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On the Line: Format, Cooking and
Competition as Television Values
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.
Key words: cooking programmes, format, television convention, competition
programmes, cultural meaning, foodTV
Could it be...that food is now replacing sex as a ground of identities...?
Elspeth Probyn.
1
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
And that is why we are studying food in the academy...
(we) not only talk about food but talk about talking about food...
Krishnendu Ray.
3
Popular food-themed TV programmes are so pervasive that, in many parts of
the globe, a viewer can watch uninterrupted foodTV for twenty-four hours a
Critical Studies in Television, Volume 8, No. 2 (Summer 2013) © 2013 Manchester University Press
http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/CST.8.2.3
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 history
4
).
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
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 21
advertisements by appliance and food manufacturers.
7
In this sense, food
television’s early pre-history in the United States is strikingly consistent with
the current industry approach to the cooking and lifestyle programmes as
ideal environments for both sponsorship and in-text advertising presence and
product placement.
Food Television Basics: The Cook-Along Convention
Afledgling BBC most likely aired the first food-related programmes in global
TV history when Moira Meighn demonstrated ‘single-ring’cooking in 1936
and the first TV chef, the appropriately French author and restaurateur Xavier
Marcel Boulestin, took to the limited BBC airwaves in 1937.
8
But nationally-
broadcast food television in the United States and United Kingdom would begin
in earnest after the war, ushered—significantly—by two eccentric and rotund
male chefs in 1946: Philip Harben’sCookery (1946) in the Great Britain and
James Beard’sI Love to Eat (1946–47) in the United States.
As media historian Dana Polan recently noted: ‘the idea that the new medium
of television might be particularly suited to intimate yet publicly available
instruction in the arts of the home took hold very quickly.’
9
By the late 1940s,
cooking shows took on much of the same basic instructional style and set of
presentational conventions in Britain and the United States, addressing a
primarily female audience and stressing cooking (as well as the role of television
itself) in assisting the homemaker in the work of nourishing and family-care, as
well as enhancing her ability to successfully cook for guests and community
activities. In the US context in particular, as television emerges from novelty
to approach the status of a common household item, cooking programmes were
also good, economical and proven means to draw women (‘homemakers’) to the
daytime set, establishing the demographically-driven ‘dayparts’programming
that would continue to dominate television well into the twenty-first century.
10
As early as 1949, production and shooting manuals for TV professionals
referenced cooking instructional programming as typical content with a set of
clear aesthetic conventions.
11
Thus, cooking instructional, with their strong asso-
ciation of locating woman in the kitchen, the use of media address for ‘training
in consumption’, and the kitchen’s centrality as the beating heart of the home,
produced the stove-side address that characterised food television for decades to
come.
The rising status of food television for the following half a century largely
mirrored the ascent of consumer-based identities and the economic reconfi-
guration of leisure for the upper middle class. These included not only the
emergence of the restaurant as a focal point of taste and self-presentation but
also the attention to home cooking as entertainment, self-fulfilment, and a mark
of refinement and cultural capital. This fascinating history of the emergence of
‘foodie’culture is outside the scope of this article, but, as Polan notes, the
French-trained home-cook par excellence, Julia Child, played a crucial role in
Critical Studies in Television 8/222
the reinvention of the food instructional programme in accordance with chang-
ing attitudes about the kitchen and the act of cooking—as well, of course, as
the role of television in that changing relationship. For many American food
and TV historians, Julia Child successfully reinvented the cooking instruc-
tional with The French Chef in 1963–73 by demystifying French cuisine to
novice American cooks. Yet, more importantly, she boosted the cookery pro-
gramme’s popularity as a viewing experience through the pure and exuberant
pleasure she communicated about both cooking and eating. Polan further
stresses that Child’s innovation was not only (or mainly) her emphasis on
the corporeal but in the notion of food preparation as fun, an activity enjoy-
able in its own right.
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.
