Entertainment media thrives on stories about how rock stars and Hollywood actors are wallowing in obscene wealth, but there’s another form of entertainment that is quietly earning big money, a place where the most elaborate special effect is choux pastry and the white powder is (mostly) icing sugar. TV cooking shows might not grab the headlines, but in terms of bang for your buck it’s considerably cheaper to pull in ten million viewers by plonking Mel & Sue in a tent full of wilting buns than it is to indulge Bono or let Tom Cruise pretend he’s some kind of Freudian space bishop.

Like anything more exciting than lawn bowls cooking has been described as “the new rock & roll”, but its true appeal is the precise opposite of the spirit that made Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a bat. Cooking is popular because in an increasingly insane world watching somebody gently make pies on TV provides an essential, calming respite from reality. Imagine Ozzy Osbourne nibbling the end off an eclair, whilst Mary Berry plays a solo on a piping bag full of crème anglaise. Not rock and roll, but in today’s world it’s like slipping your brain into a warm bath.

The relatively low cost of producing even the glitziest cooking programme means that TV bosses searching for the next big hit are chucking around cash like Gordon Ramsey lobbing carrots at a kitchen porter. Nigella could get a blank cheque just for doing a programme where she just makes porridge in a lacy basque, and even Ainsley Harriott is able to insist on being referred to as “Mr Loverman” whilst he chops runner beans with a machete, wearing shades and furs in a TV studio modelled on Scatman Crothers’ gaff in The Shining. If you haven’t seen Heston Blumenthal in a while it’s because Channel 5 have paid him to do a ten part series on sheep offal from a missile base in a dormant volcano. Even with all this, our craving for cooking telly isn’t even close to being satisfied. Let’s see what’s next on the menu.

Cringe surprise: awkward dining experience with real people

The person who came up with the idea for Come Dine With Me deserves to be a multi-millionaire, because they’ve managed to build a TV phenomenon out of a raw material that is more common than mud, namely British social awkwardness. Unlike other reality shows, which require at least a cohort of people who think they can sing or dance, CDWM could point its cameras at any five British strangers and serve up a steaming plate of hideous social gaffes, deluded menu selections and terrible hosting practices. Thirty series in and the cellar hasn’t run dry, but it’s inevitable somebody is working on a copycat format. Personally I’d like to see a show based around disastrous meet the parents dinners, or the horrific cringe potential of boozy work-related socialising. You can almost hear George Lamb sarcastically describing the preparation of a risotto for somebody you fancied at the gym but you’re now trying to poison before they can have sex with you, or the grim, grim reality of chugging too many bellinis and realising a senior colleague has said something offensive and is waiting for you to laugh.

The Bake Off replacement: has it been in the oven too long?

The producers of Bake Off thought they were going to run away from the BBC, but it turns out that everybody bar Paul Hollywood is loyal to Auntie and they blew up the tent on the way out. There’s now a Victoria sponge-sized hole in the beeb’s autumn schedules for a gentle competition where ordinary people compete to produce something that is different enough to cakes that nobody will get sued. Legal issues aside, finding a substitute is harder than it sounds – cakes are varied to look at, require more skill than you think and have the magic effect of making you feel hungry and slightly sinful just by looking at them. Bread is rarely spectacular and pizza is all flat, so the most likely outcome for an oven-based cooking competition is that they’re just going to broaden it to involve anything that British people can conceivably cook in one – from quick starters to a five-bird roast that takes 11 hours of preparation. Yes, there will be cakes, but the people of Britain will be competing on a battlefield where pies lock swords with pasta bakes and a joint of beef will be judged alongside soufflés, sausage casseroles and sticky toffee pudding. It will be like Gladiators, but will mostly involve people getting very fat and needing to loosen their belts like a farting uncle at Christmas.

