Do we like Alton Brown?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful about any group turned up, but a clumsy Holocaust reference and a prickly streak online keep him short of a top score.
Alton Brown was born in Los Angeles in 1962 but grew up in north Georgia, where his family moved when he was seven. He studied filmmaking at the University of Georgia and spent years shooting commercials and music videos, including an R.E.M. video and camera work on Spike Lee's School Daze.
Then he went to culinary school in Vermont and made Good Eats, which premiered on Food Network in 1999 and mixed cooking, silly skits and food chemistry. It won a Peabody, he picked up a James Beard Award for a cookbook, and he became the voice of Iron Chef America from 2005. Not bad for a bloke who started behind a camera.
The big stain is November 2020. After the US election he posted two tweets, since deleted, including one asking if camp uniforms would be striped like those at Auschwitz, and a reply to a user saying “I have no gold fillings”. He apologised the next morning, calling it “flippant” and saying it reflected how frightened he was for the country. Food writer Michael Twitty was among those who criticised it.
He didn't help himself that week. He told a disappointed fan they had “no right to be disappointed” in him, though he did later say he'd voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris after saying he had voted Republican most of his life. Making light of a genocide is a bad look, whatever the fear behind it, and one apology doesn't settle it either way. What counts is that nothing like it has turned up since.
In March 2022 he posted that he “cannot find the words to describe my love for #WillSmith right now”, after the Oscars slap. Plenty of fans pushed back, with one asking whether violence was suddenly okay. It's a bad take rather than a harmful one, but it shows a bloke who is quick to fire off a post.
On the harm test, I went looking for anything he'd said or done about LGBTQ+ people, trans people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and for dodgy company in his recent work. Nothing turned up. That's an absence rather than a record of advocacy, so take it for what it is. In a 2025 interview he talked about respect in kitchens, saying he holds the term chef “as a sign of respect” for people who've earned it.