The Plight of Foodies: How mordern television shows have changed our perception of what it takes to be a foodie(BP#3)

Every Sunday, around four in the afternoon, my mother would sit in front of the television to watch her favorite cooking show, Khana Khazana. As the host Sanjeev Kapoor (the Indian equivalent of Jamie Oliver) explained his recipe of the week, my mother would religiously take down notes as if the entire recipe had to be matched teaspoon for teaspoon. She would then go into the kitchen and try out the recipe for herself. The result of her efforts would be our Sunday night dinner. This became a kind of tradition in our household, so much so that I would walk into my mother’s room during the last five minutes of the show just to know what I would be having for dinner that night. During the show’s heyday in 1995, most houses in the country had a similar story.

These days the number of shows based on food has increased rapidly. There are innumerable books on the subject and the internet has made it possible to learn your favorite recipe at virtually no cost. It would seem that learning about food and cooking is easier now than it has ever been. But for all the resources available these days, a curiously small number of people take the time to cook an entire meal. Why is cooking (which was so popular just ten years ago) so disfavored today? What changed?

One reason for the disinterest people show towards cooking is the abundance of readymade meals which flood our supermarkets and malls. Why would average working people take the time to prepare their own food when they can just microwave something they bought at their local Wal-mart? These prepackaged “ready to eat” meals provide an alternative to home cooked food and are especially inviting to people with hectic work schedules. One could argue that these readymade alternatives don’t taste as good as food that is homemade. But in the end it’s a question of whether people who have jobs to worry about are willing to make the effort to cook their own food. And the answer is mostly a resounding no. Cooking is no longer a necessity. However for people genuinely interested in the art of cooking, the numerous television shows and books should help them follow their interest. But as it turns out modern television shows make learning about food more difficult for people. These shows give rise to the perception that being a foodie requires a lot of time, energy and money. Instead of giving people the impression that they too could do all the things the people on the show are doing they make people think that learning about food is a daunting and scary task.

Julia Child’s show “The French Chef” was one of the first cooking shows on television. The show was done live and ran for nearly thirty minutes. This meant that all the mistakes Mrs. Child made were not edited out before the show was broadcast on television. This gave the impression that Mrs. Child was cooking along with her viewers. Her show made it seem acceptable to make a mistake and gave many people the courage to attempt the complex recipes that were a part of Mrs. Child’s repertoire. In his article”Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” Michael Pollan says that Julia Child “took the fear out of cooking.” He goes on to cite episodes in which Mrs. Child dropped various ingredients on the floor and even unsuccessfully tried to flip a pancake. All these instances made it less terrifying to fail at preparing a difficult recipe. Many people thought that if a veteran chef like Julia Child could occasionally make a mistake then it was acceptable for them to make some as well.

However cooking shows today are very different. A prime example is FOX’s “Hell’s Kitchen” in which a number of contestants compete to become the head chef of a restaurant. The contestants are issued a series of demanding challenges (like identifying various ingredients by taste) and are subjected to verbal assaults by the host Gordon Ramsay whenever their work doesn’t live up to his high standards. There are times when Mr. Ramsay throws away an entire plate of food when he finds it unsatisfactory while yelling an impressively large number of obscenities at the person responsible. All of this may be very entertaining but it makes makes cooking seem like a very intimidating task. It makes it seem like there is no room for error. Julia Child’s show tried to encourage people to cook. In contrast, shows like “Hell’s Kitchen”( and the less intense but still intimidating “Iron Chef”) make it seem like cooking requires a great deal of expertise and is not something that can be mastered by the average person. Shows like Hell’s kitchen have changed society’s perception of what it takes to be a foodie. They give people the impression that it is a difficult task that requires years of training and discipline.

Another misconception about food culture is that being a foodie requires a lot of money.When Julia Child was preparing boiled lobster on an episode of the French Chef she began talking about the proper way to eat a lobster. She said something to the effect of “if you’re modern you can use the shears but I prefer eating the old fashioned way.” It may have been just a passing remark but it tells us something very important about what Mrs. Child was trying to accomplish with her show. She was trying to let people know that they don’t need expensive equipment to enjoy food. Most people think that being a foodie means spending a lot of money on elaborate kitchen equipment and rare ingredients. Julia Child’s show let them know that it was quite the contrary. All the episodes of “The French Chef” take place in a standard (albeit large) kitchen and all her recipes are prepared using the most common implements. The message the show was sending its viewers was clear: you can do this in your own kitchen.

Many shows today sent their viewers quite the opposite message. The show “Iron chef” was a phenomenal success in Japan and had a large cult following. The success of the show resulted in an American version being made. The basic premise of the show is that two chefs compete against each other to see who can make the better dish. During an episode of the Japanese version, two chefs were competing against each other to see who could make better sushi. Each of them was provided with five different kinds of fish and a large number of ingredients (many of which I hadn’t heard of before). Both chefs had all the tools and utensils they had asked for. It gave the impression that to make sushi like they did one would have to buy all those ingredients and implements. It’s true that since the show is a competition anything that can give the chefs the upper hand is a necessity. But it still feeds the perception that being a foodie requires a lot of moneyThe show even features a person known as “the chairman” who supposedly came up with the idea for the show and paid for it out of his own pocket, which only strengthens this notion. “The French Chef” and “Iron Chef” send two different messages to their viewers. Mrs. Child’s show tries to assure its viewers that an average person can cook her recipes just as well as she does while “Iron Chef” makes its viewers believe preparing sushi like the master chefs requires a lot of time and financial backing.

Why is it that most shows these days confirm the idea that being a lover of food requires a great deal of dedication and money which is often not available to most people? My theory is that as the number of shows about food increased so did the competition among shows for viewers. In an effort to get more viewers most show tried to make food culture more entertaining than it really is. They tried to turn cooking competitions into grand spectacles. To make events more profound they made it seem like what the people on their show were doing required years of training and discipline and could only be done with the proper appliances. While trying to draw in audiences they made being a foodie harder and more expensive than it really is.

Ultimately being a foodie requires nothing more than a keen interest in food and food culture. Most shows today will have you believe that being a foodie requires superhuman gastronomic abilities (like being able to tell the difference between leeche and asparagus while blindfolded) and enough money to buy the rarest spices and newest equipment. But being a foodie doesn’t require years of dedication or lots of money. It doesn’t even require you to be a talented chef. As the late Julia Child once said,” I was 32 until I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.” All it takes to be a true bon vivant is a passion for food whether its boiled lobster or micro waved pizza.


References: Miachael Pollan's "Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html
TV show(Hell's Kitchen),TV show(Iron Chef), TV show(The French Chef), TV show(Khana Khazana)