My grandparents made a cookbook for all their children, and it was full of microwaved recipes and dumping jars of processed foods together. I looked into remaking it with better bindings as it was falling apart, but the recipes are all so gross. So I feel like part of it is generational, that we can get good ingredients, and value high quality food more than before. As much as people hate on blue apron, they kinda proved there's a demand for it, even if its not a viable price point.
The other thing wrt television... old cooking shows were boring. Throw in a dose of reality tv, make it exciting, and people will watch. It's also one of the few tv shows where a person could pretty reasonably recreate it, probably simplified, within their own home.
It’s interesting - I assume you’re American as am I. The approach to food was completely changed after WW2 in the USA. There was so much new food tech that looking back isn’t so nice but that people of that time embraced (and many still do). And for good reason it would seem looking back through their lens.
Food and cooking lost a lot of value in our culture for many years. We started optimizing around the wrong things (fast and easy - cooking is a struggle!) and then again after more wrong things (lets replace fat with extra salt and processed foods!). And only lately has the idea of “fresh and seasonal” started to become more mainstream - again. Where as before the War it was what people did because it was how it was.
There’s a lot of good cooking in the USA that just vanished from before the War. Very localized dishes, lots of stews. Some old cookbooks reveal how much we’ve changed and have also reclaimed old values.
I remember hearing that after WW2 processed foods were seen as futuristic. It was more consistent batch to batch, less likely to spoil, and safer to eat. After a few generations of that it's seen as generic and bland.
This digging up of pre-industrialized food cherry picks the best of each area and uses higher standards for food quality and safety (that would have been unfeasible generations ago).
I'm not knocking regional food, I'm glad this is happening and love to see and try new things. I hate seeing the US covered by the same handful of chain restaurants.
A big part of it was we had the factories, machines and workflows to convert wartime manufacturing into peacetime manufacturing. We mastered the concept of processing and preserving food for GI's and converted it to households. Cooking was sold as a laborious task wrought with potential for failure. From there the next phase of industrial mastery was developing fast food restaurants and selling the idea that even preparing the pre-made meals was too much work and hassle - a true victory of Madison Ave.
We've come full circle now where inefficiently producing and purchasing high quality ingredients and having the time and resources to cook them is now the higher class activity VS the efficient processed food sold to the masses.
The other thing wrt television... old cooking shows were boring. Throw in a dose of reality tv, make it exciting, and people will watch. It's also one of the few tv shows where a person could pretty reasonably recreate it, probably simplified, within their own home.