Television, Explained
So I’m not sure if Michael Pollan’s “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” is supposed to be a movie review, but it’s definitely worth reading if you think about what you eat. I really like this line:
The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit. It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else.
Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Anyway, enjoy the blog, and please comment!
On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else.
This is a testable hypothesis, and the evidence at hand is a bit more mixed than you might think. On the one hand, sure, plenty of food-as-spectacle shows, including several that I enjoy regularly (No Reservations, passim). On the other hand: “Good Eats” is one of the Food Network’s most consistently high-rated shows, and it’s nothing but an exhortion to get up off the couch for an hour and cook.
Whenever I watch, say, Rachael Ray, I am motivated to turn off the TV. Does that count?
On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else.
When I was growing up in the UK there was a children’s program called Why Don’t You?, which was short for “Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead?” This was of course a deliberately ironic title but the premiss of the program (which was generally on in the morning on weekends and during school holidays) was to get kids to NOT watch TV all day. It was, of course, on a public TV channel rather than a commercial one.
I’m a big fan of the Pollan / Ruhlman / McGee axis, and I loved the article, although it was interesting to read several feminist critiques of some of his arguments ( http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/you_want_more_cooking_then_you_want_more_feminism/ ; http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/08/01/pollan_on_child/index.html) He suffers from the burden that Bob Putnam did when he linked the decline in social capital to entry of women into the workforce. It is both true and balanced in a complex network of the [largely positive, I would argue] reshuffling of American society.
Re: Food TV
Alton Brown does exort people to cook, but he also follows a narrative style that encourages the viewer to watch the show, splicing his cute food science/history vignettes inbetween the instructional portions.
For those who haven’t seen it, celeb chef enfant terrible Anthony Bourdain has a delicious rant about current celeb chefs and their failure to cook: http://blog.ruhlman.com/ruhlmancom/2007/02/guest_blogging_.html [link no longer works]
As far as public television cooking shows, there are still more than a few that manage to overwhelm the viewer and are more about spectacle than cookery. Yan Can Cook, but his knife skills and familiarity with the intricacies of the wok do not inspire me to be as adventurous as the lab-coats-and-toques crowd on America’s Test Kitchen.
[Adam: fixed links]
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