Lifestyle TV fundamentally changed the way we ate: retailers reached out to new markets to meet the demand for more exotic ingredients and kitchen design began to include bookshelves for cookbooks as standard. But while farmers' markets became the preserve of the foodie, cows and... pigs were taken off the land and into mega farms to serve our escalating desire for cheap meat. While weekend cooking has become a leisure activity, and our trimmer waistlines an indicator of our superfood habit, obesity rates have risen exponentially in the poorest areas of the UK; food waste and food banks are the yin and the yang of the last twenty years of food. Yet we're also in the middle of an unprecedented food cultural revolution: never before have so many people been so interested in what they eat, photographed it, fetishized it or associated foodies and chefs with such style and influence. The cultural capital of our cooking has never been so cool. Food journalist and former media academic, Gilly Smith explores how a country that had lost its way to the dinner table was taught how and why to eat by television, and what harnessing the power of that storytelling process can do to save the planet. She meets the gamechangers behind Lifestyle TV in British food and asks how food-as-education became food-as-delight under former director general Mark Thompson, who spotted the opportunity to brand food as cool. She finds how Jane Root, commissioning editor and creator of Lifestyle TV for the new leisure market, and the late, great Pat Llewellyn, producer of Two Fat Ladies and The Naked Chef, created modern British food culture. Putting their answers to the food writers, farmers, cooks and campaigners leading a revolution in food, she asks how storytelling can save the planet.
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