Media's Influence on the Culinary Arts

     MasterChef similar to any cooking show out at the current time highlights the beauty of dishes while displaying the precision and difficulty that goes into making them. While making this style of cooking into a competition, it still is able to display the challenges faced by each and every individual chef from the preparation process to the actual baking, frying, etc. As if the rhetoric in the original MasterChef wasn’t enough they have a similar branch highlighting adolescents as they attempt to reach the same feats of these conditioned chefs on the original version of the show.

     Let’s begin with why this show is successful and appealing to its audience. For one thing most of the dishes are judged for the visual appeal of it, and how “pretty” it looks to the judges. Moreover, on the specific episode linked they don’t just have food as an item for taste, but it is supposed to make full usage of all your senses to be able to wholesomely enjoy the dish. Thus, we see the ploys by the adult chefs attempting to use non-cooking materials such as electronics, firewood, liquid nitrogen, and the sort just to help their dish to evoke an emotion from the judges. Normally, when thinking of a dish, one doesn’t think of any of these aspects of a meal, all we tend to think of is what dish would taste good while remaining nutritionally fit.

     Although it isn’t included in my original discussion board post, I would like to ramble here for a moment on the junior version of this series. The overall message I got from this version is difficulty. One can watch the original version of the series and see how the contestants are being drained physically and mentally by their challenges. However, in the junior series this is displayed through what would appear and fit for children which is in having to walk away from the stove or dish to take a breather and/or refocus. This show compiled with the original has a more verbose portrayal of the actual difficulty and another ploy which I found in the junior series more so than the original is the shift in music. Whenever a child chef faces difficulty the music shifts almost immediately as it is introduced, while in the original this is primarily heard as the show moves into commercial breaks. Although, both still succeed in making the craft of cooking seen in far more complicated circumstances as opposed to what the common folk would think of it today.