Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons, but for me it has been episodes of Masterchef. I’ve seen food towers rise and fall, smears of puréed artichoke flash across plates like comet tails, and pop rocks crackling like fireworks between Jay Rayner’s teeth. I’ve heard the phrase “red wine jus” seductively whispered approximately three thousand times, and repeatedly shouted at the telly “It’s not a ‘hen’s egg’, IT’S JUST AN EGG!”. Amateur, Professional, Celebrity versions: I’ve feasted on them all. But with the simultaneous sacking of hosts Gregg Wallace and John Torode this week, my decades-long food coma is now over. I don’t know about them but I feel somewhat liberated.
To lose one presenter because of offensive behaviour may be regarded as misfortune; to lose two in one week looks like a stitch-up. Wallace’s numerous social missteps off camera are well-attested, and — while hardly in Frank Bough territory — must have made him a tiresome colleague. His claims that autism-derived sensory issues rendered him unable to wear underpants sit oddly with visions of a chafing sock hilariously placed on his nether regions for larks. Torode, in contrast, has been fired for the alleged single use of a racist word six years ago, nature unconfirmed but rumoured to be the N-word, which he says he can’t recall, and for which he has since apologised profusely. Since a context-free utterance is not the key to anyone’s soul, this looks like an unfairly draconian outcome. The Beeb disagrees, apparently having decided that, unlike the proverbial curate’s (hen’s) egg, their presenters cannot be good in parts.
Irrespective of the actual personalities, I enjoyed the televisual personas of Wallace and Torode a lot — because of their quirks, not in spite of them. When tasting contestants’ food, Wallace was good at vivid descriptions of flavour profiles for the viewers, admittedly sometimes making them sound like sexual assaults: “It starts off intriguingly smoky, then turns sweet, then wallops you round the chops with some spice, finishing off with a big smacker of heat at the end.” (I paraphrase). Torode — the Eeyore to Wallace’s Tigger — was not so verbally dextrous, but made up for it with his weird facial expressions, especially the one that would appear in the rare presence of a dish that really impressed him. His mouth would droop in solemn veneration, voice get quiet, eyes moisten, cheeks flush. It was all so unguarded and intimate that it’s surprising there weren’t internal investigations from the production company straight afterwards.
There were other endearingly eccentric aspects too. The way the pair of them shovelled food into their wide mouths, at least in the early days: as Terry Wogan used to observe, not so much lowering their bottom jaws as flipping open the top of their heads. The interspersed shots of exaggerated eye rolls and stern glares, worthy of Japanese Kabuki actors. The slow motion, Reservoir Dogs-style walk of the food critics as they approached the building for their bit: leopard-printed Grace Dent advancing in tiny steps with the magisterial wounded dignity of a Corrie barmaid; various well-upholstered male critics lurching along beside her, lower portions snaking like a caravan buffeted in a gale, scarves artfully arranged to hide their chins.
I wasn’t alone in my addiction; despite its repetitive format, the show was watched by millions. There are Masterchef tropes so common, spotting them has become a drinking game: some dull contestant saying a particular dish is his “personality on a plate”; the dangerous construction of a chocolate fondant with enough “ooze”, or of a pannacotta with “the wobble factor”; the fact that every Scottish contestant cooks loin of venison with haggis bonbons and whisky sauce followed by cranachan. In a sense, the joy of recurrence is part of the reason people keep watching. As with most perfectly pleasant meals, a few days after consumption you have no memory of the experience and will happily do it all over again. Introducing new presenters at this stage will be like putting gorgonzola into ice cream; it will take a while to get used to.
Ultimately, though, I spent all those hours in front of the television not really for the presenters, entertaining as they were, but for the shots of the food. It certainly wasn’t for the contestants: I can barely remember any of them. And it wasn’t about learning recipes or acquiring new culinary techniques either — quite obviously, because quantities or directions were rarely given, and I still don’t know what a red wine jus actually is. In truth, the attractions of programmes like Masterchef are mainly aesthetic: images of glossy sauces, crisp shards, chunks of burnished meat, honeyed dripping juices. At a certain level of technical ability, food has become a socially permissible way of immersing oneself in intricately beautiful works of art while the rest of the world gets uglier and more utilitarian by the day.
Looking at food onscreen is not like encountering it up close in a restaurant, because there is no possibility of tasting or smelling; all you can do is use your eyes. Yet somehow you don’t really miss those other dimensions. Despite a tempting comparison with porn, strictly speaking it’s not like looking at that either, since there is no definite interaction with the body: no small trajectory of desire to be completed, however unsatisfactorily, by an ersatz physical event at the end. If anything, it’s more like looking at subtly erotic paintings; bathed in a ticklish glow of hedonic associations but without feeling the need to do much about it.
The desire is not really for the food. Desire for something makes you pursue it directly, whereas watching cookery shows is a diverting end in itself. Equally, though, when looking at enticing food imagery, there’s still an echo of the original appetite, diffused by the counterfactual context but still pulling gently on the senses. I assume it’s the same impulse that leads many of us to pore over recipe books, lingering semi-ecstatically over pictures and descriptions of elaborate creations we will never attempt to recreate or seek out in restaurants.
Indeed, the best recipe books function more like ekphrastic poems than practical instruction manuals, evoking the sensory details of absent works of art: one carefully constructed artefact deliciously putting us in mind of another. And since nobody reads poetry anymore, nor indeed much of anything, it’s not surprising that many turned from words to screen images as a lazy substitute.
Still, even an imaginary meal can give you indigestion. At various stressful times in my life, my evenings have been spent bingeing cooking shows, while in place of the morning doomscroll I’ve gorged myself on accounts sharing pictures of crisply fried chicken, pillowy pavlovas, pancetta-spiked carbonara, unctuous ribbons of caramel. After a while though, I started to feel like a lotus eater, my brain’s pleasure centres firing away uselessly, trapped in the unreal. It’s my impression that thousands of people, and especially many young women, are passively lost in the same online world, which bears little relation to actually preparing or eating food for most. And even the thousands of food influencers out there seem to be cooking mainly in order to get good photos out of it.
Ultimately, enjoying food — whether making or eating it — is not about staring, vaguely titillated, at perfect compositions preserved in digital aspic. It’s about learning to manage annoyingly tricky ephemeral substances: unstable and challenging flavours, congealing sauces, collapsing textures. It is about change, not stasis; bodily actions, not passivity in front of a screen. As most mums know, it is also quite exhausting; unless you are a professional, you don’t want to think about food all day. A while ago I unfollowed all my foodie accounts, and now it seems that life has finally released me from Masterchef. Who knows what gustatory adventures await me in three dimensions, now that the seductive voiceover artist is silenced?
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Kathleen Stock
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
