Competing with food

“There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin.” Dejan Stojanovic

And you could say the same thing about any kind of food or dish. Really - how can you judge food? In an athletics race there is a clear winner - he (or she) who gets over the line first, ditto for a football match - the team with the most goals wins. But food? Or art, literature, music, beauty - any of the intangible but meaningful things in life. They just can't be judged.

And yet we love a competition. Now I like to think of myself as uncompetitive - that winning is not important, but if I'm honest with myself I do try to 'win' at games I think I possibly could win - word games perhaps - and I glow inside if something I had made (food wise) is praised - like the baklava I make every now and again because people seem to like it. But I do not care about winning in games I know I cannot win, or at things I cannot do - like painting and drawing. It doesn't bother me losing those games as long as I have not let somebody else down. I would love to be able to paint or draw, but have long ago erased it as a possibility from my mind.

And really I do try to be uncompetitive. I certainly do not think of myself as cooking something better than somebody else. I just try to compete with myself if you like - I try to do the best I can - even if that is not very good. And I think that this is what is really important about competition - the idea of one's personal best.

I can cook reasonably well - not brilliantly, but a little more than adequately. And I enjoy it. But I am not competitive about it - I don't want to compete with others. Although perhaps I compete with myself. And I do remember Jamie Oliver saying on one of his programs that nobody ever invited him out to dinner because they felt he would be criticising their cooking - and so he was delighted when one of his 'students' on the Ministry of Food series invited him to dinner. I guess it's something that must happen to lots of chefs - although no doubt they dine with other chefs. Do they compete against each other in their heads I wonder?

But what made me think about this topic was the fact that there is yet another television food competition beginning - SBS's The Chef's Line. It made me think about all of them and what we get out of them. Not that I'm allowed to watch any of them - my husband is very anti food programs for some reason.

Apparently it all began with Iron Chef - a somewhat over the top cooking competition in which a well-known chef competed against one of the three Iron Chefs. They were given a particular ingredient and then had to fashion a whole meal around it within a pretty tight time frame. Some of the ingredients were really weird, and the commentary was whacky. But then the Japanese love wacky things.

We did occasionally watch this one - or bits of it. It must have come up before or after something else we were watching at the time. And we did enjoy pouring scorn on it all. It was just so ridiculously over the top. It was very popular - one of SBS's weird hits. The original series ran from 1993-1999 and then was rebooted in 2002. I don't know whether it is still going. There has been an American version but I think that too no longer exists.

Anyway since then there has been a proliferation of these things. Here are a few of them:

The aim of each one is slightly different, but the crucial thing is that there is always a winner. The people who compete show great skill - even the 'ordinary' cooks who are the focus of the programs. It's the notion of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, whatever that might be. And sometimes the competition is quite nasty - which people seem to love.

What I wonder is, if all of this competition inspires people to have a go themselves, or does it just put them off? I suspect the latter. As I said before, I don't actually watch any of these programs, but I do see the trailers for some of them and it seems to me that the food is, on the whole, pretty unachievable by 'ordinary' cooks like me. So rather than getting people to get out there and try to cook I suspect that they may rather put them off. Yes there are lots of other cooking programs out there that try to encourage people to cook and to get excited about food - SBS has a whole channel dedicated to food. But the big winners - excuse the pun - are the competition programs. These are the things that people watch.

I recently read that the current Biggest Loser program is losing viewers because this latest series is too kind to its competitors. There is no suffering - well not like in previous programs. I don't watch this either, so can't really comment. The human race is supremely competitive - even at the level of genes and chromosomes we are competitive - survival of the fittest and all that. Yes it leads to amazing achievement but it also leads to war, to conflict, to feelings of depression and inferiority - to revolution and inequality - indeed all of the bad things you can think of really. I guess, since time began people have enjoyed watching the gladiatorial - combat to the death whether literally or figuratively and alas it seems that nothing has changed. Will it ever do you think?

And anyway, as I began by saying - how can you judge whether one dish is better than another anyway. Taste is such a subjective thing.