The Changing Face of Food TV

According to author and general truth-speaker Douglas Adams, the world is normal when you’re born. Everything that's invented between you turning 15 and 35 is new and exciting, and anything that comes along after that time is against the natural order of things. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author wasn’t talking about TV chefs (as far as we know), but he may as well have been.

A young, and in some instances, untrained digital guard has, over the last decade or so, revolutionised what we expect from food on screen. They make cooler, shorter, more direct cooking shows that are broadcast online. Your average TV viewer might not necessarily 'get' them, but legions of online fans do. Basically, the old landscape of cookery shows has been devoured by a newer model. Whether this is good or not may boil down to your age, but one thing's hard to deny – things have changed a lot in the last few years.

This revolution is partly down to time, timing and usefulness. Our attention spans have never been shorter, and there has never been so much to watch across hundreds of TV channels and millions of websites, not to mention the never-ending visual buffet that is social media. At the same time, we've never been busier – probably because we have so much stuff to watch. So who wants a 30-minute cooking lesson, or to spend ten minutes learning how to make something out of bits already in the fridge?

The origins of Food TV

Life was very different back in the 1940s when our first proper TV epicure was introduced. God only knows what that man, Philip Harben, with his staunch Britishness, would have to say about someone like Matty Matheson, the Toronto chef and star of VICE's food video channel Munchies. One of the new breed’s archetypal players, Matheson's lack of RP might be balanced out by his talent and flair for 'kitchen stuff', but we're not sure how Matty's tattoos would go down on Harben's cunningly-titled show Cookery.

Although refined over the years, Harben’s formality set a blueprint for food on TV that has hardly changed since. Professional foodies as expert hosts and tutors, audience doubling up as students, television’s staged atmosphere putting distance between the two. We may learn their traits – Gordon's the angry one, Heston is the experimenter, Hugh partakes in earthy pursuits, and Nigella has a highly suggestive nature – but we never really get to 'know' them. Even Jamie ‘Open Book’ Oliver, whose breakthrough television show The Naked Chef was arguably a precursor to the ‘online approach’, isn’t someone we feel would ever really be our friend.

Things are different for the contemporary crop. Matheson invites us into his home and life on a regular basis, or at least the parts he wants us to see. Elsewhere, Sorted Food’s ‘four lads in a kitchen’ claim over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers with a heart-on-the-sleeve stance. They are not restaurateurs or chefs, and it’s no secret that only one of the quartet has any previous culinary experience at all. They could easily be us; we could be peers. For want of a better word, it’s more 'real', or at least we perceive that to be the case.

Vegan Black Metal Chef & some of the internet's oddest chefs

Bitchin’ Kitchen’s Nadia G takes the idea further. The Canadian comedian specialises in pairing recipes with life’s big events; post one-night stand breakfasts, the perfect dinner for break-ups. In doing so she alludes to having these experiences herself, rather than living a hermetically-sealed 'on telly' existence. She becomes almost three-dimensional, and suddenly you’re cooking with an honest (if somewhat full-on) sister.

Vegan Black Metal Chef, Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time, Epic Meal Time, Cupcake Jemma – the list goes on. In each case there’s food on the menu, but also dollops of personality and a sense of stepping into someone’s world, as they come into ours via laptop, tablet or phone – all somehow more intimate than the television.

Perhaps it’s the connection we all subconsciously (if incorrectly) make between digital content and DIY ethics that creates this zeitgeist of a two-way relationship; maybe it's the fact that this new breed of hosts are proper characters. Whether those characters are real or not is apparently irrelevant.

---

More from The Skinny:

 8 of our favourite food web series

 Diet Another Day: We look at the Paleo, 5:2 and more

---

Even the most insane example fits this model. Japan’s Cooking With Dog features a female chef, known as Chef, and a little dog, Francis. Francis ‘narrates’ (via a guy speaking in English with a fake French accent), while his human co-host cooks. Occasionally the dog falls off the work counter or the woman makes it look like the dog is rolling out pastry, but on the whole it’s that simple.

The anonymous Chef has a Twitter and Facebook feed dominated by pictures of her with food in different places. She’s a real person who exists, doing things and visiting destinations that her audience can be a part of. The whole format – cute canine and silent skilled epicure tirelessly toiling while a strange man narrates – is like stepping into an alternate reality dreamed up by hungry Studio Ghibli animators.

A (surreal) universe has been shown to us and it’s possible to dive right in if that universe represents or at least speaks to us. From tattooed chefs with beards to ladies with canine companions, anyone can host their own food show. It's their combination of personality and individualism that gets us hooked, and that's before we even find out what's on the menu.