Gastroporn (or, Why I Want To Be a TV Chef)

It was all over in just one minute. I had expected things to take a bit longer considering his experience, but apparently the creamy substance wouldn’t wait any longer. This lemon curd tart was ready.

“Gastroporn” is a word I first heard used in my anthropology lecture. I can’t actually remember how the lecturer defined it, but I liked the expression so much that I have adopted it to refer to any televised food related show which favours overly enthusiastic presenters, scripted jokes, producers with emotional connections to their food, and a reliance on trivial, insignificant details in order to make a dish sound more complicated than it actually is.

The gratuitous use and abuse of food on our screens is present everywhere; look no further than the primetime slots these sorts of shows are often afforded; much like real porn, gastroporn allows the viewer to substitute actual interaction with the subject matter for an exploitative, illusory relationship with screen bound fantasies of improbably buoyant soufflés and impossibly short cooking times, ever assisted by that magic phrase ‘… and here’s one we prepared earlier…’.

I feel that it's this over-abundance of tv food shows that are ruining our appetite and spoiling our palates when something decent (and hell yes, that means anything starting with Jamie) comes along. Most tv food shows are just repackaging old information, sometimes with a promotion that mentions the associated magazine which jsut happens to be sold in your local supermarket. But that's not what food shows should be about; they should, like sex, be fun, be funny, and be flawed. No one likes to see someone else prepare a perfect dish; it's not human. It was pointed out to me that one of the best things about Hughey's Cooking Adventures is the lack of script, meaning that sometimes he completley forgets to add an ingredient before realising at the end and telling us 'whoops, we'll just throw that in now then'.

Just to clarify and appease the fans out there, Ready Steady Cook escapes this categorization by maintaining an underlying yet tangible sexual tension between the somewhat homophobic French chef Manou and the effeminate and charmingly naïve Peter Everett. But this is also an example of a show where imperfection makes it endearing; despite the blatant Coles product placement, the show manages to keep fresh by choosing contestants that are unfailingly exploiting their five minutes of fame to tell Australia (or at least the dole bludgers, students and pensioners who watch the show), their grandmother's secret recipe/tradition/bunion treatment as part of the 'family origin' approach heavily favoured by the producers of the show in order to inject some personality into these highly made up, overly chatty women.

Rather, the shows that I am referring to all featured on the Lifestyle Channel, and included such delights as a show about fat people having to poo to the satisfaction of a tiny pink-clad dietician. Following this, a huge American lady showed us how to arrange a few morsels for a cocktail party before – get this – flying across the Atlantic to give exactly the same party, with the same food, presumable to reinforce the notion that as long as you’re somewhere civilized, darling, you should be able to manage a bit of pate on a plate without looking like too much of a pleb.

It was the third show that broke me. In the drone of scripted, pre-worked dialogoue, this twenty something, personality-less presenter failed to have any opinions whatsoever during the whole fifteen minute construction period of his eggplant lined mug’o’coucous other than his choice of onions was ‘because he finds them a bit sweeter’.

Foxtel; what’s going on? Even my friend would do a better cooking show, and she lives solely on pasta and cheap tomato sauce, day in, day out. At least she’s got some sort of personality, like the way she bursts into a room shouting ‘No pants!!!’ before proceeding to boil water and heat sauce wearing precious little more than a pair of Bonds and a t-shirt.

Words cannot describe the injustice of the boringest man on the planet getting his own tv show when there are plenty of people out there (and, lets be honest, I include myself in that) willing to replace this guy and his eggplants with the perfect combination of acid sarcasm, proper food that you would actually want to eat and dashing good looks.

Call me Foxtel and give me a show.