Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

Article: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

The author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto wonders why the number of cooking shows on American television has increased while the number of viewers actually doing the thing themselves has fallen.

Erica Gruen, the cable executive often credited with putting the Food Network on the map in the late ’90s [...] shifted the network’s target audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat, a considerably larger universe

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The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit. [He means advertising]

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After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. [...] It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking.