Tell the taste of the people and interpret the food culture

Screen food programs continue to "go out of the circle" ——

Tell the taste of the people and interpret the food culture

Guangming Daily reporter Niu Mengdi

Cultural variety shows based on local cuisine have always been a big hit on the screen. Recently, the second season of the food culture program "Cantonese Cuisine Good Chef" launched by Guangdong Satellite TV came to an end, which aims to promote the "Cantonese Cuisine Master" project, promote Cantonese cuisine culture, and help rural revitalization. In the program, the skilled Cantonese chefs formed eight teams of chefs with distinct regional characteristics, and presented a delicious, good-looking and fun Cantonese cuisine cooking competition in the ten programs, allowing the audience to deeply feel the charm of the food culture in the Greater Bay Area.

Traditional Chinese food culture has a long history and is an important part of the traditional culture of the Chinese nation. The connotation of food culture is not only three meals a day, chai rice oil and salt, but also links people's feelings for their hometown and represents people's attitude to life. In recent years, "The Taste of Home" and "Punch in! A series of food variety shows such as foodie groups, "I heard that it is delicious", "it is a very cooked taste", "Cantonese cuisine good master" and so on, in the form of "food +", make the presentation of food culture more diversified, in addition to introducing more delicacies worthy of being excavated and discovered to the national audience, pay more attention to the expression of humanistic connotations, and deepen the extended value of the program.

The popularity has not diminished, and the program is constantly innovating

Food variety shows have always been a popular theme in the type of variety shows, and various forms of tricks have made the "food +" variety show model constantly innovate. China's land is rich in resources, and the diet of various places is quite different, which also makes the connotation of traditional Chinese food culture rich and diverse, and provides a steady stream of creative materials for variety shows on food themes.

In order to make the food creative and innovative, the variety show production team also added various popular elements to the program in addition to the food, and used the form of "food +" to deepen the cultural connotation and social value of the program. Punch in! In the form of "food + travel", "Foodie Group" allows the audience to follow the guests in the show, take the "foodie" train to six different cities, "punch" the food from all over the world, and make the ritual sense of eating become the flavor of life. "It's a very cooked taste" focuses on the intimate relationship between people and their families, friends and lovers with "food + emotion", and the guests must find the dish made by their relatives and friends in the dishes reproduced by the top chefs, evoke the emotional temperature from the food, and let the audience rethink and explore the way to get along with family and friends.

"Cantonese Cuisine Good Master" continues the successful model of the first season of "Cantonese Good Kung Fu" "Food + Competition", a change in the tradition of the food program "Slow Variety", to explore the ingredients and chef competition as the core of the show, the "chopsticks" family composed of guests adds a variety show "network feeling" to the show, the food Q&A between the two teams and the duel for the right to appreciate the taste make the show more intense and exciting, and the professional evaluation from the industry's top celebrities makes the show more respectful and rigorous in addition to relaxed entertainment. The big coffee guest and program consultant scongson in the program said: "'Cantonese Cuisine Good Chef' is of great significance to the spread of Cantonese cuisine culture, and the Cantonese chefs who participated in the program came to the stage to face the national audience and show their professional expertise, which is also the original value of Cantonese chefs." In this show, Cantonese chefs can divide labor more clearly, while other guests can enrich the cultural connotation and entertainment of the whole show. ”

In the view of Liu Liming, associate researcher of the School of Communication and Design of Sun Yat-sen University, "The popularity of food variety shows will continue in the future, and the production quality and content selection of the program will develop in a more professional and profound direction, providing the audience with more sense of gastronomic experience and satisfaction through further linkage between online and offline." ”

From the small to the large, promote the inheritance of traditional food culture

A "China on the Tip of the Tongue" swept the country, allowing the audience to see the treasures of food culture around the world, and for a time local specialties were "out of the circle", which also led to the popularization and promotion of food culture around the world. The success of "China on the Tip of the Tongue" has led to the quiet rise of food-themed cultural programs. In the past ten years, food documentaries and food culture variety shows have emerged, and Chinese natural love for food has made the popularity of such programs unabated.

