Alton Brown

Alton Crawford Brown Jr. (born July 30, 1962) is an American television personality, food show presenter, food scientist, author, voice actor, and cinematographer.

He is the creator and host of the Food Network television show Good Eats that ran for 16 seasons, host of the miniseries Feasting on Asphalt and Feasting on Waves, and host and main commentator on Iron Chef America and Cutthroat Kitchen.

Brown is a best-selling author of several books on food and cooking.

Alton Brown was born July 30, 1962, in Los Angeles, California.

Brown's father, Alton Brown Sr., was a media executive in Cleveland, Georgia; owner of radio station WRWH; and publisher of the newspaper White County News.

He died on Alton's last day of sixth grade from an apparent suicide.

Brown studied film at the University of Georgia in the early 1980s, and got his start in television as the cinematographer for music videos,

including "The One I Love" by R.E.M.

Brown was dissatisfied with the quality of cooking shows airing on American television, so he set out to produce his own show.

In preparation, he enrolled in the New England Culinary Institute, graduating in 1997.

Brown says he was a poor science student in high school and college, but he focused on the subject to understand the underlying processes of cooking.

He is outspoken in his shows about his dislike of single-purpose kitchen utensils and equipment such as garlic presses and margarita machines, although he adapts a few traditionally single-purpose devices, such as rice cookers and melon ballers, into multipurpose tools.

The pilot for Good Eats first aired in July 1998 on the PBS member TV station WTTW in Chicago.

Food Network picked up the show in July 1999.

Many of the Good Eats episodes feature Brown building makeshift cooking devices in order to point out that many of the devices sold at conventional "cooking" stores are simply fancified hardware store items.

Good Eats was nominated for the Best TV Food Journalism Award by the James Beard Foundation in 2000.

In 2004, Brown appeared on Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters.

This was the second attempt to adapt the Japanese cooking show Iron Chef to American television (the first being UPN's Iron Chef USA, which featured William Shatner).

Brown served as the expert commentator, a modified version of the role played by Dr. Yukio Hattori in the original show.

When the show became a series, Brown began serving as the play-by-play announcer, with Kevin Brauch as kitchen reporter.

Brown also served as the host for all five seasons of the spin-off The Next Iron Chef.

Brown's third series, Feasting on Asphalt, explores the history of eating on the move.

Brown and his crew traveled around the United States via motorcycle in a four-part miniseries about the history of road food.

Brown samples food all along his travel route.

He includes a "history of food" segment documenting famous road trips and interviews many of the foodies he meets en route.

The show was also awarded a 2006 Peabody Award.

The series premiered on Food Network on July 29, 2006.

In May 2011, Alton Brown announced an end to Good Eats after 14 seasons.

The final episode, "Turn on the Dark", aired February 10, 2012.

On Alton's 2017 book tour, he stated that Good Eats would have a sequel and that it would be released to the internet in 2018.

This was changed in late 2018 when Brown made arrangements with The Cooking Channel to air "revised" versions of several episodes with new recipes entitled Good Eats Reloaded, in which he stated new episodes of Good Eats are also in the works.

A recap series titled Good Eats Reloaded aired on Cooking Channel, and a true sequel series, Good Eats: The Return, ran from 2019 to 2021 on Food Network.

Thirteen episodes of Good Eats Reloaded aired in late winter and early spring 2019, and were added to the Good Eats reruns on The Cooking Channel.

It was announced on June 5, 2019, that the new show would be called Good Eats Returns; it premiered on the Food Network with the slightly revised title Good Eats: The Return on Sunday, August 25.

Brown relaunched the show in two versions: as Good Eats Reloaded on Cooking Channel (which updates, reworks and adds to original Good Eats episodes), and on Food Network as Good Eats: The Return in August 2019 (all-new episodes).

New episodes of Reloaded premiered in April 2020.

New Return episodes were in the writing process and planned to be filming over the summer of 2020, but were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

These episodes eventually saw release, initially as an exclusive on the new Discovery+ streaming service.

In June 2021, the episodes premiered on Food Network as a companion to the Chopped: Alton's Maniacal Baskets tournament.

On July 13, 2021, Brown announced that Good Eats: The Return would not be returning for a third season.