Anyone Can Cook! How Digital Media Changed the Food Industry

The United States has undergone a revolution. Not a coup d’état, but instead, you could call it a coup d’cuisine. We have always had an affectionate relationship with food, but in the past two decades it has developed into something else altogether. In today’s world, no longer does gourmet food belong to the elite, and no longer is the kitchen an exclusive arena.

But how did this change come about? Simply turn on your television.

 The Food Network is nothing less than a national pastime, with viewers in 100 million American households today. To put that in perspective, there’s a little over 114 million total households in the US as of 2010. The popular channel describes itself as a “unique lifestyle network…that connects viewers to the power and joy of food.” Indeed, who can doubt their success in that mission? Often today, lessons from professional chefs can cost upwards of $80 a person, as I recently experienced at the gourmet cooking supply chain Sur la Table. As a fantastically cheaper alternative, celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay, Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray and Paula Dean have brought personal cooking tutorials right into your kitchen, all included in the price of cable TV.

In the last five years, the Food Network has increased its accessibility by expanding into the online domain, with a database of recipes at the aptly named food.com. This move is nothing short of monumental. Online recipes are to cookbooks as Google is to libraries: a mind-blowingly more efficient method of delivering media. Food.com was one of the first databases of its kind. In the years since, the food industry has continued to develop its presence on the internet, through “foodie” blogs, Youtube channels, and perhaps the greatest presence of all: foodnetwork.com. Here you are able to not only access recipes and instructional TV segments, but also interact with a community of other Food Network fans. These technologies empower the “self-taught cook” by providing a forum for those in the culinary world who don’t necessarily have a degree. We see a great rise in user-based sites, as the world of cooking is transformed to a much more democratic entity.

The most recent development in my life as a chef is the smartphone application from AllRecipes.com. The concept of the “Dinner Spinner” is simple: choose what meal you’d like to prepare, a main ingredient you want to use, and the amount of time you have to cook. Then, spin the categories, and away we go. You are immediately provided with thousands of user-contributed recipes that matched with your categories, each rated using a five star system, and sorted by their relevance, rating, title, and popularity. I often wonder if this app completely oversimplifies the process of finding a recipe. After all, I always found so much joy in going through my copy of a Fanny Farmer cookbook, searching for the perfect dish. When I use such internet-based tools to find a recipe, I’m pretty much bombarded with all the options. It is not longer a slow acquisition of ones favorite cookbook recipes, but instead, it’s adding bookmarks in a web browser or saving a “Dinner Spinner” recipe to my favorites. As is a common feeling in our digital age, I feel out of touch with the work that previously went into finding information.

What was cooking like before the advent of all these godsends? In the history of humanity, the domestic roles of women, including food preparation, were passed down through personal instruction.  As a so-called digital native, I cannot say that I remember much of a life without celebrity chefs and online recipe databases. Yet at the same time, I had role models within my family who taught me how to cook and inspired my culinary creativity. We also own a collection of cookbooks, so many that they occupy their own bookshelf in our kitchen. Previously, we would thumb through them, starring our favorite dishes and writing in our own adaptations.  But now many of the cookbooks gather dust. The difference between those experiences and how I cook today is that while watching an online instructional video, I can always hit rewind. With a recipe database, I simply have to type in the keywords. Everything today is about simplicity and accessibility, sacrificing the once personal and sacred nature of food preparation.    

In the end, I certainly wouldn’t have arrived here today, as an avid baker and chef, without my hybrid culinary instruction from both real-life human interactions and internet sources. Who is to say which method is best? They seem to complement each other. Personally, I incorporate methods I learned from hands-on instruction with innovative new recipes invented by my online peers. The technological advances in our food industry are no less than an extension of an egalitarian ideal. The definition of chef today becomes looser as media like the Food Network and Dinner Spinner allow for easily accessible tutorials and recipe forums. A quote from the Disney-Pixar film Ratatouille describes the new American food culture perfectly; as Chef Gusteau says, “Anyone can cook!” 

Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Sa2bUqtnKArJwJYwVTr-S9FdML0Qjt-fcftFJv-ix8/edit