Good Food, Good Fun: An exploratory study on Italian audience consumption and perception of TV cookery programmes

Since the introduction of digital terrestrial and satellite TV and the advent of food and cooking specialty channels, the food business has definitely transformed the television industry landscape and has brought about an exponential increase in TV cookery channels and programmes worldwide. Following the fil rouge of the food mania on TV, this article assumes that the expansion of TV cookery consumption could be a useful tool to monitor more general social and cultural transformations in modern audiences across trans-national boundaries. This contribution presents the results of an exploratory, empirical study conducted in Italy among a demographically mixed sample of television viewers, both satellite and pay TV subscribers and not, in order to investigate if and how their consumption of televised cookery has changed since the introduction of terrestrial digital television in Italy in 2012 and the subsequent increase in the number of factual channels. The study also aims to find out if and how the Italian audience's perception of this kind of programmes has evolved in response to recent technological advances. Combining the results of focus groups, qualitative in-depth interviews and ad hoc questionnaires, the paper considers recent audience evolution in terms of preferences and consumption habits of both subtitled and voiced-over products of foreign cookery programmes vs. Italian cookery programmes.