. The world had become, on the one hand, a much bigger place, but, on the other hand, it contracted. Like a lot of travelers, I started to turn inward from the view out the window, started to see what was going on out there through an ever-narrowing lens. When I’d set out, I’d see a sunset or a temple and want, instinctively, to turn to my right or to my left and say to somebody, anybody, “Isn’t that a magnificent sunset?”

That impulse quickly faded. I felt proprietary about the world. I became selfish. That sunset was mine.

I was on the road for the better part of two years, during which time everything in my life changed. I stopped working as a chef—a job whose daily routines had always been the only thing that stood between me and chaos. My first marriage began to fall apart.

Sitting down in the Food Network’s corporate offices back in New York, I was a guy with very different priorities than the ones I’d left my kitchen with. For better or worse, I now had the ludicrous notion that this television thing could be “good” and even, occasionally, “important.”

On a recent book tour in Spain, I’d been introduced to Ferran Adrià—and, amazingly, he’d agreed to allow us to shoot him in his workshop taller and in his nearly-impossible-to-reserve restaurant, El Bulli. Adrià was already the most important and controversial chef on the planet—and his restaurant the most sought-after reservation. More significantly, no one to date had ever filmed what he had agreed to show me and my crew: full access to his creative process, to him, his chefs, his favorite restaurants, his inspirations—and, finally, to eat and film the entire El Bulli tasting menu in the kitchen with Adrià himself at the table, explaining things course by course. It had never been done—nor has it since, as far as I know.

But while I was away, something had happened.

Suddenly they weren’t so interested in “foreign”-based shows anymore at Food Network. The executives who’d enthusiastically taken us on and supported our more self-indulgent and racy endeavors didn’t seem to have the pull they’d once had. Or the interest. When we told them about what Adrià had agreed to do, they were indifferent. “Does he talk English?” and “It’s too smart for us” were both mentioned as factors in their eventual refusal to pony up for such an episode—or any episodes outside the United States, it now seemed.

A sour-faced network lawyer became a regular participant at “creative” meetings—subtly setting the agenda and guiding their direction. As warning signs go, this should have been a red alert. The biggest show on the network at that time, it was explained, was something called Unwrapped, involving stock footage of cotton candy and Mars Bars being made. Episodes cost about a tenth of what it cost to make our show—and rated, of course, much much higher. On those few occasions when we’d filmed A Cook’s Tour in America, it was pointed out, particularly when I was seen to put anything barbequed in my mouth, ratings skyrocketed. Why couldn’t I confine my wanderings to my own country—to parking-lot tailgate parties and chili cook-offs? All this foreign stuff, what with people talkin’ funny and eatin’ strange food…didn’t, it was explained in perfect lawyerese, fit their “current business model.”

I knew there was no light at the end of the tunnel the day we were joined by a new hire—the lawyer and the (it would soon be revealed) outgoing execs stood up and said, “Say hello to Brooke Johnson…who we’re all delighted to have join us from…[some other network].”

Ms. Johnson was clearly not delighted to meet me or my partners. You could feel the air go out of the room the moment she entered. It became instantly a place without hope or humor. There was a limp handshake as cabin pressure changed, a black hole of fun—all light, all possibility of joy was sucked into the vortex of this hunched and scowling apparition. The indifference bordering on naked hostility was palpable.

My partners and I left knowing that it was the end of us at Food Network.

Of course, the FN “business model,” for which Ms. Johnson was apparently the vanguard, turned out to be a spectacularly successful one. With each incremental dumbing down of their programming, ratings climbed proportionately. A purge of the chefs who’d built the network followed. Mario and Emeril and nearly anybody else who’d committed the sin of professionalism were either banished or exiled, like Old Bolsheviks—seen as entirely unnecessary to the real business of “Food”—which was, they now recognized, actually about likable personalities, nonthreatening images, and making people feel better about themselves.

With every critical outrage—the humiliating, painful-to-watch Food Network Awards, the clumsily rigged-looking Next Food Network Star, the cheesily cheap-jack production values of Next Iron Chef America—every obvious, half-assed knock-off they slapped on the air would go on to ring up sky-high ratings and an ever-larger audience of cherished males twenty-two to thirty-six (or whatever that prime car-buying demographic is). In service to this new, groin-level dynamic, even poor, loyal Bobby Flay was banished from cooking anywhere near as well as he actually could—to face off with web-fingered yokels in head-to-head crab-cake contests—to almost inevitably (and dubiously) lose.