Dripping with sauce: TV with sex appeal

It’s a lot harder to pull off (steady!), but when a programme maker successfully blends food with sex appeal you’ve got a recipe for a massive thrust in ratings and some long, naughty sales in the cookbook market. Nigella is the reigning Queen of Hearts & Tarts, but eventually she will retire to her soft-focus palace to be fed eclairs by a bevy of toy boys, which will leave room for new challengers to sauce it off amongst themselves in the hopes of claiming her sticky toffee throne. The field is wide open: will the new Madame of the Macaron be another flirtatious posh lady, or will the tiramisu tiara be claimed by a hot-buttered working class crumpet? If this all sounds appallingly sexist, don’t forget that we are talking about a programme format that has a 50 year-old millionaire mum pretending to sneak downstairs in a satin nightie to dip strawberries in warm chocolate. It could be that the most efficient way to meet the “needs” of Nigella’s army of dad fans is simply to introduce a culinary element to that mainstay of the high number satellite channels, Babecast, by getting the depressed looking girls to add cookery to their repertoire of onscreen performances. Text in now if you want Sandra from Dagenham to make a meringue, or call the private number and Chardonnay will tell you how she’d poach your eggs.

A double serving of unpretentious man food, topped with bacon

My own favourite TV theme is the sub-genre of cooking shows that involve a fattish middle-aged man travelling to normal restaurants and eating things a normal fattish middle-aged man would eat, sometimes but not always given an extra dimension by being served extra spicy or in an obscenely large portion size. Man vs. Food man and Guy Fieri have become stars largely via their convincing portrayal of how normal blokes deal with that big pizza or burger that is so good that you finish the lot, even though you’re so full you might end up being sick onto the passenger seat of the car. There’s millions of those men out there (I know because I am one) so I’d like to suggest a TV series themed around me enjoying a number of beers and then purchasing a kebab, a battered sausage or some special fried rice. The budget will be less than twenty quid per episode, and viewers who can’t get enough can enjoy web-only catch up clips following the morning-after progress of my heart problems, irritable bowel syndrome and gout. It’s TV gold, I tell you.

We’re about to enter the time of the year when people begin to become obsessed with obtaining what society has deemed the ‘perfect’ body in time for summer days at the beach. This obsession has now become even easier to maintain. Calorie, macro and exercise tracking apps are more popular than ever and taking over our smartphones, and our lives. What’s worse is impressionable kids and teenagers have access to them, and are being affected by their impact.

Counting macros means to count your macronutrients. Macronutrients are what make up the caloric content of a food, so it goes even deeper than just calorie counting. The three categories of macronutrients are carbohydrates, fat, and protein.

The curiosity to explore this subject came about after seeing how popular calorie counting apps and culture had become amongst people my age. I wanted to try it for myself, so a friend and I both downloaded the app Lifesum to see what it was like. The app asks you to enter your gender, age, height, weight, and goal weight when you first download it. To test their limits, my friend put her age in as 14, and got exactly the same result as me; a daily calorie goal that would make her lose weight.  After only a week of using the app, we both admitted that we had become pretty obsessed. Noting what we had for breakfast, lunch and dinner and being able to scan the barcode of items, so the app can register the calorie content automatically, became a part of our routine.

I have since deleted the app for the sake of my sanity, but can admit that I started to let it govern my daily routine. A common outcome from obsessive behavior towards food consumption is the development of eating disorders, or disordered eating habits. A 2015 report commissioned by the charity Beat estimates more than 725,000 people in the UK are affected by an eating disorder. Statistics from the NHS show around 1 in 250 women and 1 in 2,000 men will experience anorexia nervosa at some point.

Many people with disordered eating issues find recovery the hardest part of getting back to ‘normal’. It has proven to be a very difficult cycle to break. Sarah*, 22, knows that all too well, having spent years struggling with her eating disorder. “My relationship with food, calories and macro counting still has complete control over my life” she told me. “I have definitely improved over time, but spending five years of my teenage life obsessing over the nutritional content of food means I can still recall the calorie content of nearly every food under the sun.” At the age of 15, Sarah realised she wanted to make a change. “I had always been overweight. By the time I reached 15, all my friends were slim and wearing bikinis on the beach whilst I felt hideous and left out. When they started getting male attention, it confirmed that I wanted to change.”

