Taste and the TV Chef examines the evolution of food-centric TV, exploring how it changed Britain’s relationship with food and created a global appetite for culinary content. While cooking shows are far from new, they have exploded in popularity in recent years and have changed consumption patterns at a time when what we eat is of enormous consequence for climate change. What was once merely a genre is now a full-blown phenomenon: never before has food been so photographed, fawned over, fetishized, and celebrated as a way to save the planet. Celebrity chefs and so-called “foodies” have risen to new levels of fame, and the cultural capital of cooking has never been so valuable.

Food journalist Gilly Smith offers fresh insights into the creation of contemporary British food culture, examining the influence of chefs like Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, and Gordon Ramsay and the role of TV storytelling in transforming how and what we consume. A groundbreaking contribution to food and media studies, Taste and the TV Chef investigates how food and lifestyle TV changed the way an entire country ate, and then fed it to the rest of the world.