Micheal Pollan for the NYT: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. If you’re interested at all in contemporary food and television culture, this is well worth a read.
Pollan’s essay overviews the decline of everyday cooking in today’s kitchens. He tackles the question by asking why we, [north] americans, are spending more time watching others cook than cooking ourselves. Like everything around it, cooking has changed from the time Julia was on screen to today’s celebrity chefs kitchen stadiums and unfortunately, cooking shows—or food shows as he retitles them—are not teaching or even inciting us how to cook anymore. The average amount of time one spends in the kitchen making food has dropped to 27 minutes daily, less than half the length of a show on the Food network.
The paradox is explored further and the “decline and fall of everyday home cooking” isn’t evidently solely based on the metamorphosis of television cooking shows. But like many other cultural artifacts, television shows are a good indicator of what’s happening in front of the screens.