TV as a Multimedia Synchronous Communication for Cooking and Eating Activities: Analysis of TV Cooking Shows in Hong Kong

TV can be considered to be a synchronous tool for multimedia communication to deliver contents like cooking and eating activities. In this paper, we propose a framework of multimedia for cooking and eating activities. It consists of three facets namely contents, multimedia elements and communication. We demonstrate the framework with an example. Under this framework, we analyzed TV cooking shows in Hong Kong. As food programming takes up more time on our television screens nowadays, we witness a wide range of contents from hobby and leisure to skills and food therapy. The majority of those locally produced TV cooking shows in the Hong Kong broadcast schedules were focused on food services and traveling, introducing authentic restaurant cuisines and encouraging eating out. Shows focusing on instructional cooking skills emphasized ‘taste’ as their key endeavor, healthy eating and balance diets were not so much a concern. Among programs being scrutinized, only one introduced food related knowledge and disseminated nutrition information. Whilst recent studies indicate that cooking skills is highly relevant to healthful food choice, the authors wish to raise apprehension of the issue, with a view to achieve well being and sustain healthy food culture.