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 23
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
Critical Studies in Television 8/224
online while providing more unique, personality- or concept-driven entertain-
ment on air.
17
But it is noteworthy that the Food Network’s revival of the split
between the domestic daytime kitchen and the professional night-time one not
only mirrors old-time broadcast network’s gendered television day parts but
also, and to a large degree, conforms to television’s reflection of the professional
restaurant world, where male chefs outnumber women nine to one. In television,
as in other corners of the popular imagination, gendered divisions around
cooking remain largely over place and intention: women cook at home for
their family and loved ones, men cook in public, for pay, and mostly for
(adoring) strangers. Food Network’s revised approach to night-time food-
themed entertainment resonates with Charlotte Druckman’s assessment in her
essay ‘Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?’:
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
A Format is Born: On DNA, Lineage and Format Reproduction
It is easy to observe Food Network’s programming shifts simply as the ‘masculi-
nisation’of American food culture, but prime-time foodTV success was more
complicated. The shows that emerged as most successful in the turn towards
night-time programming were not, in the main, those featuring carefree,
swinging rebel males;
19
more radical and startling than the gender shift in food
programming had been the move away from the traditional, instructional format
and towards professionalisation and competition. As monumental as this latter
shift was, its origins are both surprising and eccentric.
The programme that put the Food Network over the edge from a small and
sweet special-interest channel to a pop culture phenomenon was Iron Chef
(Japan/ Ryōri no Tetsujin, 1993–99;US airdates 1999–present). A Japanese chef
competition set in the ‘Kitchen Stadium’where professional chefs, celebrity
tasters, a mystery ingredient and a race against the clock set the standards for
food formats to come. The show’s oddly charming and utterly original blend of
cooking prowess and aggrandising mythology marked it as both a product of
camp and a hybrid genre reinvention. The ‘origins narrative’credit sequence
presented the show as the life-work of its host, an eccentric Japanese gourmand,
known as ‘Chairman Kaga’(Takeshi Kaga), who constructed a massive ‘Kitchen
Stadium’where chefs from around the world would come to challenge one of
Kaga’s resident ‘Iron chefs’(who specialise in Japanese, Chinese, French or
Italian cuisine) to a cooking battle. Each episode featured the Iron chefs’the-
atrical ascension from below the soundstage floor on a hydraulic lift, more
action figure than cooking professional, adapting a static, heroic pose. Each
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 25
battle featured a secret ingredient that would be dramatically revealed by a
flamboyantly-outfitted Chairman Kaga at the opening of each show, prompt-
ing the two competing chefs to a frenzied ingredients-grab, hurried guidance
of their sous-chef teams, and a mad-dash as they improvised and prepared a
four- or five-course menu in front of a live audience—while a portentous
sixty-minute timer counted down. The show would conclude as a panel of
judges (made up of food critics, film and stage actors, musicians, and other
celebrities) tasted each chef’sofferings, provided commentary on each dish,
and finally scored each meal and declared a winner.
The Fuji television production of Iron Chef,Ryōri no Tetsujin, premiered in
Japan in 1993 and was picked up by the Food Network in 1999. The show was
an instant hit, particularly (and to many, completely unexpectedly) with a wide
non-cooking younger demographic, including college students who generically
associated the programme not with gourmet aspirations but with martial art
films, manga, video games and an Asian popular aesthetic just peaking in the
United States at the time.
20
As Mark Gallagher argues, Iron Chef’sperceived foreignness, cultural illegibil-
ity and apparent camp-like exaggeration were at the heart of its US appeal:
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
Critical Studies in Television 8/226
specifically defined challenge, bombastic music, a set time limit, a panel of
judges, and a cast of contestants whose back-story and biographical detail
serves to heighten the stakes and fan the programmes’already heated dra-
matic flame.
The Food Network’s primetime move from the kitchen to Kitchen Stadium
is apt, as it not only signals the move from the domestic to the public and
from private to professional but also, as a foodTV’s format origin, highlights
competition as a fundamental televisual value and illustrates what works as
popular TV.
