I finally caught the season finale of Top Chef Masters last night. It was pretty infuriating (spoiler warning).

Marcus Samuelsson, the Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised, chef won. But he won because his final dish was a deliberate attempt to popularize African cuisine for all of the P.C. reasons, not because the judges really liked it. I didn’t really like any of the final three contestants this year, but it was really annoying to see Samuelsson get five stars from Jay Rayner, the British judge from The Observer (the guy with the weird creep moss hair) when it was clear, by his own admission, he didn’t actually enjoy the dish very much. In fairness, it was a close call who should have won and all of them are great chefs. But Samuelsson would not have won were it not for Rayner’s absurdly generous five stars. It goes to show that when political considerations are just one of many factors, they often end up being the deciding factor. Because all such decisions are made at the margins.