Who doesn’t love watching a cooking show? However, once you’re a parent,, what used to get you through your hangover on a Saturday or Sunday morning is now the accompaniment to hectic family life. The nice news is that cooking shows are good fodder for your kids. At least that’s according to research.
In fact, a new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, suggests that children aged 10 to 12 are nearly three times more likely to make healthy eating decisions after watching TV cooking shows featuring healthy food. Reason enough to get them started young.
There are, of course, loads of cooking shows about, but there’s a difference between a show that makes kids excited about the world of nutrition and one where Gordon Ramsay keeps shouting at people until they cry. So here’s our pick of the crop.
1) Cookie Monster’s Foodie Truck
Arguably the greatest thing on YouTube, Cookie Monster’s Foodie Truck follows the exploits of Sesame Street’s biscuit-loving beast and his chef sidekick Gonger as they run a hipster food truck, making different vaguely healthy snacks. Every episode works to a formula – they receive a request from a kid (or occasionally a celebrity – Zooey Deschanel, Ellie Kemper and Jenny Slate have all made appearances), realise they’ve eaten one of the key ingredients, visit the farm it’s grown on, put everything together and launch the finished product out of a trebuchet – but it’s amazingly watchable, thanks mainly to British puppeteer Warrick Brownlow-Pike’s hilarious performance as Gonger.
Watch Cookie’s Monster Foodie Truck on Sesame Street’s YouTube channel
2) My World Kitchen
CBeebies’ My World Kitchen is a pleasant, upbeat look at food from all over the world, accompanied by the soothing tones of all round legend Ainsley Harriott. Learn how to make everything from Chilean sopaipillas to Australian meat pies. The whole thing is a delight, a genuine celebration of multiculturalism and trying new things, with a different adorable child making amazing-looking international food every time, plus there are sneaky educational bits about the history and geography of different countries casually sprinkled in.
Watch My World Kitchen on the CBeebies channel, website and iPlayer.
3) Nailed It!
The perfect antidote to, well, perfection, Netflix’s magnificent Nailed It! is a glorious celebration of failure, a tribute to not letting being rubbish at something stop you doing it. Contestants compete to make beautiful cakes, almost all of which end up looking absolutely awful, all while host Nicole Byer laughs her head off at their terrible efforts. It’s amazing, endlessly watchable with or without your children and weirdly inspiring.
4) Charli’s Crafty Kitchen
This absurdly popular YouTube show is hosted by a pair of young Australian sisters who make fairly healthy food about half of the time and ridiculous stuff the other half. Despite occasionally veering into tweeness, there’s some really great stuff here – mistakes are left in so there isn’t the veneer of flawlessness you sometimes get on YouTube, and you’ll get endearingly weird moments where the hosts confuse themselves and say things like “G’day, the main ingredient in this is a spatula”.
5) The Great British Bake-Off
Born on the BBC, then cherry-picked by Channel 4, there are now seven series of the world’s most wholesome prime-time hit on Netflix – hundreds of hours of nice people baking stuff in a big-ass tent. There are much worse ways to learn about fancy bread than seeing pleasant people get extremely stressed making it. “My daughter first discovered Junior Bake Off and watched it religiously every evening after school,” says Matt, dad of five-year-old Mabel. “She would pick her favourites for Star Baker and get genuinely sad when someone had to leave but reasoned that they’d probably had a really fun time. She’s now working her way through old series of the adult show. I have no idea what she makes of Paul Hollywood, but she seems to enjoy it.”