Oriana and MasterChef

The MasterChef contestant laid bare the gap that exists between the cuisine presented on the well-known TV show and “real”, home cooking that people understand and eat every day.

After having tasted, somewhat puzzled, her “Sunday tortellini”, a dumbfounded Bruno Barbieri asked Oriana why she even bothered to take part in MasterChef. Her response was very frank: “I am here in support of tradition, because here you cook things that normal people do not eat nor understand”.

The atmosphere became gelid and the result of the voting was two-to-one to let her continue, with Antonio Cannavacciuolo voting against, while Barbieri and Giorgio Locatelli voted in favor. It seemed to end there but the episode sparked a lot of media feedback and Oriana risked becoming a paladin of home cooking. What she basically did was to lay bare that “the emperor has no clothes”, how much of the professional cuisine from “starred” chefs was not understood by a very large number of people, which of course is true and its importance is underestimated.

For sure, similar incidents have taken place in other areas of human expression. In art, music and literature, great geniuses have often been misunderstood, at least in their lifetimes. Certain artistic expressions were later understood and appreciated by a small number of fans, as was the case with many contemporary installations, along with the compositions of Luciano Berio to the works of Gino De Dominicis.

Things are different, in my view, when it comes to food, especially if it becomes a TV phenomenon, and I tend to sympathize with Oriana. If MasterChef is not just an entertainment program, then I think the recipes they present should at least be those that can be repeated or reinterpreted at home. They should tell stories of local, family traditions, of particular ingredients and not just culinary techniques, which are a tad extreme and are often self-referential, which tends to increase the gap between “starred” cuisine and what normal people want.

This is an argument that I have tried to tackle in some previous editorials and they provoked reactions, at times even polemics, from fans of self-referential “excellence”, which is somewhat rhetorical and, in the case of restaurants, becomes very expensive and even theoretical. If, on the other hand, MasterChef is only entertainment, if Barbieri, Cannavacciuolo and Locatelli are just presenters, actors playing a part, and not chefs in their own right (Locatelli is more of a restaurateur than a chef, as was his predecessor Joe Bastianich), then everything makes sense. The show is thus a comedy, a farce, show business if you like, a program in which cooking is a pretext to entertain, to create celebrities, who then can use their popularity to publish books, advertise products that are not exactly artisanal and take part in other and different types programs, as is the norm in show business. What’s important is that this is clear to all.