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Not just your regular cookery show: How food programming has evolved over the years

Food programming has evolved from being merely recipe-oriented to culinary-minded content

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Clockwise: Cook Off! is a baking competition comedy; Hasan Minhaj and Jerry Seinfield in an episode of Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee; Chef Ranveer Brar has hosted as well as judged food shows; Chef Vicky Ratnani
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For many years, food programming was all about sitting in front of your television screen and watching a show hosted by Chef Sanjeev Kapoor or the late Tarla Dalal. However, culinary shows are now not just about cooking anymore. The rise of the digital medium has spiralled the demand for content that is packaged innovatively. 

So, you have subscribers on Amazon who can tune into Eat.Race.Win, a show about a performance chef named Hannah Grant, who cooks for athletes competing in the Tour de France or there is Melissa McCartney’s baking competition comedy Cook Off! On Netflix, you have a food-based Japanese reality show Terrace House: Opening New Doors and four seasons of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee
The digital platform has also bagged the dessert-heavy romcom Chocolat and Adam Sandler’s chef dramedy Spanglish. All these shows and movies revolve around food, and have scripted their success without following the tried-and-tested recipe-based format.

Documenting food through videos and pictures

Browse through Instagram and Pinterest, and you will realise that the zillion pictures/vlogs about different kinds of cuisines from across the globe are also short stories documenting both the dish and the experience. You aren’t always getting information from an expert. Home cooks, who until now had no way to reach a wider audience, are also curating dishes for their YouTube channels and followers to cater to a growing demand for interesting content. The credit for all of this goes to the breaking down of entry-level barriers according to chef Ranveer Brar. He says, “People started moving on from blogs to YouTube channels and thus the focus shifted from the professional chef or expert giving information to a creative artist who had a story to tell that was both unique and informative, giving people a culinary sampling, leaving them craving for more.”


(Clockwise: A still from Terrace House: Opening New Doors; Chef Hannah Grant; A still from the Hindi version of Chef; A still from Chef)

Tracing the origins

Chef Vicky Ratnani breaks it down for us. He says, “Prior to the digital era, one watched cooking shows or scanned magazines for recipes only to learn to cook a particular dish to please people. In India, mostly women would pen down recipes in journals/notebooks. With the arrival of the digital platform, that changed, and food has become a mainstream point of conversation.” That, in turn, has led to the culinary content being created in and around experiences combining travel, sports, comedy and adventure.

Food has become an Insta moment

Chef Vicky believes that people are more keen to watch food-related content because it has become a talking point and a conversation starter. He puts this down to the fact that people are travelling more. He adds, “Food has been used as a point of reference to create different content. Earlier, you could not imagine people making a movie like Chef or doing shows like Chef’s Table and getting an audience for it. The icing on the cake was that Chef became so popular that it was also made in Hindi. The way we consume data and the audience have changed, too. Culinary skills are now looked at like any other art form. Cooking-based shows now have various genres catering to different people. This has led to a change in the storytelling when it comes to shows.”

The recipe is not the end goal anymore

People want to see more colour and depth in a show. They are looking for something that’s out of the box. It’s about the journey undertaken and the immersive food experience that unravels interesting tales of origin. This satiates your hunger for information as your eyes feast on the dish; the recipe is the cherry on the cake and an addition but not the end goal.

Food experts are now culinary storytellers

Chef Ranveer believes that the way one interacts with the audience has changed. He says, “Initially, it was all about knowledge and information, but now it’s all about a food experience. From one-way mediums like magazines, television and cookery shows, it has now become a two-way street, where people not only get information but also share feedback.” 

From passive onlookers seeking information from food experts, we have evolved into an active audience that dictates the kind of content they want. There is also a demand for creative artistes who are engaging storytellers. This explains the emergence of the different palate teasers on offer in the form of diverse content that’s about food and yet so much more.

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