Too many cooks spoil his broth

Jamie Oliver, currently presenting a cooking show on television, has told the Radio Times that he “tends not to” watch cooking shows on television. (In other news, busman not so keen on holidays.) He suggested that such shows no longer take risks with new ideas. “There’s extraordinary talent out there, but they’re making their own content on YouTube,” he said.

It’s true that cooking programmes are not as vital as they were. We are far from the instructional days of Delia Smith’s long reign. (Delia, with excellent foresight, effectively resigned from TV in 2013, to set up an online cookery school.) We are decades on from the bish bash bosh of Jamie’s arrival, when you couldn’t eat anything without a generous splosh of balsamic vinegar. MasterChef and Bake Off are competitions, and solid entertainment, while we seem to seek familiarity and comfort from the few remaining TV chefs who show us how to make things. It doesn’t feel as if there is a space for innovation.

That’s a shame, and an oversight, because food

TV is more popular than ever, from celebrity-fronted foodie travelogues to 12-part Netflix series about farflung restaurants that serve only fermented heritage tomatoes (that one is yet to be commissioned, but surely it’s in the works). In his book Cooked, the American author Michael Pollan is excellent on what he calls “the curious paradox” of people spending less time cooking and preparing food, but more time watching it on screens. Surely it’s time for a new approach, especially as the internet already has the talent on the hob.