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On The Line: Format, Cooking and Competition As Television Values
On The Line: Format, Cooking and Competition As Television Values
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Tasha Oren
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Tasha Oren
Abstract
Through an in-depth look at the history of US food television, this essay
elucidates the extent to which contemporary television relies on the structural
(and narrative) logic of the format. Focusing on contemporary food television’s
radical evolution with the introduction of competition programmes and formats,
the essay accounts for the move away from female-centred, domestic ‘How-to’
cooking programmes in favour of restaurant-set competition shows that high-
light professional, high-stakes performance, criticism, stress, and risk. This shift
from the aspirational aesthetics of ‘Gastro Porn’ to the psychological endurance
of what I (albeit playfully) term ‘Culinary S&M’ illustrates how contemporary
cooking competition programmes in the multi-platform media marketplace
help re-align cultural meanings of food, pleasure, taste, identity, labour and
consumption.
There’s almost nothing you can do on television you can’t do with a food angle.
Reese Schonfeld, founder of the Food Network.2
Critical Studies in Television, Volume 8, No. 2 (Summer 2013) © 2013 Manchester University Press
http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/CST.8.2.3
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 21
day, everyday. In charting the changes (and rising fortunes) of food program-
ming, what is most striking is not the sheer, recent ubiquity of program-
ming about cooking and eating, or how such programming feeds the current
cultural mainstreaming of ‘foodism’ (particularly in the United States, my focus
in this article). What is most remarkable is the radical shift in tone, genre, and
narrative arc that global food programming has undergone in the recent past,
from the cooking instructional genre to the globally popular night-time cook-
ing-elimination competition programme. For the past decade, cooking competi-
tions have dominated worldwide: in the US, programmes like The Next Iron
Chef (2007, 2009–12), Top Chef (2006–present), Chopped (2009–present), Hell’s
Kitchen (2005–present) and Masterchef (2010–present) are routine rating bo-
nanzas, reflecting a global appetite for this genre convention (the season 2 fi-
nale of the Australian Masterchef, on 25 July 2012, for example, broke the
country’s record as the most watched non-sporting broadcast in history4).
In what follows, I would like to offer a condensed explanation for how and
why this programming shift occurred—primarily within the US context—and
how we might read it as meaningful and culturally significant. In this, I highlight
the structural and, most importantly, narrative centrality of format as a televisual
building block. Much of recent writings on formats have stressed their status as
an economic unit and global commodity. As I have argued elsewhere, the
format’s peripatetic nature and its role in the global network of industry
standards, aesthetic conventions and audience expectation is crucial to under-
standing contemporary television.5 However, in this essay, I would like to
highlight format not in its global, legal or economic sense, but as a television
convention. Here, format is not a set of rules or properties that are licensed
from the format owner to various local producers (although, of course, many
programmes are), but part of a broader ‘format-centric logic’ that imbues its
production and viewing context. As I will show, the case of food television is a
particularly instructive vantage point from which to observe how this format
logic works, how TV conventions re-align and rearrange themselves around
food, how specific format types develop—both through global exchange and
local example—to gain legibility over time, and how conventions of format
adapt and reform with changing cultural values.
For years, food television meant simply ‘cooking instruction’ and had a stable
form, a domestic, kitchen-like set that featured a familiar instructor who
addressed the viewer directly while demonstrating the preparation of a particular
dish. Such programming relied on a very specific premise, the ‘cook along’
pretence that the viewer (presumed female) was an apprenticing home cook.
Indeed, this programme genre was older than television itself and, in the
United States, was imported from its predecessor on commercial radio.6 US
broadcasting’s commercial foundation was also crucial in the structure of such
programmes, tailor-made, as they were, for advertising and product placement.
