Online class, takeaway, zero waste, Korean food variety in the post-epidemic era

Since the second quarter, South Korea has seen a wave of food variety shows, including "white father: don’t stop cooking", "home cooking live", "food avengers", "takeaway can eat", "order food to the sea", etc., mainly focusing on the lifestyle channel Olive and the favorite food theme tvN.

Although these shows are not particularly innovative in form, they all go further in theme, either aiming to promote mass consumption after the epidemic, or advocating the environmental concept of saving food. In the context of the huge impact on the catering industry during the epidemic and the decline in mass entertainment activities, these food variety shows not only bring sensory stimulation to the audience, but also convey a deeper value proposition, which in turn has a positive impact on the daily life of the public.

"White father" "home cooking and living":

Celebrity Chef Online Free Online Lessons

Food teaching videos have always had a fixed audience. During the epidemic, everyone has also studied various foods, and cooking teaching programs can be said to have come into being. MBC "White father: Don’t stop cooking" and Olive TV "Home cooking live" have adopted the method of live chef teaching. They were launched on June 20 and 21, and they all started live at 5 pm.

After "Home Cooking Teacher Bai", "Bai Zhongyuan’s Three Heavenly Kings", "Alley Restaurant", "College Feeding King", "Delicious Square" and other programs, "White Father" is another food variety show with Bai Zhongyuan as the core character. This time, Bai Zhongyuan turned into an old father and Liang Shiheng’s partner, guiding the "cooking children" who only rely on takeout to solve three meals a day to cook.

Accustomed to superb cooking skills and advanced dishes, "White father" shows the other extreme of cooking. Zero basic students are introduced to teaching, and the program teaches the most basic foods such as boiling rice, fried eggs, and boiled instant noodles. To fill the time of one hour, Bai Zhongyuan’s teaching is detailed to every step of buying rice, finding pots, washing rice, filling water, etc., which is indeed a bit boring in the eyes of people who can cook.

Each episode of the program connects 49 groups of families, among which there will be students who need special guidance in advance, as well as foreigners, Koreans and other special people, and special places such as camping in the wild. For example, the rural grandpa who appears in several consecutive episodes becomes one of the highlights with various fan operations. In addition to real-time interaction with students, there are also live band performances to increase the interest of the program.

"Home Cooking Live" was broadcast immediately after, hosted by Yu Guixian and Cao Shihao, and each issue invited a well-known chef to give live teaching, such as Li Lianfu, Song Xun, Nan Chenglie, etc. The mode of the program was not much different from "White father". First, the difficulty was raised to an intermediate course, and the dishes included squid fried rice, clam seafood noodles, pork belly and scallion cakes. Second, the students were reduced to 9 or 6 groups, so that more characters could be highlighted.

Although these chefs could often be seen cooking in other shows in Korea, the live online class on the TV screen still brought a new experience to the audience. The live broadcast mainly tested the host’s control of the rhythm, and the chefs without live broadcast experience would be a little busy while cooking and explaining, which was in contrast to their usual steady and sophisticated.

From the perspective of the platform, transplanting online cooking teaching to the big screen can be regarded as a way to fill in the content of the TV station during the epidemic, and the form of live broadcast connection and real-time interaction can also play a better accompanying function. Students gather together through the camera, and the audience can also interact in real time through bullet comments, which can effectively mobilize enthusiasm. After the epidemic period when they were forced to be in a state of social isolation, this kind of clustered and social program is obviously more in line with the needs of the public.

"Can you eat takeout?":

Secondary transformation of mature IP

In March 2018, tvN launched the food business variety "Can you eat well in the local area?", which is led by chefs to go to foreign countries to operate snack trucks and accept the test of locals. So far, it has successfully created three seasons in Thailand, China and the United States. The first season was made by chef Hong Xitian, and the second two seasons were changed to Chinese chef Li Lianfu, selling Korean Chinese food and American food.

Under the influence of the epidemic and unable to go abroad to shoot, tvN changed this IP and launched the Korean local version of "Can you eat takeaway?". After prior investigation, the program team learned that pasta is not often ordered by Koreans because it is easy to swell and dry, and it accounts for a very low proportion in takeaway software.

Therefore, the show will improve this situation as a challenge, inviting Western chef Sam Kim to lead Ahn Jung-hwan, Yoon Doo-jun, and Zheng Shiyun to run an 8-day Italian takeaway restaurant in Seoul’s Yeonam-dong business district. The takeaway restaurant operates during lunch and dinner, and the delivery range is within 15-20 minutes. Food can be ordered through takeaway software or by phone. To rule out the celebrity effect, only the name of the store is "I am Sam" as a hint.