The format industry is the single largest part of the international television
market, comprising over sixty per cent of all entertainment television world-
wide.
23
The skill competition, the most popular reality format all over the
world, is a set of rules built around a premise (and often sold with a production
book, rights to music, and set design, production help and demographic
information) that is then produced locally. While formats came to international
attention in the late 1990s, with the juggernaut success of the European formats
Big Brother,Survivor and Idol (introduced in the US as American Idol in 2002),
US programmers were slow to grasp the far-flung applications of format logic.
24
In 2000, when Iron Chef first surprised Food Network executives by rapidly
moving from a cult hit to a ratings powerhouse, the only other food competition
format on the US airways was the UK original Masterchef, which aired, quietly
and with little attention, on the non-commercial PBS network.
The timed/creative process/skilled/style-oriented/expert critique engine that
would so typify the most successful formats by the mid-2000s was in its infancy,
with pre-format elements appearing first in 2001 on the premiere cable network
HBO as Project Greenlight (2001, 2003, 2005);
25
in 2002 on the Fox network,
with the premiere of the localised format of Pop Idol,American Idol; in 2003
with the format-originator America’s Next Top Model on the UPN network (the
format would spur countless national iterations); and next on the cable channel
Bravo which, in a bid for survival in 2000, had abandoned its original focus on
the arts and rebranded itself as a pop culture, lifestyle and fashion network. In
2004, in the same year as the Food Network introduced its format iteration of
Iron Chef, Bravo struck gold with Project Runway, a format originator that
shared significant DNA with the Iron Chef engine—in its creative-skilled,
challenge-based and timed competition; host and judges structure; and emphasis
on the final presentation, panel critique and verdict. But the Project Runway
format also owed much to its older European siblings, most significantly in
its move away from the one-offseries structure of the ‘one-on-one battle’of
Iron Chef and towards the season-long series structure. Like its European
predecessors, the programme began with a group of aspiring contestants
(twelve, in this case), and its episode-structure of challenge-and-elimination
would narrow down the field to a final three and then a winner. Bravo’s
entre into the format universe is important here as Top Chef, the most popular
US cooking competition format, would be a direct reapplication of Project
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 27
Runway’s engine (created by the same production company at the network’s
request), merely swapping haute cuisine for high fashion.
Writing in the journal Gastronomica, food sociologist Krishnendu Ray
speculated that the professional chef’s growing status on foodTV and television’s
emphasis on the chef’s labour as creative process with theatrical flair is linked to
public cooking’s‘insecure claims on professionalization’.
26
As he observed,
television (in contrast to other media such as print or radio) is particularly
suited to displaying work and documenting the creative process. In this, design
and cuisine are natural companions.
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
As Ray suggests above, these shows’heart (and this programme-type’s
particular niche) may very well be its forensic examination of the creative
process. But, as the rapid, procreative sequence of the shows that followed
demonstrates, it is imperilled creativity within a competitive, coercive environ-
ment that would be its spine. The Iron Chef America format began its regular
run in 2004, Fox’s US format of Hell’s Kitchen debut in 2005, as did Food
Network’s elimination cook-offThe Next Food Network Star, and PBS’s,
Cooking Under Fire, an unsanctioned precursor to the Top Chef format; Bra-
vo’sTop Chef premiered in 2006 along with Food Network’s dessert-focused
format variation, The Food Network Challenge; Iron Chef’sformat spin-off
The Next Iron Chef premiered on the same network in 2007. This first
wave then spurned a still-multiplying tide of food shows using the basic
skilled-challenge-judgement-elimination engine (see the ‘gluttony’section on my
origins chart).
Repetition and reconfiguration are, of course, constitutive of television, much
more than originality, novelty or sharp deviation. Indeed, television’s survival
depends on the domestic, ritualised predictability that measured and stable
duplication and recombination allow. Innovation within conventions is thus
the primary logic of television itself, producing the format as its most native,
natural and ready-made product. And this logic grows bolder as television
grows more global. As Albert Moran has importantly pointed out, classic
formats are generative and creative precisely because of their restrictive rule-
bound system.