In her historical account of cooking programmes, Susan Collins asserts that
radio cookery programmes in the early 1920s were literally a by-product of
22 Critical Studies in Television 8/2
Fun, indeed, may be the most recurrent word on The French Chef. Given what so
much instructional television had been like before she came on the scene, a
commitment to fun like the one she demonstrated could also make all the difference
for the medium’s promise as popular pedagogy.12
Indeed, Child is largely credited with igniting an interest in food and its
media presentation that launched a wave of new cooking and food-related
programmes, first on the public, non-commercial television network PBS
(which aired and then adopted the first ‘proper’ food format, the British
Masterchef) (1990–present) and then on the twenty-four-hour food-themed
cable channel, the Food Network. By the summer of 2009, as Nora Ephron’s
love letter to Julia Child, Julie and Julia, enjoyed warm reviews and surpris-
ingly strong ticket sales, food-related programmes on American network and
cable channels were experiencing unprecedented success—and a pattern of
growth that remains unabated as I write. However, the shows garnering all
those ratings were not updates on Child’s happy home cook or the cooking
instructional that dominated television for the past half a century. Instead,
through formats like Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen, Masterchef and many others,
popular food television had become (and remains) a tense and sweaty affair,
featuring contestants, impossible assignments, rushed preparations, costly
mistakes, and withering assessments.
But how did these format-based, competition shows come to dominate food
television? Formats, as I suggested elsewhere, are seemingly paradoxical in that
they are as old as TV itself and yet have come to typify the face of our
contemporary global media landscape.13 It is easy to assume that foodTV, too,
has simply succumbed to the formidable logics of format programming, and
repetition of success, in much the same way as the rest of global television. Such
an explanation may not be wrong but proffers little insight into how (and why)
this process occurred, or its cultural significance. In what follows, I would like to
offer just such an explanation, one that takes up the food competition as an
instructive example of global-televisual-exchange, industry strategy and algorith-
mic logic.
24 Critical Studies in Television 8/2
The Food Network: On Strategic Stumbles and the Birth of the Cooking
Format
Programming changes in the US-based channel Food Network are as good a
place as any to start: In fact, it is safe to say that one central theme in the two-
decade history of the Food Network is its various, and increasingly successful,
attempts to broaden viewership from home cooks to food lovers and from older
women to younger men.
In the first decade since its establishment in 1993, the Food Network has
relied primarily on the how-to, in-kitchen instructional convention. Shot on a
cosy set, resembling a domestic kitchen, the programmes were hosted by a
steady constellation of presenters who, with an eye-level mostly-stationary
camera, engaged audiences directly (addressing them as ‘you’) with a relaxed
manner and a warm, friendly patter—a format that channelled Child’s likability
and intimidation-free style. As the status of food as a sanctioned mainstream
pursuit and a marker of class mobility grew in the late 1990s, commentators
pointed to an accompanying shift in food media: the conspicuous move towards
higher production values within the programmes (including soft focus close-ups
of sumptuous ingredients), an inclusion of a stylish revision of the overall look
of the channel and brand (programming was punctuated by a common ‘stamp’,
a slow-motion sequence that featured an enticingly ripe and glistening cherry
falling languidly through a spray of water into an awaiting glass bowl), and
a cohort of younger, attractive presenters for whom food preparation was not
only a leisure activity but an explicitly sensual bodily pleasure (the British host
and cookbook author Nigella Lawson epitomises this shift). This stance reflected
the network’s reallocation of focus from an audience of cooking enthusiasts to
those who loved to eat—a shift concurrent with a new cultural ubiquity of
so-called ‘gastro-porn’14 and a general hunger to look at, document and describe
food (particularly, much like porn, to look and read about the kind of food one
is unlikely to actually make, or eat).15
Sensual and social aspects of cooking, as much, or even more, than eating,
were a large part of Food Network’s strategy to attract viewers in the late 1990s
and early 2000s. However, another shift quickly followed. By the mid 2000s, the
Food Network had developed a new programming strategy that de-emphasised
cooking how-to altogether by moving actual cooking shows—programmes in
which largely female on-air talent prepared meals in a domestic kitchen setting
—to a morning segment known as ‘in the kitchen’. The rating-focused prime-
time period took a radical turn towards male hosts identified as professional
chefs (decidedly not home cooks), out in the social world, primarily restaurants,
diners, food carts, cook offs or BBQs, (not in domestic settings), and a sudden
all-consuming, full-throttle preoccupation with such ‘masculine’ fare as pork
belly, burgers, beer and BBQ.16
Some industry insiders suggest that the follow-the-recipe instructional is
