The Joy of Cooking?

I used to enjoy the food channel, but it seems to me they have done everything they can to remove the joy from cooking. You will recall that it was primarily Julia Child who started cooking on TV, an enterprise that has now grown by leaps and bounds. Not for the better, I think.

Julia Child was enormously successful when she first brought French Cooking to the U.S., partly because of her personality and partly because people, at least many people, were ready to start cooking again after years of being told it was a hassle and they should use canned and instant foods and so on. Child wanted to bring authentic French cooking to American Housewives. This then spawned other cooking shows like Mario Batali, Emeril Lagassi, and by now many, many more. Most of these shows, when they began, actually focused on cooking, and teaching people how to cook. I loved them. They were educational and taught a great deal, not only about how to cook, but where food came from, how it was raised, and so on. We learned about Italy, Spain, India, and many other countries when their cuisine was featured on one show or another. It was great.

But like most everything on TV it changed from basic cooking shows to entertainment, and in the process I believe it did, indeed, remove any joy from cooking. Many of these shows now, especially Emeril Live, degenerated into mostly entertainment, with the Emeril Live band, and so on, where the actual cooking became merely an excuse to make jokes and set the stage for the entertainment. One other development I believe has contributed to removing the joy (at least for me) are the contests. Rather than just teaching us how to cook and passing on other useful information, now many of these shows are contests in which people (cooks of various kinds) compete for prizes, often money. Iron Chef America is perhaps the most important example, where guest chefs come in and compete in cooking supposedly “secret” ingredients to see if they can best the staff of five “Iron Chefs.” They have only a limited time in which to cook. This, too, is mostly entertainment. I’m quite sure the secret ingredient is not really a secret, the show features “judges” (who seem to be picked rather haphazardly) and the five courses required are rated on scales. There is a certain amount of just plain “hoke” involved with (for reasons I cannot comprehend) a gymnastic host, a clever spokesman and an false aura of drama and suspense.

There are other shows, less elaborate, but as competitive, or even more competitive. One of these went on for weeks to pick a chef who would become the fifth Iron Chef. Another competition that just finished last week was to pick someone who would be given their own cooking show. These brought together a number of individuals who competed with each other on a weekly basis to see who would ultimately win. As these were truly competitions there were, of course, hurt feelings, disappointments, sometimes a bit of cheating, all interspersed with comments about the contestants lives and so on. The contestants were universally serious about it and there was little joy to be found, except perhaps for the winner. Now there are competitions for baking the best cake, producing the best three course meal, the best desserts, the best ribs, steaks, hamburgers, chili, whatever. This is a far cry from Child’s attempt to bring French cooking to America.

Not only has the idea of fine cooking been abandoned but now the shows on the cooking channel feature “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives,” where every kind of abomination is served up to be greedily gulped down by the host who seems delighted with everything, no matter how unhealthy or fattening or whatever. There are other shows that feature how candy is made, potato chips, and just about everything that can be eaten by a public devoted to sugar and fat.
So on the one hand there are those who took Julia Child seriously and want to improve American cuisine (or at least did when they began), and on the other hand those who have basically abandoned the quest for better cuisine and just feature whatever foodstuffs they think Americans want to eat. There is a growing “slow food” movement, dedicated to taking food and cooking seriously, as do the French and Italians, for example. And there are those who are asking people to consider carefully where their food is coming from, how healthy or unhealthy it is, and so on. But there are also those who choose to ignore fine food entirely and just pander to the gluttony of the fast food business. In any case, it seems to me that the whole idea of cooking and enjoying fine food is being challenged and corrupted by those whose interest is in selling us addictive fast foods based primarily on corn syrup, fat, and sugar (they know what Americans like and want to continue serving it to us). The result of all this I think has been to remove whatever joy there once was in food and cooking, either by promoting fast foods on the one hand, or on the other hand, causing us unnecessary worry and anxiety over the source of our food supply. And this without even mentioning those whose very being seems to revolve around making us feel guilty about eating at all, Vegans, PETA, and the burgeoning diet industry. In spite of all this I know at least two people who still find real joy in their food. Perhaps there is still hope in a culture that features hot dog and pie eating contests and revels in all-you-can eat restaurants.