Without a doubt, one of my favorite cooking shows of all time is Chopped on Food Network. If you haven’t seen this show, contestants are given a basket of three to four different ingredients that they must use to make a dish in a certain amount of time. The dishes are then judged by their taste, originality and creativity.
I don’t have cable. So while at my mom’s house for any length of time, I tend to binge-watch a bit. During a commercial break, Food Network was advertising the new Chopped Cookbook. This book is available to pre-order on Amazon for $17.40 and has quickly risen to best selling U.S. Regional cookbook on Amazon.
This concept behind this book is not a new one–it allows readers to search through recipes by ingredient so that if you have say, a butternut squash in your pantry that you need to use, you can look up a recipe for it in the book. It allows readers to create their own “baskets.” But we have seen this same concept many times before. Supercook allows you to enter in an ingredient from your kitchen, the Power Foods cookbook sorts recipes by ingredient and All Recipes even allows you to enter multiple ingredients.
The Chopped cookbook’s Food Network backing is allowing it to rise to the top before it is even sold–passing up other cookbooks like Power Foods. As consumers, we are so trusting of products that we are jumping to order this book just because “Food Network” and “Chopped TV Series” are plastered across it. What does this mean for the little guys–the “gems?” Why are we, as consumers, so drawn towards large corporations that we are already familiar with? And what does this mean for smaller publishers–will they ever be able to rise to the top?
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