Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Too busy watching chefs on TV to cook?

There's an incredible number of cookery programmes on TV these days, with everything from Jamie "pukka grub innit?" Oliver to Raymond "ooh la la" Blanc and Heston "brain the size of a chest freezer" Blumenthal. The last one is particularly good for chips as long as you don't mind waiting three days for them. Then you've got the amateurs having a bash on Masterchef and that Come Dine With Me programme where you invite people in to be rude about your cooking and cast disapproving glances at your kitchen ("distressed MDF in pale green...very 1980s"). Or at least I think that's what it's all about - I've only ever seen the trailers.
 
 
A potato peeler. Apparently some of you are not familiar with one of these.
 
 
So given all this televisual outpouring of tips on how to fatten yourselves up, not to mention the zillions of books by the above celeb chefs which jostle for space at the top of the bestsellers lists, you'd imagine that we'd all be slaving away over our hot stoves, producing endless exotic culinary creations, no?
 
No. A survey today (yes another bloody survey - where would the media be without them?) says that large numbers of us think that "cooking" amounts to heating up a pizza or nuking something gooey in a plastic pot in the microwave. Of course as usual, we don't need a survey to tell us this. We know it must be true from the vast volume of frozen gunk in brightly coloured packaging clogging up the supermarkets along with "easy cook" versions of everything, even things like roast potatoes. (If you really can't prepare your own roast potatoes then I expect you can't tie your own shoelaces either or dress yourself. How do you get through the day?) It seems that the more cookery programmes there are, the less inclined we are to actually do any cooking. It must be some kind of vicarious exercise of cooking by proxy: once we've finished watching Nigella getting all saucy with lashings of butter, fromage frais, chocolate and some weird Slovakian confection from that super little deli round the corner from her place in Belgravia, we feel we've done it all ourselves and can just give that frozen lasagne 800 watts of particle physics.
 
So if, as it appears, there's an inverse relationship between the amount of cooking on TV and the amount done by the (wo)man in the kitchen, could it be that this can be extended to more useful behavioural effects? Let's have a go at putting on lots of programmes featuring mugging, rape and murder and watch as crime rates plummet. Maybe a few more war films on the telly would reduce the incidence of the real thing. I don't know if this would work but I'm sure that wall-to-wall documentaries on Eds Miliband and Balls would cure people of socialism.
 
Although this sounds like a brilliant idea, I can't help thinking there's a flaw in it somewhere. You don't think that the reason people buy ever increasing volumes of pre-prepared this and microwavable that is something to do with the profits to be made by the food companies? Surely not. Pass me a Pot Noodle.

2 comments:

Lucy said...

Similarly, I think you will find that people who watch a lot of pornography do not have much sex (not with other people, anyway).

Marshside said...

Ah yes...there's another example...of course I don't even know what pornography is so you must be right...