28
Further, they are not only repetitive across programmes—in
terms of their conceptual foundation and set of rule-bound actions and out-
comes—but also internally, as each programme performs the same set of action-
events in tight, regulated recurrence. Such formulation, of course, has no better
fit than the ritualised and repetitive labour of cooking.
Critical Studies in Television 8/228
The Cooking Competitions as Narratives of Labour, Anxiety and
Judgement
Cooking shows are narratives of control and mastery with (relatively) little vio-
lence. As Dana Polan notes, the generic universe of the cook-along show is one
where only one conclusion is possible and it is, inevitably, a happy one; here
the universe is abundant and the objects of the world could never resist the
protagonists control for too long.
29
This structure is radically disrupted in the
cooking competition format: shows like Top Chef or Chopped not only reorder
the programme’s focus to the strictly professional realm of food preparation,
they also reorganise their logic from answer (how to cook this) to question (will
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 29
he succeed?). In this, cooking competition formats depart from the cooking
instructional’s closed-form certainty—where the object under preparation is
pre-determined—to a form of narrative suspense, conflict, humiliation and
failure. In these top-rated competition formats, chefs race around in utter
panic to complete each ‘challenge’under strict time limits, are subjected to
harsh criticism or a degrading dress-down by a panel of judges, and then,
one by one, are dismissed with a gravely intoned catch-phrase (‘Pack up
your knives and go’,‘You have been chopped’, or ‘Take offyour jacket and
leave the kitchen’). Competition cooking shows trade on displacement, confu-
sion and discomfort as important pre-conditions to productivity. As much as
beautiful dishes, skilfully made, they also offer stress, discord and reproach.
The narrative structure of each programme stresses risk and suspense and
the competitive work of encountering the challenge, gathering ingredients and
prepping ‘dishes’, dealing with time constraints and competitors’egos. In terms
of classic narrative structure, these are a series of ‘second act’complications,
leading to the narrative climax in the show’s‘third act’. Most significantly,
however, this climax is not the dish itself. Here too, the format reorganises
the show’s procedural syntax, deferring the climax from the dish’s successful
completion/presentation to its reception/critical evaluation. This final stage,
coming on the heels of the frenzied rush and (more often than not) tears
and meltdowns, visits fresh humiliation on the contestants whose dishes—
and, by clear extension, personal worth—are scrutinised, criticised, and often
rejected by a panel of judges. Here, cooking is far from a means for pleasure or
social sharing, but a strictly regimented, highly individuated, labour-hierarchy
within an economic circuit.
Returning briefly to the historical progression of cooking shows I sketched
above and their largely-gendered classification of female home cook (who cooks
for love) and male public chef (who cooks for refined pleasure), it is noteworthy
to point out that both eschew the definition of cooking as commercial labour.
In the home, it is a labour of love (read: unpaid) while in the restaurant kitchen
(at least those restaurants that merit foodie attention) it is artistic creation—
with the ‘labour’part, performed in the back, on the line, and normally not in
the space of praise or even attention. Top Chef, Chopped,Hell’s Kitchen and
other cooking competitions disrupt and correct this erasure by locating ‘profes-
sional cooking’deeply in the site of labour—sweaty, anxious, painful and risky
—while holding offthe possibility of tantalising art and elevated creation at the
dining end. Characterised as they are by anguish, humiliation and domination,
these shows probe the metaphoric limits of gastro porn: if, as critics often argue,
overexposure to pornography desensitises audiences and creates the demand for
something more extreme, television food culture appears to have moved from
the tame erotica of food-porn into the darker theatre of sado-masochism.
Traditionally, lifestyle television (as all aspirational culture) trades in the fantasy
of the good life: Food Network’s initial appeal was its call for participation, a
friendly and accessible hail for both pleasure and social performance. However,
Critical Studies in Television 8/230
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.
