Interesting article in the NYT magazine this morning on the rise of TV cooking shows and the concurrent collapse of cooking in the home:
But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.
Apparently women in the workforce is to blame as well as a bunch of other stuff. Read it. It's not like I am going to do that for you, too. I like to cook but I don't think I cook as much as I did say ten years ago. It's not the job, however - it's the kids. I can put together special meals of roasts or BBQs and have discovered the fish taco but kids won't eat some of what I would like to make and certainly most of what TV cooks promote. Not a lot of shows about ways to sneak vegetables into sauces. No nightly show called "Coating With Mild Cheese!" or "How About Another Sandwich?"
Food on TV has become acceptable porn. Listen to that background music. You have heard it before. There is an unnatural relationship to eating on cooking programs. There was that one about the smiley Australian making something with what's already in someone's fridge but who wants to learn others with kitchens like yours are better off than you. No, we want the TV kitchen and twelve types of capers gathering dust as we eat Cheese Wazz on white bread in front of the blue screen. That is what we really want.
Comments
P of K - August 2, 2009 10:57 AM
Perhaps when one spends all one's free time watching TV one has none left to cook anything other than PC at the mantra'd instruction of 18 to 20 minutes at 400 degrees.
Lew Bryson - August 2, 2009 11:07 AM
We don't watch food porn, but we do have way too many cookbooks and subscribe to four cooking magazines...and we cook all the time; Cathy made red pepper hummus, a new kind of guacamole, and some kind of barley salad just this morning. We also dine out a fair amount. What we don't do is heat up prepared food very often. Is there a connection there?
Alan - August 2, 2009 11:54 AM
Could be. I am declaring beer and fish taco day as last night's BBQ needs just a bit of haddock to make it complete. The other thing we have these days is easy produce. I am just as happy to eat a real tomato as make anything.
I don't watch that much food porn but it does seem a lot like those shows about fixing up the house by people who never fix up the house.
Jay Currie - August 3, 2009 3:36 AM
Not having a TV my sweetie has resorted to the hard stuff...200 recent issue hard core cookbooks. And buying (thankfully at used and thriftstore and garage sale prices) more everyday. Which is just fine with me because other than my barbquist skills (ribs in honey mustard sauce tonight) the dear heart cooks a minimum of two meals a day three hundred and forty five days a year. And, with the exception of the yearly too much chili pepper event, they are brilliant. How can I resent four Panni books when I have Pannis five days a week. Only a churl would object to a couple of dozen baking books when confronted with fresh baked bread and World Peace Cookies more than occasionally.
Like the other sort of porn - and rather more plausibly - food porn offers suggestions. And it turns out there is a lot more you can do in the kitchen than you can do in bed.