Cooking as Food Porn

I’ll start off with an admission – I love food, and I love cooking. As a businessman, for 10 years I travelled throughout Europe to the USA and South Africa and enjoyed good food and wine in all sorts of surroundings. Eating a 1Kg Crayfish in Cape Town accompanied by fine South African wine is a high-point with which I still bore my friends! (Grammarians please note how I carefully avoided putting the preposition at the end of the last sentence.)

However food has now become a strange societal obsession. Television is full of celebrity chefs selling cookbooks and lifestyles to which many aspire but few ascend. We love chefs who are so obsessed with their art that they cannot express themselves except through invective. Now we have the modern Masterchef which has become a cooking X-factor.

I used to love Masterchef, it was amateurs trying to cook a good “restaurant quality” meal for their friends. They had plenty of time to prepare, to perfect their recipes and experiment on family and friends. They had an hour and a half to prepare their meal with everything planned in advance.

Now there is no point getting involved unless you aspire, from the start, to the legendary 3 Michelin Stars. It is altogether quite ludicrous. Having a cookery writer trying to perfect themselves is one thing (although obviously not an amateur) but in this series we have a Paediatrician who obviously thinks that cooking a great meal is more fulfilling than saving the life of a child! (As a taxpayer, I try not to get annoyed by the hundreds of thousands of pounds we’ve spent training him!).

It really is all too absurd. Food is enjoyable, it can be fun; if you are wealthy it can be expensive beyond belief. But when it completely transcends any normal human experience it becomes a dangerous obsession.

I have to say that the latest series annoyed mo so much I watched little of it. After press coverage of the final winner, I sat down and tried to watch the final on catch-up TV. I gave up; the appalling self obsession of the contestants, the vulgarity of the judges and the sheer overall excessiveness of the format just defeated me.

At the end of the day it’s just a meal, at its best when shared with those you love. If the company cannot equal the cuisine then it’s a source of harm rather than good.

Why is this on a blog primarily about religion?

Several reasons, it happens to be the last thing that upset me, and I had to get it out of my system. But it’s also the Easter season; part of the theology of the Eucharist is that it is a sacred meal –an anticipation of the heavenly banquet. If we don’t have a balanced attitude to food we cannot comprehend eternal happiness expressed as a meal.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my point. We need a sense of perspective in everything. A working mum serving up bangers and mash should not be made to feel inadequate, at the end of the day we eat to live not live to eat.

The latest series is The Delicious Miss Dahl cookery and former super-model cleavage all in one show –did I say gastro-porn!