The west has culturally moved into a kind of foodie Epicureanism in the past 15 years. This can be seen as a response to economic pressures that young people are facing. When you can't afford a home or a car, you give up on it altogether and suddenly you have all this disposable income to spend on smaller and more transient sensory experiences like food and travel. Importantly, these experiences are able to be catalogued on social media.

Instagram is a huge factor in the rise of foodie-ism. If you are what you eat then you can use pictures of food as a form of self-expression. Picture of a dish at a quirky new restaurant? You're adventurous and on-trend. Made a sourdough bread from scratch? You're artisanal and authentic.

We also have to consider that 'cool food places' is one of the biggest draws that have led people to move into big cities in the past 15 years. Young people are ditching chain restaurants for hipster authenticity. Fetishising the latest Pho place as being more authentic than the last is one way to demonstrate your competence in the urban marketplace of food choices. Which leads on to the phenomenon of 'review-ism': how we now depend on internet reviews to decide where to go.

My grandparents made a cookbook for all their children, and it was full of microwaved recipes and dumping jars of processed foods together. I looked into remaking it with better bindings as it was falling apart, but the recipes are all so gross. So I feel like part of it is generational, that we can get good ingredients, and value high quality food more than before. As much as people hate on blue apron, they kinda proved there's a demand for it, even if its not a viable price point.

The other thing wrt television... old cooking shows were boring. Throw in a dose of reality tv, make it exciting, and people will watch. It's also one of the few tv shows where a person could pretty reasonably recreate it, probably simplified, within their own home.

It’s interesting - I assume you’re American as am I. The approach to food was completely changed after WW2 in the USA. There was so much new food tech that looking back isn’t so nice but that people of that time embraced (and many still do). And for good reason it would seem looking back through their lens.

Food and cooking lost a lot of value in our culture for many years. We started optimizing around the wrong things (fast and easy - cooking is a struggle!) and then again after more wrong things (lets replace fat with extra salt and processed foods!). And only lately has the idea of “fresh and seasonal” started to become more mainstream - again. Where as before the War it was what people did because it was how it was.

There’s a lot of good cooking in the USA that just vanished from before the War. Very localized dishes, lots of stews. Some old cookbooks reveal how much we’ve changed and have also reclaimed old values.

I remember hearing that after WW2 processed foods were seen as futuristic. It was more consistent batch to batch, less likely to spoil, and safer to eat. After a few generations of that it's seen as generic and bland.

This digging up of pre-industrialized food cherry picks the best of each area and uses higher standards for food quality and safety (that would have been unfeasible generations ago).

I'm not knocking regional food, I'm glad this is happening and love to see and try new things. I hate seeing the US covered by the same handful of chain restaurants.

A big part of it was we had the factories, machines and workflows to convert wartime manufacturing into peacetime manufacturing. We mastered the concept of processing and preserving food for GI's and converted it to households. Cooking was sold as a laborious task wrought with potential for failure. From there the next phase of industrial mastery was developing fast food restaurants and selling the idea that even preparing the pre-made meals was too much work and hassle - a true victory of Madison Ave.

We've come full circle now where inefficiently producing and purchasing high quality ingredients and having the time and resources to cook them is now the higher class activity VS the efficient processed food sold to the masses.

Cream of mushroom soup and Cheese Whiz!

Because Instagram/ other social media has taken over and sharing food pictures is one of the major categories of posts on Instagram. Doubly so, a category that a regular Joe can participate in by posting their own food pictures as opposed to say posting your 6 pack abs photos.

Notice how most of these cooking shows rely on eye popping photography and visuals, which have become that much more prominent with better and better smartphone cameras. With above 2 factors in place, it's not surprise that there is an explosion in cooking related media and shows.

Contrast this with potentially other entertainment categories which cannot be posted very easily on social media, like learning piano or guitar etc.

Alton Brown talked about this in his Hot Ones interview but basically Food Network became insanely popular directly after 9/11, as a sort of apolitical escape from the real world.

Interesting. The latest season of Serial claims that cooking shows are what's on the tvs in the waiting rooms for courts (in Cleveland) because they're so apolitical.

Makes sense, I guess.

Lately I have been visiting Doctor's office lot more. And I notice HGTV is choice of TV channel in at least 5 different Dr's office. Again I think a kind of apolitical choice.

Well, this is all obviously speculation, but here are some things that I think contributed to it: First of all I think that it's a reaction to a generation of people growing up with chain restaurants and ready to cook meals. They see that it's unhealthy, there's more to food, and they want to move past that. Similarly they maybe didn't have someone to teach them about food and cooking growing up so they have to fill that space and lack of experience. Notice how a nearly every book or show has to involve some line about how cooking this way, or the inspiration for this or that, has been passed down from generation to generation? Also, you could look at it partially as an environmental/economic thing. People feel good consuming local/seasonal/organic/natural/whatever food. But knowing how to do that properly requires some amount of knowledge that they don't have. Lastly there's a certain amount of cultural cache to knowing things about food that other people might not know. You feel like you get brownie points for knowing about a local spot no one's been to that has good food. Being able to make a good meal has been built up as a sort of unique and desirable skill to have, while at the same time being a really easy skill to attain. People take pride in things like being able to make the "best" barbecue sauce or bake a decadent, attractive cake.

I think it’s because many people love the idea of cooking but don’t have the time or will power to actually do much of it. It’s like fantasizing about living an active, outdoor lifestyle but all you end up doing is browsing the aisles at REI and picking up a couple of new t-shirts.