In recent years, food documentaries have become more vertical in the presentation of content, and are committed to making local food culture detailed and thorough. "Boiling Bar Hot Pot" focuses on the types of food that young people like, introduces the different hot pot flavors from all over the world to the audience, displays unique hot pot ingredients, and makes people's enthusiasm for food roll in the fireworks; "Words of One Side" uses a bowl of noodles to string together the story of a city, and integrates a variety of emerging elements and national tide culture in it, so that history and reality are intertwined and collided in food and taste buds; Let's Go! "Seafood" focuses on the delicacies in the ocean, from large seafood feasts to small home-cooked side dishes, using food to freshen ordinary life. Through a series or type of cuisine, the lens intuitively presents the differences of local food for the audience, from a delicacy to culture, and from culture to value and feelings.

Food variety shows carry richer cultural content in more diversified forms, and also give traditional food culture a new form of creative expression. In the second season of "Cantonese Cuisine Good Chef", the eight star chef teams include chefs from the Greater Bay Area city clusters such as Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou, as well as Cantonese chefs from Chaozhou, Heyuan, Shunde and other unique regional characteristics. Despite belonging to the same Cantonese cuisine, celebrity chefs from different cities and regions still show the unique gastronomic styles of each region, and the diversity of Chinese food culture is vividly reflected in the competition and confrontation of cooking skills. In the creative food reality show "I Heard It's Delicious", the chef uses his superb cooking skills to make many long-established Chinese cuisines, from the famous dish "Heiguan Shan", which has a century-old history and has been lost, to the famous local food "Hakka Niangjiu Chicken", each dish is a symbol of Chinese cultural heritage.

It is not difficult to present the food itself, how to dig deep into the cultural value of food. Allowing the audience to get more spiritual satisfaction in addition to the enjoyment of food is a greater test and challenge for the creator. Zhou Kui, associate professor at the Communication University of China, believes that "compared with other cultural types, food culture is oriented to a wide range of people, covering different ages, identities, regions, etc., which makes food programs have unlimited potential, can arouse the audience's sense of belonging and identity to the nation and hometown, and plays an important role in promoting the inheritance of Chinese food culture."

Delicious linkage, local products to help rural revitalization

In addition to spreading food culture, the program with local specialties as the core can arouse the audience's interest in local culture through a dish, an ingredient, and a type of cooking technique, and at the same time, more delicious ingredients have the opportunity to go from niche to public, from region to country.

According to the different themes of each issue, the chefs in "Cantonese Cuisine Good Chef" bring home agricultural products such as Shenwan pineapple, Shaoguan spring shoots, Heyuan shiitake mushrooms, and Jiangmen sweet water radish to the table. Agricultural products representing local characteristics are also the epitome of the achievements of rural revitalization projects, local ingredients through the display and introduction of the program to the national audience, has a greater market potential, the platform built by the variety show for local agricultural products to win greater exposure and reputation, increase the sales of characteristic agricultural products, to help rural revitalization and development. Another program, "Taste of Hometown", uses the content structure of "studio + micro-documentary" to show the culture of Yu cuisine, and strives to make food an important starting point for rural revitalization. The program realizes the cross-screen communication interaction of "TV + Internet" and "TV + e-commerce", allowing the audience to customize the dishes and ingredients introduced by the program by scanning the two-dimensional code while watching the program.

Compared with live streaming with goods, e-commerce promotion and other forms, the special ingredients in the food variety show have been carefully cooked by the chefs to release the delicious to the extreme, and the audience learns the authentic cooking methods of local ingredients with the famous chefs through the program, which stimulates the desire to try and buy, so that people can not only see the food through the screen, but also taste its beauty. In the view of Zhang Kaibin, a teacher at the School of Culture, Creativity and Communication of Zhejiang Normal University, "special cuisine can fully empower rural revitalization, and gastronomic variety shows such as "Cantonese Cuisine Good Master" are a good window, so that these unique and quality-assured local agricultural products appear more frequently on the tables of thousands of households, so that an ingredient becomes a new business card of a region."

What is contained in the food culture is the optimism and positivity of Chinese's treatment of life, revealing people's common yearning and pursuit of a better life. From the screen to life, the food culture that has been precipitated by history is getting real inheritance and innovation in the fireworks of the current life.

Guangming Daily ( 2022-07-04 09 edition)

Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily