The Case Against Cooking Shows

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman has an excellent column today about the downside of televised cooking shows.

When you watch most celebrity chefs go to work on TV it is a) baffling and intimidating, and b) a charade. Baffling and intimidating because nearly every ingredient is usually prepared in advance, and what isn’t is selected so that the chef can show off his (almost never “her”) knife skills, which are bound to intimidate nearly all of us who can never aspire (and why would we, really?) to chopping an onion with our eyes closed; his ability to make food fly in the air while cooking it; and/or his skill at presentation, which has absolutely nothing to do with taste. A charade because it’s all taped, and therefore not only doesn’t take place in real time but doesn’t even give a sense of what “real time” might be.

He goes on to describe a hilarious snafu involving flaming meat during a taped Food Network event. But home viewers never saw a thing. Read the full post on Mark’s Bitten blog, “TV Cooking vs. Real Cooking”



Source: well.blogs.nytimes.com