Eighteen months ago I got the chance to interview the MasterChef judges on the set of the second series. The interview was supposed to be for a magazine but for various reasons it slipped through the cracks of the published schedule. The interview was too interesting not to share so I have decided to post it here.
I was determined. No questions about cravats. Or about chocolate mousse cakes. Or about being unlikely sex symbols. Or about the endless conspiracy theories explaining why Julie won the first series over Poh or Chris. I had the rare opportunity to get the three MasterChef judges – Matt Preston, Gary Mehigan and George Calombaris - together on the MasterChef set for half an hour and I was going to do my best to avoid the obvious. “We’ll have nothing to say”, Preston joked, when I told him what I wasn’t going to ask them about. Instead, I had developed a raft of question for the trio about food and eating in Australia and why they believed their runaway success of a show had changed the way Australians approach food and cooking.
And indeed there is some empirical data that it has. During the finals week of the first series the market research company Ipsos (of which I am a director) conducted a poll of 1000 Australians that found 61% of those polled felt that watching the show had encouraged them to be more creative when cooking meals at home. I shared this research with Preston, Mehigan and Calombaris and asked them - if their show doesn’t manage to produce any great chefs but changes the way Australians cook, would that be enough for them?
GM: Absolutely.
MP: That’s how we measure our success. I don’t think any of us came into this with any other idea than we might find a good cook who might somehow have a role to play. What we’ve found is the potential for this show to influence people on a far greater, deeper level.
Q: Is that a shock to you?
GM: It’s a surprise but it’s one of my greatest pleasures. Matt and I are both dads and the fact that it’s had such an enormous influence over children is such a great thing, to hear little children talking about food and produce and cooking.
MP: And actually wanting to get in the kitchen. Asking their mums ‘do we have to have sausage rolls, can’t we have a soufflé?’ And mum going off and actually looking up a recipe for soufflé.
GC: I have a couple of mates who tell me their mums are bad cooks. How can you have a mum that’s a bad cook? A lot of people are bad cooks or aren’t prepared to cook because they think it’s scary. I am lucky because in my family, food is natural thing. Its good, its fresh, its healthy, it comes from out of the garden. Every day is a celebration that gets you around the table. And that’s what the show’s done - get people back around the table.
GM: It has crossed a strange number of demographics. I was in a traffic jam - they were digging up Burnley Street in Melbourne - and this big hairy-arsed guy with his stop sign sees me and yells “Yah, MasterChef!” and all the guys down the line did the same thing.
MP: If you look at the changing attitudes to food in this country, food was very much something that happened in magazines but what’s happened with the rise of people like Donna Hay and magazines like Delicious is now it’s very much about people cooking. You are never going to watch So You Think You Can Dance? and crump in the back garden. But you can watch our show and then sit down with your family and eat something you have seen on it. Jamie, Stephanie, all these people have been pushing down this road for years and suddenly its happening. Food is suddenly being seen as a valid part of our lives.
Q: Famous chefs have been around for a long time. How is it different for today’s celebrity chefs?
GM: Of course it’s different. This is the first food program to go free to air on national TV with an audience that peaked at 4.1 million. Even though it’s a food slash other kind of program, that field of influence is enormous. Let’s not ignore the obvious change in how people are marketed to and how people consume. Chefs today are more of a brand than, let’s say, Keith Floyd was or Margaret Fulton was. It has changed. The market is bigger.
MP: What makes Australia unique is that in other countries food programs like Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares run on secondary channels. Australia has a history of running food programs on prime time mainstream channels. That’s unheard of elsewhere. Australians definitely have an interest in food and cooking as a mainstream mass market thing.
Q: Many of our celebrity chefs are male but the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that on the whole women are still responsible for the bulk of food planning and preparation. It’s changing but how can we continue to encourage men into the domestic kitchen?
MP: We need more dads coming home at five and less mums coming home at five.
GM: The biggest threat to family life in general is our working week. We work more hours than we have ever done. We all know what it’s like to run to pick up the kids from after care and run home to feed them something quick before bedtime. That’s a struggle.
Q: That leads me to another question. Generally when you ask people why they don’t cook more or cook different meals beyond their usual repertoire, they say they don’t have time. Do you buy that?
GC: It’s laziness. It’s easy to cook. People have this idea that it’s hard to pop a packet of lentils in a pot.
