Self-Righteous Food TV Makes Me Hate Food and Myself

The ubiquity of food TV has become gross. On any given week, scrolling through the TV listings can feel a lot like being strapped down and waterboarded with melted butter. Taken individually, the programs are pretty palatable. Some might be cheap, others patronizing, but mostly they're enjoyable, and the cliché that you eat with your eyes takes on a new truth when skillful TV chefs start rhapsodizing about the delicious food they're making. But while it's entirely possible to binge on them for three hours at a time every day of the week, it's hard to escape the feeling that food TV exists to make you feel ashamed that it's pasta with ketchup for you again tonight.

The litany of messages we are fed surrounding what we should and could eat through food programming is tiring. I can't be the only one who feels less inclined to cook because of this constant televised assault upon my appetite, or embarrassed that I might not be able to whip up something amazing out of three "well-sourced" ingredients. In many ways, our diets are used to define what social class we belong to, and food TV has a hand in this. After all, what sort of mother are you if you can't sustain your adoring family with a freshly baked loaf of bread every day? What kind of feckless cow doesn't sack off a social life to transform herself into a walking cake factory?

Shows like Top Chef are fun, but they're essentially built on the premise of shaming their audience. They make it look so easy when it really isn't. It's hard not to be cynical, even if you enjoy watching this kind of thing, when everything feels so… righteous. So priggishly middle class. Righteousness prevailed in the heavily-rationed kitchens of the 1940s. It was rife in the glowing-with-goodness whole-foods movement that flourished in the 70s and 80s. And it's everywhere today, when it seems that barely a week goes by without some story popping up in the tabloids about hag-faced moms defiantly feeding hot dogs through the bars of the school gates to their fat-starved children beyond.

The term "convenience food" is knowing shorthand for a certain type of person. There's a running joke on the British food show EastEnders about the most down-at-heel resident, Bianca, feeding her horde of multi-tonal children chicken nuggets every night. It's easier to mock people whose lives really are like this than it is to ignore the factors that led them there: no time, no money, and no idea how to healthily feed their families for less than the cost of a dollar bag of tater tots. Will these women watch Nigel Slater? Maybe. But there's a gulf between the two realities. The idea of having leftover duck to serve with your griddled peaches is as exotic as chartering a plane to the Maldives. So Slater, in all his pregnant-pausing glory, is an entertaining presence on our TVs, rather than an educational one.

TV chefs are ostensibly there as models for us to aspire to. They stand—despite what they may protest otherwise—not for what we are but what we're not. Follow us, they say, while rarely actually providing widely accessible recipes for us to introduce into our own lives. Follow us around bustling markets, into our well-stocked pantries, into the romance of lives lived in beautiful, editing-room "natural morning light" hues. All this is a tonic and, particularly in the case of Nigella Lawson, is a dream to watch. But who the fuck has time to spend the hours before midday whipping up that evening's dinner?

Conversely, there's a sense that merely watching the sort of cooking show in which the presenter happens to chance upon some well-marbled pancetta at the back of the fridge is enough in itself. That in doing so, the viewer is somehow elevated above the rest of the gruel-slurping, McDonald's-chomping proles. Most people aren't comfortable with being caricatured as selfish, lazy, and poor. Food TV can be a salve for this; the presenters' wisdom helps to drive a wedge between you and "that other lot." They can help stuff your brain with the precise science required to cook a triple-fried chip, or the ability to distinguish arborio from carnaroli rice. The faces of food TV become fonts of knowledge. Deified, even. But frankly, any genre that elevates Gregg Wallace to divine status needs to have a word with itself.

The price, the effort, and the piles of bloody washing-up mean that few people actually replicate the dishes cooked by TV chefs. The reality for most of us is one of boring frugality. Nothing underlines the grinding monotony of life more than forcing down the last dregs of a stew your bank balance won't allow you to sling out. For most, there is no glamor to be found in leftovers. And however delicious Nigel Slater's midweek supper might look, Wednesday nights, for most, are spent prostrate on the sofa trying to ignore emails. You really can, if you try hard enough, find great profundity in the cold sludge left over from an evening meal of Coco Krispies. Freeing yourself from this drudgery is simple: just bang on whatever Pompous Little Kitchen Adventure happens to be on the screen that night.

If the gulf of food programming in Britain does render itself hollow, though, what does our obsession with the shows say? Traditionally, the aspiring middle classes have defined themselves with an interest in the better things in life. But while you might hunger for Ottolenghi's next freekeh-and-feta adventure, how many of his viewers will actually scour the independent delis in their zip code trying to find an expensive artisan grain? Some will, maybe. Most won't.

For all that man-on-the-moon and discovery-of-penicillin stuff, humans are pretty thick. Our minds are as soft and malleable as mashed potato, and if you really want to make something your "thing," all you need do is immerse yourself in it deeply enough. The result is that there are millions of us who are, because of the sheer volume of food TV hammering our grey matter, couch-potato gourmands. In the kitchen, would we have the chops to actually transfer this knowledge?

TV stations know the habits of their viewers. They probably know that the less we cook, the more justified the shows are in presenting rich, complex, expensive meals. We all need escapism, but should there be fewer food shows? Probably. The messages are too muddled. Eventually, it all becomes a swirling frieze of seared duck and buttery razor clams, like a nauseating orgy on the banquet table of a French duke. And afterward, all you really want is a glass of water. Maybe a bottle of Gaviscon.

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