British food TV has grown stale and dull. Try ‘A Nation of Broth’ instead

I’m not one for inspirational quotes. I don’t trust anything attributed to Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde, and I do not accept counsel on life from A2 posters of misty mountains. But there is one, from the American writer Kurt Vonnegut, that’s so important to me I write it on the opening page every time I start a new notebook. 

“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” 

It started, as so many things do, halfway down a bottle of wine while staring at cable TV. That’s where I go, occasionally, late at night, when left unattended. I’m not proud of myself but, well, there it is. And there, on the never-ending dreck scroll, was a new delight: A Nation of Broth, a three‑part Netflix programme on Korea’s obsession with soup.

It’s presented by two young actors, Ham Yonji and Ryu Su-young, as well as an older bloke who, the subtitles tell us, is Huh Young-man, a cartoonist. They get on in an adorable kind of way, visiting different parts of the country, talking to people running cafés and food museums. Mainly, though, they eat. They suck down great bowls of broth. Broth with tilefish or kimchi, with pork fat or beef bones, ancient historic broths, weird rural broth. There are no recipes, there is no competition. They just eat, laugh, talk about the experience and share it in the most engaging way… for three hours.

I have almost no time for home-grown food TV any more. Great British Menu leaves me cold, Bake Off makes me howl abuse at the screen, and the MasterChef franchise makes me want to open my veins. So what is it about a Korean cable show that makes me almost teary with emotion?

Korean food TV at the moment is coming into a really interesting phase. The country has an incredibly ancient food culture but has, like the UK, only comparatively recently seen it in full renaissance. From the 1960s onwards, after centuries of war and occupation, Korea experienced an enormous opening up to external stimuli, while, at the same time, also seeking to reconnect with its own history. It has some of the most exciting food on the planet right now. Not necessarily in the shape of internationally famous chefs, more in the sense of a whole cuisine that’s seized and embraced possibility. These guys have a lot of exciting stuff to enthuse about.

Korea has also given us the odd phenomenon of mukbang — people making videos of themselves eating and talking to their audience as they do so. This sprang up on the internet just over a decade ago and became inexplicably popular. It seemed that people wanted to talk about eating, while eating, and millions wanted to watch. 

The cast of A Nation of Broth love what broths and soups mean to their culture. They want to find out more and they want to tell us. It is incredibly infectious, an almost pure expression of Vonnegutian caring. (If you’re ready for more of it, then Baek Jong-won, who produced A Nation of Broth, also presents three more deep-dive immersions — on pork belly, on cold noodles and on Hanwoo beef — all with the same insanely high production values and honest enthusiasm.) 

All this makes me sad for our own food media. I’m racking my brains and trawling through cable repeats, searching for some tiny hint of that level of joy, and we just don’t seem to be able to do it. I’m as happy to watch Nigella’s delirious spoon-licking as the next person, but it’s just a closing shot after 15 minutes of recipe. It seems we can’t sustain more than a few seconds of someone communicating pleasure of consumption. It’s almost as if cooking is worthy and improving while enjoying eating is somehow sinful.

Most of the time, we don’t even have that much joy. Gregg Wallace can produce a stream of consciousness about a pudding, an enviable talent, but there’s no celebration of sensuality in his dead eyes. If I need to have it explained that Kevin from Merseyside has themed his trio of desserts in honour of the “NHS staff who looked after my dying mother — ‘I’m sorry… I’m Getting A Bit Emotional’” — then the actual dish is just the canvas on which to smear personal drama for a prurient audience. When a programme is built on artificial jeopardy and the personal stories of “relatable people”, be they professional chefs or civilians, then the food is just a MacGuffin.

My own enthusiasm started as a kid with the earliest “celebrity” chefs. Fanny Cradock, in serial-killer face paint, gave me nightmares, while the infinitely smoother Graham Kerr gave me frankly worrying “stirrings”. Too enthusiastic to sit still for the camera, he self-evidently so loved food that he couldn’t contain himself from telling me about it. Meanwhile, Cradock was going to teach us to cook, even though she seemed to hate us.

Now that I’m a grown-up, it’s become nearly impossible to watch Chef’s Table, which lauds chefs with the wide-eyed hagiography of a 1970s rockumentary. Instead, I find myself late-night binge-watching the deeply emetic Guy Fieri posturing through Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Sure, the food is identical vein-occluding slurry from city to city, but the bloke cares about it and it shines. 

Comparison between food TV and pornography is invariably tortured but here, for once, it seems apt. Imagine how infinitely difficult it would be to despise either if they featured people simply enjoying themselves, who cared about what they were doing and, in their hearts, wanted others to care about it too.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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