"Can You Eat Takeaway" retains the fixed elements of this series, such as launching different dishes in stages, having different tasks every day, and hiding expert evaluations. However, the scene is limited to the store, and the content focuses on the process of star production and packaging. There is no solicitation link, and there is no picture of guests eating and communicating, resulting in the lack of original highlights.

The solution that the program team came up with was to create a fake show and recruit people to "cloud dinner" together online under the name of the popular "untact culture". The netizens would order the same food from the takeaway shop, learn about each other’s professional identity and other basic information during the waiting process, and complete the ice breaking; after receiving the takeaway, the conversation would focus on the evaluation of the food. The stars in the store can also receive pictures of the meal in real time and hear the real evaluation of the guests. Although it is not as capable of creating various connections with the external environment and guests and launching multiple story lines as the original mobile food truck, "Can Takeaway Eat" can be regarded as a successful transformation under the existing conditions.

The Food Avengers:

Zero-waste restaurants that promote environmental protection

"DASH 0 Yen Canteen" was launched in 2013 by Rijongji "Iron Fist Dash!". Guests visited post stations across the country to collect food discarded by farmers but still edible, and made it into food to entertain the original owners, as a way to call on people to save food. The plan has been highly loved by the Japanese people and has reached a well-known level. In Europe and the United States, in recent years, many catering practitioners have begun to reflect on the problem of food waste in the industry and have launched zero-waste green restaurants.

Olive’s "Food Avengers," which launched in July, uses the same concept to open South Korea’s first zero-waste restaurant with an environmental theme. The show begins by making viewers aware of widespread food waste through a series of numbers. For example, 15,900 tons of food are wasted every day in South Korea. In just 22 beef shops in the Gwangjang Market, 110,000 octopus heads are thrown away in a month.

In order to achieve the goal of making good use of waste ingredients as much as possible, the show uses a cast of half chefs and half stars, including Western chef Song Xun, Chinese chef Liu Fangyuan, Korean chef Kim Bong-soo, Astro Wenbin, actor Wen Jiayun, and Feng Taikui. Guests can apply in advance online to find ingredients, process ingredients, and develop dishes.

It was not easy to develop new dishes using leftovers and consume as much food as possible. Even experienced chefs were worried about this and had disputes over different ideas. Fortunately, in the end, the chefs all succeeded in turning leftovers into treasures, such as mixing ground beef with octopus head to make steak, and whipping egg whites with octopus offal and ink to make fried food, which was well received by customers. And these new products can also be emulated by merchants to reduce the number of discarded ingredients.

It is worth mentioning that each episode of the show obtains discarded ingredients from different channels. For example, the first issue collects ingredients left over by merchants in Guangzang Market, such as onion skins, egg yolks, octopus heads, beef liver, and muscle scraps. The second issue is one step closer to the source, collecting the outer leaves of small cabbage, underweight small cabbage and broccoli bottoms in the field. Chickens that have been raised on farms for too long have been frozen beyond 1kg size, so that people realize that a lot of food is being wasted unconsciously, and the program’s environmental protection advocacy is better conveyed.

Conclusion

Overall, the above shows have both similarities and different angles and cuts. Unlike domestic artists, chefs occupy a major position in these food variety shows. Han Zong is good at making amateurs into stars, and chefs are the most common group. From Bai Zhongyuan to Li Lianfu, Sam Jin and Song Xun who came out of "Please Fridge", they have all become regulars of variety shows. The unified approach of the show is to put chefs in a difficult situation, facing unfamiliar live footage, making takeaway food for the first time, and developing new dishes with leftovers, in order to create a point of view.

Specifically, "White father: don’t stop cooking" and "home cooking live" are both live teaching by well-known chefs, and the difficulty of cooking is different. "Can you eat takeaway?" transforms the original IP, makes Italian takeout in Korea, and changes the guest dining in the store to cloud dinner. "Food Avengers" adopts the concept of zero waste, with the main goal of using waste ingredients, and has carried out a certain degree of innovation in common business models. Combined with the current popular online class and cloud dinner culture, with the theme of promoting consumption and environmental protection, this batch of new food variety shows in South Korea has found different angles and cuts of innovation, bringing a sense of company to people who are eager to socialize after the epidemic.

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