Pursuits: Food is the new sex

If you have seen the Julia Child movie in which Meryl Streep so brilliantly played the gigantic American foodie

who not only popularized French food in the US but also more or less invented the TV cooking show, then you'll have some idea of how much things have changed in the food TV world.

 

   In the old days, food TV was daytime programming, cheaply made (cookery shows are among the cheapest of all TV shows to produce), and directed mainly at housewives. The idea was simple: don't be intimidated by a fancy dish, we can show you how easy it is to cook this at home.

 

   I have fond memories of some of those shows. There used to be one called The Galloping Gourmet hosted by a man called Graham Kerr. In the UK, the star TV cook was Delia Smith. And in India, the food TV genre was dominated and created by the man who still remains its biggest star: Sanjeev Kapoor. To have some idea of Sanjeev's popularity, you only have to travel abroad with him. Non-resident Asians (Indians and Pakistanis alike) from the Gulf, from South East Asia, and even from the US, treat him like a rock star and swear by his recipes.

 

   It is a funny thing but food programming on TV only took off when networks dumped the cookery show. At first, they still believed that they had a mission to teach people how to cook. So though Madhur Jaffrey travelled around the sub-continent visiting picturesque locales and talking to interesting people, she also found time to include a few cooking demos, intended to assist recipe hunters. Keith Floyd did much the same sort of thing, only he was a lot drunker than Madhur Jaffrey. Soon the cooking show set in an exotic locale (Rick Stein visits France, Kylie Kwong goes back to China, Bobby Chinn learns about Asian street food etc.) replaced the boring old cookery demo set in a studio kitchen. It cost much more to make. But it drew larger audiences.

 

   That kind of show still survives, flourishes even. Famous chefs still feel obliged to travel the world demonstrating dishes. Every year Gordon Ramsay visits a new country (India, Malaysia etc.), potters around with that country's cuisine, challenges the local chef and then declares that he can do Indian food better than any Indian chef, Malay food better than any native Malay etc. Eventually he even publishes a cook book based on his recipes. (Why would anybody who wants to cook say, Indian food, bother with a recipe by Gordon Ramsay? The world is full of mysteries.)

 

   But the cookery-show-cum- travelogue format has been edged out by newer formats. Around two decades ago, America's Food Network discovered that even people who never cooked in their lives went to restaurants. So the great leveller was not the home kitchen. It was the professional kitchen. People wanted to know what life was like behind the pass. And the men who made the food suddenly became superstars as chefs sprang out from behind their stoves and strode the studio floor.

 

"As long as there is a market for restaurants, chefs will remain bigger stars than Hulk Hogan ever was in his heyday."

   This revolution has many fathers. The publication of Kitchen Confidential (which became a short-lived fictional TV show with a young Bradley Cooper in the lead) by Anthony Bourdain popularized the cult of the chef. Bourdain, a chef at a relatively obscure New York restaurant (Les Halles) quickly worked out that his real skill was not in cooking in front of the camera but in telling stories about food and great chefs.

 

   Japanese TV took the idea of the cookery competition away from the realm of home cooking and into the world of chefs. On the Japanese Iron Chef, chefs who specialized in different cuisines battled each other with skills that no home cook could ever hope to emulate.
 
 

   Then, as the reality TV boom took off, cooking shows on TV became about the real world. Gordon Ramsay went to unsuccessful restaurants and told their chefs and owners how to turn things around. The original Masterchef, a British TV show hosted by Lloyd Grossman had been low-key, daytime TV. But now with budgets boosted by a factor of ten new versions of the Masterchef franchise turned up all over the world, focusing as much on the tension within the competition and the rivalries of the contestants and on restaurant style cooking (and in the case of the Australian version, with many world famous chefs as guest judges), all shot in high gloss.

 

   Another show, Top Chef, persuaded some of America's best-known chefs to compete against each other. In Britain, The Great British Menu also featured some of that country's best chefs. Now it was no longer about learning to cook. It was about seeing chefs as gladiators locked in combat.

 

   The new food TV has still to lose its appeal. Take the case of Gordon Ramsay, widely regarded by restaurant critics as a chef whose career is in the decline as his restaurants either fold up or get bad reviews. Ramsay does not care. He is such a big star in America and many other parts of the world that one estimate of his earnings last year alone put them at $ 50 million. With that kind of money coming in, why bother to please every punter who wanders into your restaurant?

 

   Why does the new style of food TV work? Everybody has their own theories but mine is that food is the new sex and that the food shows are gastro-porn. People are turned on by fancy food and by everything that goes with it. Twenty years ago, a restaurant in Arizona turned away Roger Verge, a Michelin three-star chef from France who was staying at the hotel to cook a charity dinner on the grounds that the help was not allowed to mix with customers! Today, any remotely famous chef would be treated like a movie star --- if he has appeared on TV.

 

   Can it last? I'm not sure. About a decade ago when professional wrestling had its big resurgence and Hulk Hogan was among the most famous TV stars on the planet, people thought the wresting boom would never go bust. But it did collapse.

 

   So will food TV follow the same pattern? Logic says it should. But my guess is it will take decades to collapse. As long as there is a market for restaurants, chefs will remain bigger stars than Hulk Hogan ever was in his heyday. And as for gastro-porn, well however much you and I may disapprove of pornography, who can deny that it is hard to eradicate?