When I was growing up I went to a small private arts school that believed that having your children watch TV would ruin their creative mind. Thus, I was forced to go through one of the saddest transitions of my life between preschool and kindergarten and throw away all of my movies. You can imagine the tantrum my mother had to deal with as she ripped Pocahontas and Bambi from a sobbing three year old’s hands. As I grew older I would always try to pretend I was sick so I could stay home from school and watch the forbidden television. My heart would flutter with excitement as I would veg out to reruns of Full House, the Golden Girls and Boy Meets World. Eventually my mother caught on and decided that in order to prevent me from faking that I was sick she had to take action. She allowed me a few hours a week to watch the only channel she could think would not “ruin my creative mind” : The Food Network. You cannot believe the joy and satisfaction I experienced as I drooled over Emeril’s lasagna and Rachael Ray’s 30 min. meals.
Photo cred goes to: http://www.runningoffthereeses.com/2011/10/04/spinach-chicken-lasagna-with-alfredo-and-mushrooms/
Now I sit here before you today with the fun “homework task” of writing a blog post based off of one of the ‘kernels’ my teacher, Kathryn Kuttis, has given us. It was hard to choose from all the awesome topics she presented us with, but in the end I naturally had to go with ‘From Scratch’ Goes Behind the Scenes at the Food Network. In the article, Carey Polis, discusses the decline in ratings for the Food Network and their evolution over the years. What caught my attention the most was the idea that the Food Network had created these “celebrity chefs” and made it more about entertainment than food. My first reaction was “Yeah duh! They need high ratings in order to stay afloat, so obviously they are going to lean more towards the entertainment side of things.” But then when I thought about it more I was perplexed with if they really needed to have a “celebrity” on the show in order for it to be entertaining.
I believe that the answer is yes, you do need to have some sort of celebrity on a cooking show in order to get people to watch. Viewers latch onto the familiar face of a celebrity or someone they have seen for countless years, and invite them into their living rooms as if they are family. These chefs become iconic, and regardless of its viewer decline, I can promise that www.foodnetwork.com is many people’s first stop when looking for a recipe idea.
I then thought about what the Food Network could do to improve ratings. The answer I came up with is to latch on to this health and fitness craze, and to create more shows that help people prep healthy meals that will help them lose weight or stay in shape. I am aware that they do have shows that are geared towards healthy meals, but if they emphasized weight loss or fitness I believe they could tap into a much larger audience of overweight Americans who are searching for every possibly trick in the book. How they would do this I am not entirely sure, but hey it’s a seed to plant in the back of your mind and I will claim full bragging rights if someday a show like this does appear!
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