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For Team USA, the only bright spot was Chicago’s own Peter Yuen, who took fourth place in the individual Viennoiserie category. “This means I get to come back to France in two years to compete in an individual competition,” he said.
The scoring for the competition changes from year to year, and much depends upon the personal opinions of the judges, none of whom are from countries with entrants in the competition. Factors include taste, appearance, timely production, and even cleaning up your kitchen at the end, which falls under the heading of “professionalism.” The problem is that nobody seems able to predict how the various categories will be weighted in any given year. Team USA suffered from some bad luck in the artistic design category, which was the responsibility of Dara Reimers, from Maine. Her representation was of baseball and apple pie, and she constructed a window in the process of being broken by a baseball knocked through it. The intentional breakage part worked fine, but unexpectedly, the window frame itself split in several places (mind you, everything in the construction was composed of bread or other edibles). This required patching, which took up extra time and left Reimers–who’d been supposed to work on sandwiches as well–behind in her duties. The team finished 22 minutes after the deadline, but until (or if) the scoring is announced, nobody will know how much they were penalized.
