Our Love Affair with Celebrity Chefs
THE SEEDS OF OUR LOVE AFFAIR with cooking shows and celebrity chefs, and the influence they’ve had on the way we think about food and its place in culture at large, can be traced back to Julia Child.
The new documentary Julia by co-directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West, previously Oscar nominees for RBG (2018), tracks how Child became an icon in the cooking firmament while arguing why that show and her influence was and continues to be important.
It’s one of three docs about celebrity chefs released this past year, each of whose subjects has had an impact not only on the way we eat, but on culture in general. The others are David Gelb’s Wolfgang, his study on Chef Puck, and Morgan Neville’s understandably darker Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.
There are, of course, other significant chefs who have had multiple cooking shows and been highly influential, but these films form an interesting triptych concerning how we in North America think and talk about food since Julia Child first went on the air. What was once considered perhaps frivolous is now a subject of deeper importance.
We see food as pleasure, as education, as entertainment, as competition. Food is, importantly, political: a driver of social cohesion and change. And that’s, in large part, a byproduct of the celebrity chef era.
We have several channels specifically devoted to food and cooking. Cooking shows are part of the
