Alton Brown

Template:Person Alton Brown (born July 30, 1962; age Template:Age) is an American food personality, cinematographer, author, aircraft pilot, and actor.

His SpongeBob SquarePants role was in "House Fancy" where he played Nicholas Withers.

Biography

Alton Brown was born July 30, 1962, in Los Angeles, California. As a child, Brown was a Boy Scout. 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. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, after studying film at the University of Georgia, Brown was the cinematographer for several 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.

Brown lives in Marietta, Georgia. He and his former wife DeAnna, an executive producer on Good Eats, divorced in 2015. DeAnna and Alton have one daughter, Zoey (born in 1999). A few members of his extended family appeared on Good Eats (such as his late grandmother, Ma Mae, his mother, and daughter, Zoey, who is known on the show as "Alton's Spawn"), but most of his "family" portrayed on the series were actors or members of the show's production crew.

Brown and Atlanta restaurant designer Elizabeth Ingram became engaged in 2018. According to Brown's Instagram account, as of September 2018, he and Ingram had married, on a boat in Charleston, South Carolina. Brown and Elizabeth Ingram have two dogs: a terrier named Francis Luther and a Boston terrier/pug mix that the couple rescued in 2018 named Scabigail Van Buren, affectionately nicknamed “Scabs”; Scabs has also made a few appearances on the new episodes of Good Eats.

In the fifth episode of Season 18 of Worst Cooks in America, Brown referred to his current wife as his third wife.

Brown was once a motorcycling enthusiast, although he no longer owns one. He gave up motorcycling by 2012, citing issues of slowing reflexes and safety.[citation needed] In a recent Quarantine Quitchen episode, Brown stated that he currently owns a 1980 BMW R60.[citation needed]Additionally, Brown is an airplane pilot, and was featured in the aviation magazine AOPA Flight Training. He owned two planes, a Cessna 206 and a Cessna 414.

Brown enjoys vintage watches and wore a different watch for every season of Good Eats; this was used in production to quickly identify which season a clip is from. When his watch broke down midseason,[which?] he continued to wear the broken timepiece to maintain this system. Twenty years after the Omega Seamaster watch his father left him was stolen, Brown bought it from an eBay seller and had it restored.

Brown changed his eating habits in 2009 in order to lose weight and become healthier, losing 50 pounds (23 kg) over the course of nine months.

He is the creator and host of Food Network shows Good Eats, Feasting on Asphalt, Iron Chef America, Food Network Star, and Cutthroat Kitchen. He is also the author of several cooking how-to books.