The Critique Economy
In her preface to a collection of literary essays about food and eating, Bonnie
Marranca wonders whether the current preoccupation with food and appetite is,
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
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 31
While appreciating Marranca’s reverence for food’s basal materiality, my
experience of the growing gastronomical reach into ordinary culture has been
precisely in ‘virtual reality’and mediation; much more about interface than
face-to-face. Friends regularly share their meals on Facebook, and critical,
aesthetic, appreciative or derisive engagement with food on blogs, websites
like Chowhound and Grubstreet, or social media sites such as Yelp make up
a daily deluge of virtual meals in words, images and ‘likes’. As Krishna Ray
noted, the fact that gastronomy has emerged into popular consciousness in
the United States has us ‘buying all those cookbooks we never cook from,
watching so much foodTV, reading nonfiction about food, and devouring
restaurant reviews for places we will never visit’.
34
Obviously, foodTV, like
all lifestyle media, is aspirational. But, as Ray’s observation suggests, despite
(because?) its deeply carnal associations, food culture also bears a deep invest-
ment in fantasy, make believe and play.
Like all procedural TV, each food competition follows a strict recipe of
ingredients in a precise order, but importantly, in their rule-bound series of
challenges and their winner-take-all competitive sweep, these formats are
also games. John Dovey argues that game models, playfulness, and video
game influence are increasingly central for thinking about contemporary
media modes and their digital dependencies.
35
As David Marshall asserts,
game culture and the rise of a play aesthetic have not only emerged as an
organising experience in media culture but are crucial to an industry-wide
reconfiguration towards interactivity and intertextual associations across media
products.
36
Marshall’s observation, along with Henry Jenkins’analysis of reality
format’saffinity for product placement and in-text commercial presence
37
is a
snug fit with Top Chef’sostentatious highlighting of product placement, inter-
platform cooperation between websites, magazines, computer games, call-in
contests, and various product brandings. Indeed, the show’s marketing actively
invites viewers to ‘play’at being chefs themselves, not only through Top Chef
video and trivia games but also through ‘chef drag’such as branded chef jackets,
chef pants, aprons and knife kits complete with branded carrying case.
But viewers also play at being experts. In fact, as the programme’s narrative
structure and production cues (music, editing, setting, etc.) all point to the
moment of criticism and judgement as the climatic sequence in each episode,
much of the fan conversation on websites and blogs focus on these judgements
—as they do in other elimination programmes like American Idol. But, of
course, on American Idol, they heard the singing. Top Chef demands a more
complicated negotiation between our own, sub-sensory judgement and a partial
surrender to a surrogate expert palette.
These shows do not teach us how to cook, but they do teach us something:
they instruct audiences in a vocabulary that suggests gastronomical knowledge,
not only for ingredients and techniques (sous vide, Yuzu vinegar, emulsion,
semifreddo or veloutē) but also critical terms of art (flavour profile, plating,
acidic balance or GBD
38
). Expertise, knowledge and mastery of detail only
Critical Studies in Television 8/232
superficially recognised by mere pedestrian interests are, of course, the mark of
any subculture. As recent ethnographic studies of foodie culture illustrate, mas-
tery, expertise, and critical acumen are emphasised much more uniformly than
pleasure, taste or even love of food, within self-described foodie communities.
39
Fannish credentials, in all their permutations (from Star Trek to football),
often involve a kind of one-upmanship of knowledge, mastery and strong
opinion. If such expertise is the coin of the realm, it is easy to understand just
why assessment, judgement and criticism are so highlighted in the mostly digital
realm of foodie culture exchange. We are not, then, in the realm of the mediated
food world where images and words stand in for tasting as experience, but in a
simulation gastro-world, where criticism is prized and has gained its own,
untethered meaning and currency. Foodism’s ascent to popular culture provides
the backdrop and motivation for the current explosion of food-themed formats
that encourages audiences’investment in their own expertise as critics, diners,
foodies, and even wanna-be professional chefs. FoodTV, in turn, feeds back into
a web-powered, gastro-culture and critique-economy where appraisal outranks
delight.
