I like competitive cooking shows. This is hardly an interesting revelation, and I’m sure it seems out of place for a sports blog, but bear with me, because I do have a point. Cooking shows are an exception to the rule for me when it comes to reality television for me. On the whole, I find reality television to be an effective theater of spectacle and narrative that ultimately lacks deeper wells of meaning, but I’ve always found competitive cooking to be one of the outliers.
For one, they usually require a certain degree of technical skill, and this is much more interesting to me than the artificial orchestration of interpersonal dramatics.