Over the last couple years, we have witnessed a revolution in food television. On Tiktok, on Instagram, on Youtube, we—the hungry and gastronomically inept—are assailed with an unending stream of home videos of professional chefs and amateur cooks slicing, dicing, pickling, frying, and roasting. The aesthetics are straightforward: bright colors, zoomed-in close-ups, hand-held videography, and amateur-hour sound. The cooking is, too—with one exception: Unlike food television of the past, these shows do not tell us how to make the great feasts before us. We are there just to watch these skilled practitioners of the culinary arts work their magic. “Not since the release of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, almost a century ago,” observes Aaron Timms, “has the human body at work enjoyed such important cinematic exposure.” Writing in the August Books & the Arts, Timms investigates what has caused this transformation in gastronomic television—why is the focus now on admiring the art of cooking instead of on showing us, as the instructional programs of yore did, how to do the cooking? Why now is there a “classic assertion of craft and artisanship” without any explanation of “its inner workings”? “Want to try turning an artichoke at home?” Timms writes. The new food TV says, “Don’t—watch a professional do it instead.” Read “The Rise of the Influencer Chefs”