To account for the changing terms of food television and its astounding
popularity, I have argued that we must consider the televisual rules of format
in their broader, more promiscuous incarnation. Format, as essential software
of television, is vital to any analysis of contemporary global media, and format
logic is equally essential to a consideration of food culture as popular culture,
TV competition as both spectacle and value, and the role of repetition and
variation-on-convention within the global TV landscape. As every good chef
knows, repetition and recombination of a basic recipe are the fundamentals of
cooking. They are also the lifeblood of television. However, as I have indicated
through my brief ‘origins’tale’of the cooking competition programme in the
United States, format development (be it franchised, stolen or just ‘inspired’) is
neither natural nor predetermined and is always in conversation with other cul-
tural forces and preoccupations. To wit, yoking our particular moment of food
format popularity to a digitally-manifested culture of aspiration—expressed
through the mastery of critique—further reveals how various pressures of iden-
tity, capital and narrative arrange themselves, in sometime surprising concert, in
that trusty old test kitchen, known as television.
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.
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 33
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.
7Ibid.
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.
Critical Studies in Television 8/234
23 Albert Moran and Michael Keane, ‘Cultural Power in International TV Format
Markets’,Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 20:1, 2006, 71–86.
24 This is likely the result of the US’s notoriously insular television culture at the time
and its long-standing dependence on a global ‘canned’programming trade.
25 The competition, created by Eli Holtzman and produced by film stars Matt Damon
and Ben Affleck, offered aspiring screenwriters and filmmakers the chance of
producing their own film through a series of challenges, while seasoned producers and
directors served as a panel of judges that offered critiques and selected the winner.
26 Ray, ‘Domesticating Cuisine’, 54.
27 Ibid., 58.
28 Albert Moran and Justin Malbon, Understanding Global TV Formats, Intellect, 2006.
29 Polan, Julia Child’s The French Chef, p. 240.
30 Collins, Watching What We Eat, 2009.
31 NBC’s competition show The Next Great Restaurant provides an especially-clear
example of this: the show pitted aspiring, would-be restaurant-chain owners against
each other as they competed for the financial backing of the judges, themselves
restaurant owners and/or chefs. The winner was Jamawn Woods, a struggling cook
and single father from Detroit whose concept restaurant Soul Daddy featured home
cooking with a traditional African-American foundation. Woods’s ascent and prize
(two of his own restaurants, which opened immediately after the show’s airing)
were a testament to the final justice of feel-good TV economy, just as the brutally
swift and final failure of his venture soon after its fan-faired opening was the
devastating real-economy aftermath.
32 Isabelle de Solier, ‘TV Dinners: Culinary Television Education and Distinction’,
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 19:4, 2005, 465–81.
33 Bonnie Marranca (ed.), A Slice of Life, The Overlook Press, 2003, p. 17.
34 Ray, ‘Domesticating Cuisine’, 56.
35 Jon Dovey, ‘It’s Only a Gameshow’, in Ernest Mathijs and Janet Jones (eds), Big
Brother International: Formats, Critics and Publics, Wallflower Press, 2004, pp. 232–49.
36 David P. Marshall, ‘The New Intertextual Commodity’, in Dan Harries (ed.), The
New Media Book, BFI, 2002, pp. 69–81.
37 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, New York University Press, 2006.
38 Golden, Brown and Delicious.
39 Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann, Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the
Gourmet Foodscape,Routledge,2009;IsabelladeSolier,‘Liquid Nitrogen Pistachios:
Molecular Gastronomy, elBulli and Foodies’,European Journal of Cultural Studies,13:2,
2010, 155–70; and Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston and Shayon Baumann, ‘Caring About
Food: Redoing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen’,Gender & Society,24:5,2010,591–615.
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.
On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition 35
