I think we're all just freeballing it and I think it's interesting.

Gourmet Magazine, shortly before it died, lamented the fact that "food culture" had gone from "what do you cook" to "what do you watch." And we're talking an era where they were lamenting the fall of Sarah Moulton (who got her start as an assistant on Julia Child) rather than the rise of Guy Fieri. Their point was that the Craig Claiborne-era New York Times was all about things you make, while the Sam Sifton-era New York Times was all about watching other people make things, eating things made by other people, and watching other people eat things made by other people. Take Allrecipes just as an example - in the interest of grabbing pageviews they turned their site into one you could search for recipes into one you had to "discover" recipes.

It makes sense from a "the only way we make money is by randos cruising through and maybe looking at dirt-cheap banner advertising" standpoint and the reason Gourmet is gone is that nobody fucking cooks anymore. It's like "adulting" - bitch, I adult every goddamn day and have done since I was twelve years old why the fuck do you get ten thousand views on TikTok for doing your laundry. Much like social media has gone from participatory to passive, so has cooking. The rise of the "celebrity chef" was well underway by the time Facebook and Youtube hit the scene but the transcendence of knobs like Guy Fieri nailed the coffin shut. Everyone knows Alton Brown, nobody knows Cooking for Engineers because why make something when you can pay to watch someone else do it? After all, if you don't ever intend to try the recipe you'll never know how bland every single one of Alton Brown's recipes is. Every single one of Claire Saffitz's recipes. Every single one of Martha Stewart's recipes.

Into this, throw "British food culture" - a celebration of the meekest, mildest, most mediocre cuisine to ever grace a plate. We tried "Bake Off: The Professionals" for exactly one show. It was awful except for two things: (1) the fact that of the six teams, two judges and two color commentators, three people were native-born Britons (2) the fact that they had to do some fuckin' riff on a "treacle tart" and one of the Frenchmen said, on camera, "A friend once gave me the recipe for a treacle tart and I thought he was taking the piss." "This is very good, but it doesn't take like treacle," says the Hong Kong restaurateur whose job it is to denigrate and belittle Hungarians for their inability to properly capture the essence of a dessert that no one but the British will eat.

There was a time when British culture was all about conquering, dominating and stealing from people with more color, more flavor, more culture and more history than themselves but that's been one long, slow decline since the Suez Crisis so now the British are all about proclaiming the glory of all the things the British have failed to export to any other region or locality despite a 200 year ability to do it at gunpoint. "Hawaiian pizza is the most disgusting thing the Americans have ever come up with," the Briton said unironically, blissfully unaware that it was invented by a Greek in Ontario, British Commonwealth Nation of Canada, while he gleefully wolfs down a sausage roll.

I once mixed Gordon Ramsay waxing eloquent for ten minutes about fucking sausage rolls. He of the aubergine, he of the courgette, he of the fucking chantilly cream (whipped cream with sugar and a little vanilla, because the British think it's okay to eat whipped cream without), sitting there losing his absolute fucking mind over a goddamn sausage roll, which is basically a fucking Hot Pocket without cheese or sauce. There is no one so smugly superior as a British gourmand and there is nothing he's so superior about as British food.

High, low and middle-brow American foods took a real kick in the nuts with COVID. I think as soon as everyone was stuck in their own kitchen for a while they recognized that it takes an overnight to make proper cinnamon rolls but you can whip out a bitchin' carbonara in about 20 minutes so it's rapidly become (1) what can you sell (2) to who (3) for how much. Avocado toast is goddamn good and it can be anywhere from white bread and a fried egg to artisanal we-bake-it-every-morning with a poached turkey egg and bechamel sauce.

And that, I think, is why Bake-off is so loved: (1) they're all just muddling through, for the most part (2) they are encouraged and told how to get better (3) they're all mutually supportive which is so violently opposed to the Simon Cowell School of Reality TV that it captured an audience that had simply wandered off. Frankly, it's the same formula Master Chef had followed for 20 years before Bake-Off, with the exception that the judges on Master Chef are always dicks.

And that, more than anything, is the crime the British must answer for. What the US imported from Britain, and exported to the rest of the world, is the idea that your host must say "you are the weakest link, goodbye." We were squarely on the Julia Child/Bob Vila path until fucking Idol. And it's contaminated food. You aren't any good unless you shit on someone else.

I've mixed entire seasons of Hell's Kitchen and I've mixed entire seasons of Master Chef. What has always interested me is how collaborative an environment Master Chef is - the cast lives in the same hotel for the duration, and they have a little hang-out room where they look up recipes and stuff, and none of it is filmed. Behind the scenes there's a ridiculous amount of camaraderie that Fox deliberately excises. Compare and contrast with Hell's Kitchen - those guys live in the same dorm and they hate each other. Master Chef has to play down how much everyone is just there to have a good time and make friends while Hell's Kitchen has to play down the fact that their contestants are fragging each other.

I feel like when you start with amateurs, who know they're amateurs, who have no interest in becoming professionals? You get a bunch of vacationers who are not going to let you ruin a good time. We had to reshoot a couple ceremonial beats on Master Chef once because none of the producers were clever enough to notice that all the contestants were wearing matching chef hats in solidarity with a contestant who had just been (kinda unfairly) eliminated. But I feel like when you start with the grasping influencer "professional" caste you get people who will stitch each other up for a pack of cigarettes.

From that perspective, Bake-off can't help but be nice. They shoot that thing Friday-Saturday-Sunday and then the normies go back home and practice. They're constantly reminded of normalcy, they can commiserate with the outside world, they have time to reflect. The stuff that makes it crap is entirely enforced by the producers - "Bakers, you have half an hour to make macaroons!" "Welcome to an un-airconditioned tent in July, let's temper chocolate!" "Yes it's raining absolute buckets but for some fucking reason you are all going to make toffee today because we're British and have no fucking idea how to work with the weather." "That's right, we've failed to give you blast chillers for another season, have fun making the ice cream we insist be done in three hours." If the British weren't a bunch of cheap shits that show would be so much better.

I am FPSing vicariously through you, warrior. Give 'em hell.