SAGE McLAUGHLIN WRITES:

Eric writes in the entry on feminism and cooking that, “I am noticing a lot of cooking-type reality shows…I wonder how Hollywood turned meal preparation into a gladiatorial competition.” As a fan of cooking shows (though not the “reality” versions in which loud-mouthed, vulgar chefs abusively deride younger, less experienced ones), I used to wonder the same thing. But it’s not so complicated, really. The entertainment industry is now, much as it has always been, in the “dream” business. Selling visions of people’s dreams back to them is what television has been about for quite some time now, and even the element of competition is not so new, with game shows being one of the oldest and most successful kinds of programming. Look around at the prime time competition shows today and what do you see?

You see The Biggest Loser, a show about a competition in which people get to become rich and famous while losing lots of weight. Whoever thought of this wildly popular show—which has now spawned a line of books, food, videos, clothing, etc.—understands America better than most of us would care to admit. You see American Idol, a horrifying show about achieving fame and riches as an entertainer, after passing through a gauntlet of abuse, public shaming, and humiliation. You also saw, during the housing boom, an explosion of shows about domesticity and home improvement, which was a clear reflection of the fact that home ownership had become the essence of the American dream, and of course that people (especially the women who were those shows’ principal viewership) yearn desperately for orderly, beautiful domestic setting that is denied them by the demands of modern life. I notice that the end products of these shows were not often very beautiful or accessible, but weird and alienating minimalist design work. Which brings us to the cooking shows.

You now see an endless parade of cooking shows, many of them competitions but many of them merely instructional (there must be half a dozen shows about cooking “a great meal” in under 30 minutes, which as Laura said earlier, is almost an impossibility). Again, the proliferation of these shows, for which there is such demand that even the 24-hour Food Network cannot satiate it, speaks to a deep unfulfilled longing. It speaks to the plain fact that most people have no idea what goes on in a normal kitchen anymore. Americans literally sit and stare in wonder at the sight of a woman cutting a few vegetables, covering them in oil and garlic, stir frying them, and mixing them with pasta. Nevertheless, the most popular cooking shows involve elaborate challenges and huge prizes, reinforcing the idea that cooking is a strange and esoteric art. (Of course, they also reinforce the idea that conflict is at the heart of everything and that anything worth doing involves doing it at another person’s expense.)

In any event, I’m struck not so much by the proliferation of “reality” TV or gladiatorial contests—this is an entirely pagan age, and an ever-more-cruel one. What I find more interesting is the subjects of these competitions, which are not dangerous or grand, but include things like ordinary good health, decorating one’s home, and cooking decent food. These are goods that are no longer common, to borrow from the masthead here. An altogether inhuman state of affairs.

                                     — Comments —

Marcy writes:

On the subject of competitive cooking shows, consider this from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:

You can get a large audience together for a striptease act–that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

One critic said that if he found a country in which such strip-tease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same way, before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis of ‘starvation’ the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.

I wonder if he ever thought, in the 1940s, that his hypothetical situation would one day come true. 

Eric writes:

Well, I think you have figured out what Martha Stewart offers: a purchased, synthetic home life full of rustic Americana. Notice that the purveyors of pop culture are full of contempt for her.

Alongside the cooking shows are the work shows (some of them double as cooking shows). Many of them revolve around the theme of work-as-ordeal or work-as-dangerous-challenge, and they are aimed clearly at men. The “ordeal” shows include Iron Chef, America’s Worst Jobs, and many other imitators. The “challenge” shows include Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers, and arguably anything at all about war.

These feed another modern hunger, and that is the hunger for meaningful and engaging work. The assembly line and the modern workplace are a pit of alienation and boredom, and these shows feed a longing for work that matters. The “ordeal” shows feed a uniquely male need to undergo passage by a trial of fire, which in it’s modern form is an escapism fueled by a desire to escape one’s own meaningless existence by passing through the flames.

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