Rachael Ray's Third Act: From TV Fame to Personal Freedom

Rachael Ray isn’t sick. Her marriage is healthy, too. And yes, she’s still on TV. Rumors have swirled around the woman who gave us 30-minute meals since she stepped away from her daily show. But that hasn’t diminished her thrill at rolling through her mid-50s still cooking on television and still pulling crowds for beachside burger parties. Welcome to Ray’s third act, the recipe for which is equal parts serendipity and returning to her hands-in-pans roots. Three years ago, the woman who turned culinary effervescence, EVOO and garbage bowls into a media empire stepped away from the Food Network and her syndicated daytime talk show. Today, she acknowledges, “It can be hard to find me.” Ray sat down with the AP recently during a break from events at the South Beach Wine & Food Festival to talk about what’s next, what keeps her going and why she doesn’t care about her legacy. “I’ll be dead, so who cares?” She said that a lot, actually. About her critics. About the gossip. About whether people today get her and her decisions. Except, clearly she does care. Particularly about the thread common to it all — giving people kitchen confidence. She once described her cooking as the food equivalent of a pop song. Which sounds flip. But when your entire career is built around breaking barriers to food, the easy digestibility of pop is an apt analogy. “That was the message I wanted to bring to people. Don’t be scared of this,” she said. “If it doesn’t come out all right, who cares? It’s just dinner.” The story of Ray’s rise is well-trod. Young woman from upstate New York gets noticed while doing food demos at an upscale grocery store, lands a gig on the Food Network demystifying cooking with a focus on fast and affordable, parlays that into a daytime show backed by Oprah Winfrey, and in short order she and her rat-a-tat Yum-o!-punctuated vernacular — not to mention her knives, books, pans, magazine, pet food and all manner of other products — were ubiquitous. Then, in 2023 -- after 17 seasons on daytime TV -- she jarred fans by walking away from much of it, a decision she’d been quietly considering for years. Network television brought with it armies of executives and lawyers. “I just didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t want to live by committee,” she said. “I wanted to focus more on food the way I want to teach it, talking to people I want to talk to, and being just me.” To many, she seemed to slow down or even disappear. After fire destroyed her home in upstate New York and flooding ruined her city apartment, she moved much of her life to Italy. A podcast was started, then quietly shuttered. All amid rumors of failing health and marriage. Moved under the radar might be more accurate than slowed down. But let’s start with the gossip. “We’re very volatile people. We’re loud, and then we’re lovey dovey, and I think we confuse a lot of folks because of that,” she said of her marriage to musician and lawyer John Cusimano. “I have a great marriage. My health is fine. I lift weights every morning, 4 o’clock, you know. I’m doing just fine.” After ending her daytime show -- the only thing she misses is the energy of the live audience -- she created her own production company, Free Food Studios, an effort to control her content (sans layers of lawyers) and launch new talent. A&E soon acquired a 50% stake in it and ordered hundreds of episodes, including several new series starring Ray. “People tell me on the plane or at the airport or at the grocery store, ‘Oh, I miss your show so much!’ And I’m like, I have many! You know, look on YouTube or look at A&E or look at Disney or Hulu,” she said. “It rotates through all these different platforms now, so it’s harder for people to find.” In fact, her “Meals in Minutes” recently was renewed for more than 100 new episodes, and she’s producing two additional shows with other stars. Meanwhile, she’s planning an eighth humanitarian trip to Ukraine — she’s been collaborating on them with José Andrés since early in the war — recently launched her own gin, and still sells plenty of pots and pans and pet foods, the latter of which helps fund The Rachael Ray Foundation, which has donated $140 million to animal welfare and nutritional advocacy groups. Today, culinary pedigrees among food celebrities are few and far between, making the early critiques of Ray -- She’s not a serious cook! She’s not a chef! -- seem quaint, sexist, maybe both. She’s thankful social media has lowered the bar for entry to her world, saying fresh faces no longer need money, connections, a culinary degree or blind luck to get noticed. What hasn’t changed is the way aging women are judged, particularly when they have the audacity to do so as a public figure. Her appearance has been a hot topic in recent years, but Ray said she refuses to join the beauty bandwagon. “I tried Botox here (pointing at her eyebrows) years ago,” she said. “And I just looked sort of shocked or something. And I thought, this isn’t you.” At this year’s South Beach festival’s Burger Bash, which Ray has hosted for two decades -- consuming some 568 burgers over the years, but who’s counting? -- crowds swarmed her with stories of growing up on her recipes and shows. At a private dinner the next night, 20-plus people paid $500 each to clamor as she served pasta alle vongole and told family stories while Cusimano mixed cocktails. “Honey! I’m talking too much! This got hot!” Ray said, handing him a Martinez cocktail to refresh. “I don’t drink a hot cocktail. I almost never drink the second half of my cocktail.” The crowd of mostly middle-aged women nodded enthusiastically, clearly adopting a new Ray-endorsed rule to foist on their own spouses. “I love the fact that it’s still relevant that I come here,” Ray said. “I’m a woman in her mid-50s that’s still employed, still making programming, and still can book an event and have thousands of people come out. That means a lot to me.” “I like not knowing,” she said. “I like watching things evolve and discovering what’s next for myself. So there’s no plan. There’s no road map.”