outmoded since cross-platform synergy enables channels to feature recipes
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 25
In theory, we’ve come a long way from the notion that a woman’s place is in the
domestic kitchen, and that the only kitchen appropriate for a man is the profes-
sional one. But in practice, things can be pared down to the following equation:
woman: man as cook: chef.18
As with many international media texts that find marginal audiences in the west,
the necessity of cultural decoding—and the limit of that decoding, the text’s very
illegibility—provides a source of engagement and interaction.21
The Japanese show reached record rating heights in the summer of 2000,
when the ‘New York Battle’ pitted the stern Japanese Iron Chef Masaharu Mor-
imoto against the cocky American Bobby Flay—who was vanquished and then
scolded by Morimoto after the American chef jumped feet-first onto his cutting
board at the battle’s end.22 The show’s, and particularly this episode’s, popular-
ity produced two rematch specials the following summer; when those proved
equally successful, the Iron Chef format was launched. It appeared first, in 2001,
as Iron Chef USA by the UPN network (set in Las Vegas and starring America’s
icon of self-knowing parody, Star Trek’s [1966–69] William Shatner) and then,
with a more stable and long-term success by the Food Network itself, as Iron
Chef America in 2004. In a move instructive to any study of formats, the latter
production largely avoided the self-parodic or ironic wink, hitting a tone
designed to resonate closely with Fuji TV’s originating format’s mix of over-
the-top pomp, intense competition and display of cooking mastery. Unusually
for the format’s practice, the localised US version also sought to maintain the
show’s Japanese origins within its narrative envelope; producers first cast mar-
tial arts star Mark Dacascos to host as Chairman Kaga’s nephew—a role he
continued on the Australian version of the format, Iron Chef Australia (2009–
present)—and the format quickly developed to refine and fix the basic DNA of
the cooking competition convention. These included a larger-than-life host, a
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 27
In fact, cuisine has a lot in common with haute couture. Cuisine happens when
food enters the fashion cycle, where its fluctuations are described, debated,
contested, predicted, and awaited in magazines, on television, on the Web. Couture
happens when clothing abandons the realm of traditional practice and enters the
sphere of conscious change, which brings with it obsession, waste, and
playfulness.27
current top-rated food shows trade not in this affable call for collective foodie
friendliness but rather in the cold, harsh and often stinging atmosphere of the
professional kitchen and a critical appraisal. As I have argued thus far, the
emphasis of popular foodies television has shifted from the home to the res-
taurant, from the friendly to frenzied, and most importantly, from cooking to
critique. But, how are the vicarious pleasures of eating replaced with the simu-
lated authority of judgement?
Or, asked differently: If much of the appeal of traditional lifestyle television,
especially cook-along programmes, is in its suggestion, encouragement and
instruction of cultural mobility through aspirational consumption, what is the
promise of a show like Top Chef?
In her account of the Food Network history, Kathleen Collins suggests that
its success trades on a baby boomer’s ethic of self-improvement as leisure and a
work-as-play ethos.30 Most competition formats concentrate, compound and
flip this formula as restaurateurs fight to keep their business, ‘Iron chefs’ push
themselves to gladiatorial heights to keep their reputations, and ordinary chefs
race to secure ingredients, keep the sauce from separating, the meat from
overcooking, and the judges from sending them home, all playing the game of
economic survival.31
Writing about the cultural function of cooking shows, sociologist and food
scholar Isabelle de Solier argues that cooking shows provide their audiences not
only with practical cookery skills but also with the taste knowledge of ideological
food preferences. Accumulating these interconnected knowledges is a form of
accumulating cultural capital. Watching cooking shows, she concludes, can be
understood as productive leisure, that—following Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation
about class/taste formations—has viewers investing their time in acquisition
work for cultural capital in the form of social distinction and competence.32
While food competitions do not instruct viewers on how to cook directly, I
suggest that they do engage viewers in two interrelated systems of knowledge
acquisition: that of taste hierarchies and that of judgement and critical expres-
sion. So far, I have charted several complimentary media and culture shifts in
presentations of food and cooking. I end with suggesting that food competitions
and their popularity provide a contemporary example of yet another adjustment
in our relationship with media and food as popular culture.
as much about spiritual hunger as self gratification. The experience at table offers
one of the few realms of privacy and intimacy in a culture of increasingly vulgarized
public obsessions. It honors . . .face-to-face, not interface. Sharing a meal is a
hands-on experience, not a virtual reality.33
32 Critical Studies in Television 8/2
Notes
1 Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentity, Routledge, 2000.