Sarah got to a healthy weight through changing her diet and exercising, but once she reached her goal, she was petrified of gaining it all back. “I had a ridiculous fear of gaining weight again. I had found the app MyFitnessPal great during my initial weight loss, but when I reached my lowest weight, it became more of an obsession” she told me. “I was in competition with myself to lower my calorie intake every day, and saw it as the only way to control myself from gaining weight again.” Sarah’s obsession started to take over her personal life. Her fear of not knowing how many calories she was consuming made going out for dinner and drinks with friends near impossible. After two years of losing weight and tracking her food intake, Sarah developed anorexia. “I’ve been lucky to have always been surrounded by understanding and supportive family and friends. After I’d gotten the help from my medical team, I fell into a cycle of binge eating, because my brain was unable to regulate the hormones that tell you you’re full after I had starved my body for so long.” Sarah went from six stone to 16 stone in a year and a half, which she says demonstrated the extent of damage she had caused to her body.

Sarah is still rebuilding her relationship with food, and now realises that food and diet should not cause her the anxiety it does. “The most important thing in being healthy is balance. Never forget your self worth and love your body, because being healthy is not all about how you look, it’s about how you feel.”

Chris Sandley is a qualified nutritionist based in the UK, and runs his own nutrition and health business ‘Seven Health’. Originally from Sydney, Australia, Chris moved to London after he graduated from university. He studied for three years at the College of Naturopathic Medicine and received a diploma in Nutritional Therapy. “Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of women in particular who dieted a lot in their teens, and a lot of my clients have suffered from eating disorders in the past” he said. “For some people, apps like MyFitnessPal do work very well, as it’s good to track your information. The main issue with apps like that is that they are nothing more than a computer. If you tell it you’re 14 stone and want to be 10 stone in a few months, it’ll calculate how little calories you need to eat to achieve that goal. There’s nothing in its programming that acts as a warning to tell you it’s not healthy or doable.”

Chris’ work revolves around better understanding your body and becoming healthier, rather than focusing on losing weight. “I do not advocate anyone of any age actively losing weight, because that is how people start to associate being healthy with weighing less” he told me. “The body can only do so much with the resources you give it, so if you are under eating and over exercising, areas of your body will shut down. Women’s menstrual cycle can stop, the digestion system could shut down, and your mental health can take a serious hit.” Chris looks at calorie and macro counting as an absolute last resort with his clients, as he doesn’t see it as the main benefactor in becoming healthier. When it comes to advice for parents regarding how to make sure their child has a healthy lifestyle and relationship with food and exercise, Chris had a very strong message. “The biggest thing is to not comment on their weight. The more it is commented on, the more likely the child is to become dissatisfied with their body” he told me. “The best thing to do is to make healthy food a normal choice; to make exercise fun and a part of their routine rather than a chore. They shouldn’t be counting calories or macros; they should be living a healthy balanced life.”

If you have been affected by anything mentioned in this piece, or feel you yourself need help regarding the topic, see below where you can find help locally:

The Jersey Eating Disorders Support – eatdisordergroupjersey@hotmail.com

Eating Disorder Team, Psychiatric Outpatients’ Department, General Hospital T: 442717

Please seek advice from your GP if you feel you need further services.

In a world of Instagram food brags, hashtag sandwiches and miracle berry suppositories it’s easy to think of food fashions as being a contemporary phenomenon, but they have been around as long as any other fad, possibly longer if you consider we started being fussy about food when we were still butt-naked and living in a pile of sticks.

A high-protein diet is like a pair of flared jeans – the colours and materials may change but eventually it will be back in style, teenagers are going to be obsessed with it and you’ll still look ridiculous if you’re over 40 and try too hard to join in. Like flared jeans, I stopped being cool after the 90s, and looking back at my Thatcher-era childhood I’ve realised that the dominant food fad wasn’t the sort of thing you’d probably expect (juicing, nouvelle cuisine, Spud-U-Like) but the specific variety of faux-Americanism that thrived in Jersey’s family restaurant market. I grew fat on Coke floats at Waterfront Pizza and Central Park, scoffed pork benders at the Wimpy and remember the despair of my hippy parents when I blew all my pocket money on dubious hot dogs at the funfair. I thought the trend for clean eating and wheatgrass smoothies had killed off this style of restaurant for good outside planet takeaway, but the grease has floated back up in a new, hipper form. We’ve stopped flogging chicken in a star-spangled basket in favour of checked shirt hillbillies and rustic pulled pork BBQ, but Ole Zeke’s Shoreditch BBQ is no more authentic to the deep south than Jason Statham doing an American accent, and a lot of artisan sourdough pizza is no closer to Italian food than the Waterfront’s beloved Cicero.

