Popular cooking television programs
Television cooking programs are a growing genre of TV show, and they seem to be increasing in terms of the number of programs and in their variety. With many people today concerned with having a healthy and balanced diet (Diät), many cooking programs are dedicated to encouraging health through brand new recipes and experimenting with healthy alternatives to traditional recipes. Cooking programs are generally inexpensive to produce, making them a favourite from a production and budgeting point of view. While TV cooking programs originated on day time schedules, with the rise of reality cooking and celebrity chefs – they are starting to appear more and more regularly on prime time evening slots.
Cooking television programs can take on a number of different formats, and these days there are a large variety of shows that make it on to our screens. The first cooking shows on TV however, were concerned primarily with the simple preparation of food, either in a kitchen environment or on a dedicated TV set. A celebrity chef will generally prepare a single dish or a number of dishes over the course of one show, illustrating the separate steps that are involved in each stage of cooking. The first incarnations of TV cooking programs were mostly educational in nature, although today it is just as likely to see purely entertainment driven programs or at least a mixture of both these approaches.
There are many famous TV cooking shows that have run for many seasons, with the really successful ones often involving celebrity chefs who have become popular television icons in their own right. Some of the most famous cooking programs include: America’s Test Kitchen, Celebrity Cooks, The Cookin’ Cajun, The Ministry of Food, The French Chef, Good Eats, Iron Chef, Two Fat Ladies, Ready Steady Cook, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsey, and The Naked Chef with Jamie Oliver. One recent trend among some of these programs is to encourage healthy cooking (Kochen) practices in order to achieve a good balanced diet. As more people become interested in eating healthy food, they are naturally more interested in learning how to prepare and cook it from the best chefs in the world.
Some celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Gorden Ramsey and Nigela Lawson have become household names, with cooking shows that have been produced for a number of seasons. Jamie Oliver and Gorden Ramsey in particular, are especially notable for their ability to push the boundaries of the cooking show format. Both of these chefs make shows that are not educational at all in a ‘how to cook’ sense, but are instead explorations into another side of our relationship to food and the practice of cooking. Jamie Oliver is very interested in nutrition and health as it relates to cooking, and has done a series based on ways to encourage good healthy eating practices to children across the United Kingdom. As the number of TV channels and cooking shows rise, we are more likely to see many of these programs dedicated in whole or part to the preparation and cooking of a healthy and balanced diet.