I’ve always been a fan of food shows on
television. There is something infinitely comforting about sitting down for
half an hour or so and watching someone cook a lovely meal on the telly. You
can lose yourself in the colour of the ingredients, the gleam of the kitchen
utensils, and the expertise of the TV cook. Everything comes together
seamlessly as she – yes, I know you’re visualizing Nigella Lawson now, as one
does – peels and chops, roasts and fries, and then serves up a delicious spread
to friends and family. You can almost taste the roast lamb and potatoes, hear
the satisfying crunch as a crab claw gives up its succulent meat, and smell the
vanilla scent rising from the bread-and-butter pudding. It’s a food feast for
all your senses, even if it’s one step removed from reality.
And then, there’s the Anthony Bourdain
school of food telly. Here, you get taken to one exotic location after another,
shown the kinds of dishes that you’ve never ever seen, heard of, or even dared
to imagine. You go from the street food of Bangkok to the tapas bars of
Barcelona, from the backwaters of Kerala to the sushi bars of Tokyo, from the
brassieres of rural France to the gritty streets of New York’s Chinatown. And
you get a vicarious taste of the world, thanks to your intrepid host, as you
watch open-mouthed from your couch.
In shows like these, it is the dishes
that are centre-stage, the meals which are the stars of the show, and the
entire point of the exercise is to appreciate food in all its infinite variety.
The hosts are just there to tease out the flavours, the colours and the aromas,
and of course, to eat on our behalf. What’s not to love?
And then, there are shows like
Masterchef, which take food in all its life-affirming glory and transform it
into an instrument of mental torture; which take the art of cooking and suck
all the joy out of it so that rather than being an act of nurture it turns into
an exercise in humiliation. What Masterchef does, one cook-off at a time, is
snatch away all the pleasure that you derive from feeding others, leaving gut-wrenching
anxiety in its wake. It is less a food show or even a cooking contest and more
a gladiatorial smackdown in which only one winner will be left standing in a
field of cooking casualties. Seriously, what’s not to hate?
Food should be infused with the love you
cook it with, not contaminated by tension and stress. It should be served up
with smiles of pleasure, not with a side order of the tears you shed because
you feared elimination from a competition. And it certainly shouldn’t lead to
ritual humiliation if you don’t hit exactly the right spot.
As if this was not enough, there’s the generous
lashings of emotional manipulation thrown into the mix. Nearly every
participant has a hard luck story: there’s the single mother cooking on a
budget for her daughter; the recent immigrant who can only rely on his culinary
skills to get ahead; and thus it goes.
I am sure that all of them are very
worthy people who deserve to make it big. But, to tell the truth, I am not
terribly interested in their backstories. And all that hyperventilating about
how nervous they are in a professional kitchen and how scared they are of elimination:
frankly, it leaves me cold. When I tune in to see a food show, I’d like it to
be about the food, thank you very much.
Ah, the food! There is something
soul-destroying about the poncy little plates that are served up to the judges,
weighed down as they are by gimmickry and artifice. Give me a good, honest dish
any day, with clean flavours, fresh ingredients simply cooked, and served up
with the minimum of fuss. Instead, we get ten kinds of fiddly garnishes,
complicated sauces, all of it peppered by pretension.
And that’s before we even get on to the
‘experts’ on the panel. There is something risible about such chefs as Gordon
Ramsay and Marco Pierre White lecturing the participants about calmness and
communication in the kitchen. These are men who have built their reputations on
their abusive behavior in their own kitchens. During their careers, they have
turned the air blue in every kitchen they ever worked in, with their extensive
vocabulary of four-letter words. They have turned bullying into a fine art.
Their kitchens are hothouses of tension, stress and full-on fear. And then,
they turn up on our TV screens, holding forth on the virtues of ‘calm’. Give me
a break.
But leaving everything else aside, you
know what is the saddest thing of Masterchef? It’s the fact that it makes
cooking appear stressful and scary rather than fun and relaxing. Watching the
participants fret and fume, or go into full-on meltdown mode, doesn’t really
inspire us to get cooking. And that, at the end of the day, is the real pity.
