True story: Julia Child once made lunch for me in the kitchen of her Cambridge, Massachusetts, house. A tuna salad sandwich and what she called “crunchilly underdone” veggies. Yes, in that kitchen, the one now on display in the Smithsonian Institution. At the time, I was barely familiar with microwave ovens, let alone cooking shows, so this singular honor was totally lost on me, a young journalist on assignment. I will live with the shame forever.
Leap ahead several decades, and programs about food are now everywhere on TV. Like avocados, you can’t avoid them. Julia just happened to be a pioneer.
Since then, Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, Guy Fieri, Emeril Lagasse, Rachel Ray, and a slew of other TV chefs have emerged as major celebrities with avid followings. I’m still a low-brow gastronome — would just as soon have a peanut butter and pickle sammich as a fancy pot-au-feu — but I fully acknowledge our national obsession with food shows on TV and online. What exactly is it about them that compels us to (pardon) eat them up? In America, it seems, their incredible proliferation speaks to our extreme privilege as a society. Only the most wealthy of nations could afford to focus on cooking and dining chiefly as a form of entertainment. It is like sports coverage, almost.
During one two-month stretch last year, the Food Network reported it had attracted more than 50 million viewers across its various platforms (not including web content). Huge. Allen Salkin, author of From Scratch, the definitive history of the network, told me that, despite all the skeptics, “food TV has not peaked. It will never peak.”
Simply put, food programming fits into three pots, with some overlap: how-to shows, travel/documentaries, and competitions. There have been fan-favorite staples in each of the categories. (Something titled How to Boil Water was an early hit on what was then called the TV Food Network. Seriously.)
Likely as a result of the genre’s popularity, we’re now seeing lots more on-screen cooking even on traditional scripted series. For example, The Bear, a critically acclaimed drama headed into its third season, revolves around a Chicago grease pit that transforms into an elegant restaurant pursuing a Michelin star. It’s beautifully produced and presents a realistic picture of how meals are prepared under the command of a high-strung, top-tier chef. On a distinctly sweeter side of the equation, if you happen to be a lover of doughnuts — which if you’re not I don’t need to know you — you may remember that it was one particular scene in the Sex and the City series that suddenly, for a moment, propelled the doughnut to previously unheard-of levels of excitement some years back.
Personally, my favorite shows are the cage matches — MasterChef, Top Chef, and Chopped, among others. I don’t learn much about cooking from them, nor do I expect to. But wow, have I become an expert on plating! Don’t ever say I’m not a lifelong learner.
What makes the competitions compelling is the clock. “That’s the one thing they all have in common,” a senior TV-industry source told me. “It’s always the clock that gets the contestants. No matter how much skill you have as a cook, you can’t practice enough” to beat that big, blinking stopwatch. The pitched battles between ambitious chefs, involving sweat, swearing, and sometimes squirting human blood, invariably conclude with a glorious on-camera victory — or the agony of defeat and humiliation. Quintessentially American. As Emeril would say: Bam!
In the November/December issue, Cable wrote about the underground shelter boom.
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Comments
The cooking (and baking) competition shows can be entertaining and educational, especially if the food in question is something you’d maybe like to try making yourself but didn’t know how. It could also be a case of after knowing what’s involved, re-thinking it as a ‘maybe not’.
For me personally, I like Martha Stewart’s cooking, baking, or any project shows she’s doing, best. Her calm, friendly, no rush approach is perfect. I’m sure millions love her for just that alone, as there’s enough stress in life already she’s keenly aware of.