Historically, my family has bonded over Food Network. The Barefoot Contessa, Rachael Ray, Giada—my whole family would spend the weekends watching together and trying out recipes. Nowadays, we’ve shifted away from the big screen and towards the small, sending each other Instagram Reels from “Justine Snacks” or asking each other our thoughts on the latest Claire Saffitz croissant recipe.
My experience seems common amongst the American public. In general, there has been a decline in cable television, also known as “cord cutting.” As viewers shift to streaming or social media, they are canceling their cable subscriptions. In 2014, more than 102 million households paid for cable television. Now, that number is 55 million — almost half as many as a decade ago. Advertisers are directing more of their ad campaigns to the internet, where their money is used more efficiently than television. If cable channels hope to stay alive, they will be forced to seriously consider their content strategy.
Food Network itself has seen this same decline. Food Network is the 22nd most popular channel on live television right now, with their audience at 447,000 daily. In 2014, it was the 15th most popular channel. Their most popular show, Chopped, used to pull 1,456,000 viewers on average. The drop from those numbers to today’s marks a significant decrease in the channel’s popularity.
Food Network is shifting the programming they offer: They will no longer host instructional content, once referred to as “stand and stir” shows like Ina Garten’s; instead, they are now exclusively showing their competition–based content. The cooking show format (pioneered, for what it’s worth, by Julia Child) has essentially gone extinct. And much of this content has drifted towards the internet.
Whereas TV ads must be marketed to a more general public, cookies and targeted ads make it possible for companies to have a more curated audience. With fewer people watching cable TV, it simply makes more sense for advertisers to direct their funds online. At the end of the day, money is necessary for these channels to run. And cable TV runs on advertising dollars. Food Network is forced to only create the most profitable content in order to stay in the game, and that content is no longer the instructional cooking television of yore. Instead, it’s Beat Bobby Flay.
The internet plays a role both in housing the rejects and necessitating their housing. We have more platforms for entertainment than at any other point in history. Our attention span is shortening, and with so much content to consume available, creators have to work even harder to grab our attention. As TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram make it increasingly easy to learn how to cook, there has been a shift in how individuals consume food content. You used to have to watch an entire episode of Barefoot Contessa to get your one–pot chicken pasta recipe, frantically writing it down to hope you can remember—or hoping they air it as a rerun. Now, you can head to TikTok for “marry me chicken pasta” with a link leading to the written–out recipe. Audiences can now click that link and read hundreds of comments endorsing the recipe, instead of having to take Alton Brown’s word for it. In this context, it makes sense that a one–minute viral hack to create rice paper croissants is more likely to retain our attention than a one hour program that delves into the history of French cuisine.
The upside to all this is accessibility; the downside is severe quality degradation. With this shift to offer exclusively competition–based food shows, we lose the instructional element. Instead, we only have entertainment.
Food Network is competing with free and convenient content that provides a dopamine rush. The internet is full of overblown content—whether it be faked prank videos, mukbangs, or ASMR videos. In order to stay relevant, TV must be able to keep up with the hyper–engagement of the internet. Beyond food content, cable TV more generally is becoming more sensationalized. They are competing for more limited ad revenue than 10 years ago, but also for our time. In order to compete in the current media landscape, these networks must adapt and survive, following what draws in our attention and ad revenue.
The competition format does not provide anything valuable to our lives; we are not learning anything. If even Food Network, whose founding goal was to teach people to cook, no longer does it because of the changing media landscape, what does that say about the rest of our content? All TV might be doomed to become glorified reality TV, an extension of the exaggerated internet.