Cutting edge:

superfoods and sinner foods

Although BBQ meats go in and out of fashion, the most persistent food trend of the 80s is one that shows no sign of going anywhere, so if you want to get ahead of the curve all you need to do is arbitrarily start dividing everyday foodstuffs into good, bad and super food categories and build a half-baked philosophy around them. This always suited me because I’m fussy to the point of obsession and was happy to learn of equally picky people who ran arbitrary crusades against eggs, red meat and tasty, tasty fluoride. It doesn’t matter what the offending food is, because in the 80s butter gave you cancer and now butter is okay to eat by the ounce whilst margarine is so deadly they are loading it into planes and dropping it on ISIS. Berries have been viewed like magic nutritional gems since I was in nappies, but eventually, this luck has got to end and acai, goji and blue berry fruits will be seen as the dingleberries of the devil himself. Even some fundamental building blocks of our diet (wheat, carbohydrates) have fallen under suspicion, so you might as well throw caution to the wind and open a fashionable restaurant where the inclusion of ingredients is vetted by a panel of angry toddlers.

Post-Brexit British cuisine

The most challenging new food fashion will arrive by necessity when the Brexit bun finally comes out of Theresa May’s oven, and the French build a wall to stop us importing camembert and Bonne Maman apricot jam. If we evoke the Blitz Spirit and look on the bright side, this could trigger a resurgence of a style of cooking that was, again, very popular with fussy children with an innate distrust of green vegetables: good honest “pub grub” with “none of that fancy foreign stuff” a.k.a. sophisticated flavours or balanced nutrition.  My parents were aghast at my love for the brown, meaty food offered by some other families – accompanied with boiled vegetables, excessive salt and a bowel movement frequency that synchronised with episodes of Emmerdale. Allegedly this was true British grub, and probably the reason that most of our nation’s successful chefs speak French. Nonetheless, we’ve already seen a couple of half-decent attempts to reinvent a less hideous British cuisine on the part of chefs like Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal. Maybe an enforced isolation from Europe is the final push British cuisine needs – a ban on foie gras and carpaccio might compel creative cooks to spruce up our native Pukka pies and apple crumble into something that will earn Michelin stars and make the people of Europe jealous of us once again. Or, it might condemn a generation to a diet of brown stodge and grey meat, whilst fruit and veg are sold under the counter like German porno mags, and groups of europhiles gather in secret to gorge on illicit couscous and brioche. 

A new Asian flavour

In my youth Jersey always preferred its seafood deep-fried and covered with mayonnaise, but in the civilised world the hottest trend was Japanese food, specifically sushi. I learned about east Asian food from video games and confusing references in the Guardian, but eventually Jersey caught up and we now have two restaurants serving sashimi, as well as at least three Thai eateries in every parish except St John, where lemongrass is banned in case the kids smoke it. The market is ready for a new Asian cuisine – but which one? Vietnamese street food is having a moment and benefits from a complex French influence, Malaysian food fuses Chinese and Indian traditions, and Filipino ingredients are bold, flavoursome and available in St Helier. However, Korean food is my personal favourite, and I also think that a restaurant could capitalise on anti-Trump sentiment by theming its restaurant around one of his greatest enemies – the brave, the beautiful, the oppressive: North Korea.

Korean food has the complex spices that Jersey people love in Chinese and Thai food, but uses them to create regionally distinctive dishes such as the sumptuously meaty bulgogi, the mixed rice masterclass of bibimbap and that inescapable spicy cabbage preserve, kimchi. This could be served up alongside propaganda art (always fashionable) and the authentic retro style of a nation where culture hasn’t been allowed to develop since the 1950s. Potential investors should note some ethical downsides, the main being that the dishes I’ve listed are only available to average citizens in South Korea, as most people in North Korea are actually forced to survive on a diet of boiled grass and chicken water.  There’s also the whole “ruled by a tyrant” thing. Those are minor criticisms though, as “Waterfront Pizza, but themed around North Korea,” is the type of pitch that would go off like a rocket if we had a local equivalent of Dragon’s Den, and we all know that North Korea loves rockets. Let’s see the UN Security Council pass a resolution against Coke floats – they wouldn’t dare.