Watching celebrity chefs on the Food Network can be as addictive as eating your favourite foods. Television has brought the entertainment value of food from visceral to visual, even though it is quite paradoxical that an entire network serves up mouth-watering dishes that viewers will never eat. Although it may all be just a tease, Kathleen Collins tells us in her book Watching What We Eat that “people love to watch cooking, but it does not mean they love to cook or that they even do it at all.” Collins takes us on a tour of how cooking shows have become top notch entertainment, even though they started out as instructional programs for housewives, and she reveals how a combination of compelling chefs and scrumptious food presentation keeps us tuning in day after day. “The cable network gradually revamped the traditional instructional cooking program, adding live bands, participatory studio audiences, science, travel, and game shows, making the genre a microcosm of television and entertainment itself.” Read more