Television Review: How To Live To 100 With Jason Wrobel

The day has finally come. The Cooking Channel has at last featured a special—first aired a few weeks ago—all about the benefits of a vegan diet. It’s about time! Well, let’s plop ourselves down on the couch and enjoy some How To Live To 100 With Jason Wrobel. This ought to be great, right? Right? …right?



I really, really wanted to like this show, but in the end, there were too many elements that turned me off and I came away feeling like it was a poor representation of a vegan diet and culture. As a matter of fact, my first complaint is that the show seemed to go out of its way to avoid saying that it was proposing a vegan diet. The V-word was only used once in the entire show and it was used derogatorily when Jason’s “neighbor” called him “vegan boy”. I know it was just a jest, but the show could have benefited from at least one instance of “vegan” being used in a positive tone.

All the recipes, of course, are vegan, but the show makes it seem coincidental. The foods are presented as having health benefits from their antioxidant-rich ingredients. This is fantastic, but the health benefits of a vegan diet cannot be summed up in the foods that it includes. Equally important are the foods that a vegan diet excludes. The foods highlighted in the show all sounded delicious and healthy, but if they’re eaten as a side to a double cheeseburger or a 24 oz. steak, the benefits are sure to be slim.

Aside from the show’s issues regarding the presentation of veganism, I found the show was just too difficult to enjoy. Jason Wrobel has an on-screen personality that is just too over-the-top. The jokes were seldom clever and he punctuated the poor jokes with outrageous expressions that did nothing but prompt my eyes to roll. Wrobel has said in interviews that his intent was to create a “cooking show meets sitcom”. It all comes off as trying far too hard, though. Especially disappointing is that this ineffectual humor element ends up consuming so much screen time that the recipe segments seemed to take a sideline to Wrobel being a ham. I for one prefer my cooking shows to be cooking shows and my sitcoms to be sitcoms.

So, my excitement over a vegan television show on the Cooking Channel has been tempered by the realization that I don’t actually enjoy the show, but in the end, it is an important step for veganism. With luck, How To Live To 100 will be at least successful enough to motivate additional vegan shows in the future. And for that reason, I still urge you to check out the show if for no other reason than to buttress the show’s ratings. Though I didn’t care for it, perhaps To Live To 100 With Jason Wrobel will resonate more with some of you.

Thanks for reading!