2 Quoted in Cheri Ketchum, ‘The Essence of Cooking Shows: How the Food Network
Constructs Consumer Fantasies’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 29, 2005, 217.
3 Krishnendu Ray, ‘Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American’,
Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, 7:1, 2007, 50–63.
4 ‘Ratings: 1 in 4 watch MasterChef finale’, The Spy Report (Media Spy), July 2010.
34 Critical Studies in Television 8/2
5 Tasha Oren, ‘Reiterational Texts and the Global Imagination: TV Strikes Back’, in
Tasha Oren and Sharon Shahaf (eds), Global Formats: Understanding Television
Across Borders, Routledge, 2011, pp. 366–381.
6 Kathleen Collins, Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking
Shows, Continuum, 2009.
7 Ibid.
8 Stephen Mennell (ed.), All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and
France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Blackwell, 1995.
9 Dana Polan, Julia Child’s The French Chef, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 44.
10 Marsha Cassidy, What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s,
University of Texas Press, 2005.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 34.
13 Oren, ‘Reiterational Texts and the Global Imagination’, 2012.
14 The term ‘Gastro Porn’ or ‘Food Porn’ entered popular parlance in the early
nineties in the US. In its popular usage, it connotes, not so much a direct allusion to
sex but rather to the growing aesthetic emphasis on food as spectacle, both on
television and in print media, as well as its power to induce a bodily response and
craving. While various critics had pointed to the use of porn film conventions in
cooking shows (see end note 15 in this article for an example) common
understandings of the term—as well as more recent iterations such as ‘real-estate
porn’ and ‘organization porn’—refer self-consciously to presentation and coveting.
My use of the term here, as with my playful coinage of ‘Culinary S&M’, does not
propose a direct linkage or parallel to pornography or even sexuality. While outside
the scope of this paper, I would caution against the narrowing equation of
sensuality and sexuality.
15 Fred Kaufman’s widely cited essay, ‘Debbie does Salad: The Food Network at the
Frontier of Pornography’ (in Harper’s Magazine, October 2005 issue, pp. 55–60), for
example, argues that production technique and food presentation styles of the
predominantly female on-air talent of the Food Network deliberately employed the
style, generic conventions, and technique of pornography to entice audiences.
16 Tasha Oren, ‘The Bloodsport of Cooking’, in Nishime Dave and Tasha Oren (eds),
Crossroads: Asian American Studies and Popular Culture, New York University
Press, forthcoming.
17 Allen Salkin, ‘Newcomer to Food Television Tries for a Little Grit’, New York
Times, 20 April 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/dining/21network.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=0, accessed 19 April 2013.
18 Charlotte Druckman, ‘Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?’ Gastronomica: The
Journal of Food and Culture, 10:1, 2010, 24-31.
19 The ‘Bad Ass’ chef image that emerged in early efforts by Anthony Bourdain (A Cook’s
Tour), Guy Fieri (Guy’s Big Bite) and Bobby Flay (Grillin and Chillin or Throwdown!).
20 Chris Sherman, ‘The Gong Show’, St. Petersburgh Times, 8 June 2000, p. 1.
21 Mark Gallagher, ‘What’s so Funny about Iron Chef’, Journal of Popular Film and
Television, 31:4, 2004, 180.
22 James Norton, ‘WWF Meets Haute Cuisine on “Iron Chef”’, Christian Science
Monitor, 3 October 2001, http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1003/p16s1-lifo.html,
accessed 19 April 2013.
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 35
Tasha Oren is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies and heads the
Media, Cinema and Digital Studies Programme at the University of Wisconsin
—Milwaukee. She is the author of Demon in the Box: Jews, Arabs, Politics and
Culture (2005) and numerous articles and chapters on film, television, technol-
ogy and food. She is the co-editor of East Main Street: Asian American Popular
Culture (2005), Global Currents: Media and Technology Now (2004), Global
Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders (2011) and a forthcoming
collection on Asian–American media culture.