What fascinates us about culinary competitions

MasterChef Quebec arrives on our airwaves, while The Chiefs ! prepares a season bringing together its star players. Meanwhile, viewers can also turn to An almost perfect dinner or web catch-up of Heads of wood… What is it about culinary competitions that captivates us so much?

I called on experts to probe our television psyche and understand what it is that pleases us so much in the duels of whips, maryses and soufflés, but I reassure you: I am not trying to steal Hugo Dumas’s position. You will see that their observations often bring us back to our state of gourmands. This survey is published in the correct notebook.

Léa Franck is a fan of culinary competitions, screenwriter and author of a memoir whose title is: Cooking shows, symptoms of hypermodern societies. However, she is embarrassed to be considered an expert in this column. Let us salute his humility.

If The Chiefs ! invites us to consume fresh products and promote our culinary heritage, these are not necessarily practices that we adhere to on a daily basis. “We end up ordering a Big Mac at McDonald’s through UberEats,” illustrates the screenwriter.

Although Mathieu Charlebois cooks a lot, he never wanted to recreate a recipe put forward in The Chiefs !. That’s not the point of the series. Besides, Caroline Décoste would like to know who made the quail in a sarcophagus at home. (If this is your case, write to me, I will forward the message to him.)

The duo is at the helm of Are you going to finish your plate?a site where he explores the confines of industrial food and covers episodes of Chiefs!, a “seasonal obsession”. The preface to their book Are you going to finish your plate – tests and pranks between two grocery aisleswhich will be published in March by Éditions QuébecAmérique, is also signed by Élyse Marquis.

According to them, if we owe 50% of the success of the series to the host and her extremely expressive non-verbal skills, our appetite also counts for a lot.

I quote Caroline Décoste (who would be connoisseur to the point of being nicknamed “the Rodger Brulotte of Chefs “) : “I see people doing things that I am not capable of doing and completing their tasks in less than an hour. I have a feeling of satisfaction by proxy! Plus, we’re super visually stimulated. It’s as if we could taste the food. »

Mathieu Charlebois gives a disturbing demonstration. He invites me to look around me.

“Any case you watch, you can imagine the effect it would have on your tongue. You can guess what it would taste like, right? »

… He is right. It tastes like the need for dusting.

“I am shown a gourmet dish and I know a little about what it would be like to eat it,” concludes the columnist.

Our gourmet streak is challenged by cooking shows, but competitions go further than that. As a screenwriter, Léa Franck believes that the key to their success is stress: “The competition, the counting, the parameters imposed on the candidates… You are with them. » Besides, she consumes a lot of these shows while writing to a friend. Together, they worry: “See that they have just added dessert to them, poor things! »

What surprises me is that we engage in the search for participants even if we know the workings of editing by heart. The dramatic music, the small fires (which we always end up putting out smoothly), the judges who are wary of a dish that is ultimately very good. What if knowing the recipe made the genre even more comforting?

The unifying aspect of this type of program should not be neglected either. Caroline Décoste gave permission to her 6 and 8 year old daughters to go to bed later on Mondays. They love to watch The Chiefs !even if they don’t like to eat much…

The children of Jean-Michel Berthiaume, a doctor in semiology specializing in popular culture, once criticized family meals as would Daniel Vézina. “They could enhance their daily experience through what they saw on television,” he says. And this is the specificity of culinary competitions, according to him.

The doctor in semiology continues with convincing examples: we do not reproduce the masterful movements seen in Revolutionnot more than Talent to spare doesn’t make us want to breathe fire. Cooking is already part of our habits. We may not concoct a quail in a sarcophagus, but if a chef or a judge explains to us how to better prepare a mushroom, we may take his advice into account.

“You can focus on the presentation of meals and be enticed, but there is also something that invites you to give new importance to ingredients,” summarizes Jean-Michel Berthiaume. You are going to participate. »

Maybe deep down, what we love so much about cooking competitions is feeling included without having to do dishes.

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