The Art of the Cooking Show. Part 1/2.

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We'll soon be releasing a host of extra content and information on our Patreon. Tomorrow we'll post a podcast where our writer will discuss the more in-depth details of the research that went into this video to outline the whole constellation of the cooking world (it's really big). We're just three freelancers trying to find the time to make these videos, so if you'd consider becoming a Patron we'd really appreciate it so we can devote more hours to this project: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=25150972

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Stick around for Part 2 next week, where we'll be going over the techniques that the cooking show utilizes to enthrall viewers.

VIDEO DESCRIPTION

In this installment, we will run you through a brief archaeology of the cooking show and demonstrate some of the genre's stalwarts, both in terms of personalities and the elements underlying their programming.

It is quite surprising that no one has spoken of the cooking show as a "genre", and that largely the topic of Food Entertainment has not been extensively explored by researchers, journalists and writers. It is especially shocking when only 60 years ago Claude Levi Strauss launched an academic revolution through his structural studies of myth, but all of FOOD in the Le Cru et le Cuit (The Raw and the Cooked). Now, resources to compile such research certainly don't exist, but people have yet to connect all the dots. So we're here to try and do that, or at least build some ground for someone else to walk on.

Cooking shows today exhibit the anthropological traits of a great variety of cultural commodities, like coffee, HBO shows, and comic book movies. These experiences can be distilled to a dynamic logic and a semi-concrete history, but the creativity which underlines them follows the same developmental trajectory of any art -- and that's a principle which we stick to: the art of making a cooking show is an art, and the personalities, editors, producers, and writers behind these things should be regarded as artists. Chefs are artists as well, but that's not an argument for us to make.

Where cooking is interesting is the fact that unlike reading, movie-watching, or other art-consumption, it is by every means an essential activity which takes up precedence over others in brute-force, Maslowian terms. But the need to WATCH people cook and eat is something entirely different, but that relationship, that essential connection, underlines the whole thing.

Cooking also has political and corporeal consequences. America currently has some of the worst eating habits out of every nation, and Food Media has played an interesting role in that dynamic. Studies have shown that watching the Food network, in its old form, actually made viewers on average eat WORSE, because again, the stress is on watching. However, with a lot of the new cooking media that has arisen in the last 10 years and the attempts of famous chefs (take David Chang's "Ugly Delicious" as an example") and amateur Youtube all-stars alike to make cooking more accessible and open to everyone, it seems that maybe people really ARE starting to learn and cook more. That possibility has become even more of a reality with quarantine.

It is with this principle that Julia Child began her programming more than 50 years ago; to spread the gospel and knowledge of an ancient art: cooking. And we should always remember that cooking is one of the kindest, most human things we can do to both ourselves and to others.