GM: There is a certain amount of education needed but the reality is when you’ve got kids they need to be in bed by 7:30 and often it’s a struggle to get the family meal on the table by 6 or 6:30. Most of the meals I prepare at home have to be something that takes 20 minutes. For a chef and people that know their food that’s easy but for most people who have other skills it’s not easy.
GC: I come from a family with three kids where mum and dad ran a supermarket. They worked really hard to put us all through school. I have vivid memories of us growing up chopping up potatoes and veggies for dinner. When mum would get home she’d finish the rest.
GM: You have a food family.
GC: A family that loves to eat.
GM: You come from a food culture. And middle Australia doesn’t have that.
MP: Middle Australia has lost that. Once I talked to a number of Australia chefs about the relationships they had with their grandmothers. With the older chefs it was fantastic – the stories they told about granny’s sponge. And then when you got to the guys who were in their early twenties it suddenly shifted to stories about granny taking me for my first McDonalds Happy Meal. All those changes with women not wanting to be seen as ‘nanna’. They were skydiving and parachuting, living their own lives.
Q: George, I have a specific question for you. There was a poignant moment in the first series of MasterChef where you were cooking crumbed lamb’s brains and you said your mum used to cook them for you and tell you they were Chicken McNuggets. I laughed when I heard you say that. Being Italian, every ‘wog’ kid has a memory of when they wanted Vegemite sandwiches instead of the food of their own culture. Looking at Australia now, do you think your children will feel the same?
GC: It’s easy for me to sit on the outside and say ‘this is what I am going to do when I have kids’ but I am going to try and do half of what my parents did. And half of what they did would be pretty good. We never ate processed food. We just ate fresh food simply prepared. And this is what upsets me about the ‘I don’t have time’ excuse. Coming home at night, sometimes it is as simple as beating eggs together and adding some fresh parsley and yesterday’s sausages cut up, served with some crusty bread. That’s beautiful. My grandmothers passed that onto my mother and I have to do my best to pass it onto my kids.
GM: This is where things are changing and this is where MasterChef has made a massive difference. I never had convenience food when I grew up and I used to whinge to my mother when I went to friends’ places they used to get ‘bake in the oven’ chips or Findus crispy pancakes. And my mother was cooking lamb stew and I thought I had the worst mother in the world. When I grew up and became a chef I realised I had a great and responsible mum. She was a working mum but she would have got that from her mother. We’ve lost that with the commercialism and everything is so fast and pressured. It’s a shift of mindset. It’s lovely to see that with MasterChef there has been a shift of mindset in the other direction.
Q: What do you say to critics who have a go at you for promoting supermarkets and paper towels on television?
MP: There is this weird notion that if you do something commercial like an advert you have somehow sold out. If I’d somehow made some political statement about a product I’m advertising or about the morality of advertising itself in the past then this would possibly be a legitimate claim, to the best of my recollection I haven’t, so it isn’t!
GC: My involvement with Coles is in relation to fresh produce – everything from Australian lamb to Crystal Bay prawns to broccoli. If we can get people out of the convenience food isles and into the fresh food section then that’s great. No one does nothing for nothing. I am getting paid for it. I have a belief that we need to change supermarkets in this country. Look at supermarkets in the UK and then look at our supermarkets. There is a big problem with supermarkets in Australia. They are crap, they are rubbish. The majority of people in Australia shop at supermarkets. They can’t afford to eat at restaurants all the time or go to high end providores for their food. That’s the reality. If we can change the product they are getting, and I can help do that then I have made a difference that matters. The people who knock that, I don’t care about at the end of the day.
Q: One of the great things about MasterChef is as a viewer you learned about cooking by watching people you could identify with make mistakes. In the first series we saw Poh struggle and then master the deep fried meringue. She taught everyone – including you guys – a thing or two. What’s the latest new thing you’ve learned about cooking?
GC: Poh was inspirational for me. I learned a lot from her.
GM: We learned from all the contestants. They learned off each other too.
MP: Like Lucas’s dish with the silken tofu.
GM: Or tarragon salt from Julie.
MP: What we have discovered from this show is that good food is not a subjective thing. We three might have disagreed once on something – that’s on how much butter you need to put into mashed potato. That’s one disagreement over 800 dishes. That suggests to me that there is such as a thing as good food and bad food.
Q: I have two final questions – a fun one and a series one. Matt, in your book Cravat-a-licious you have a piece on dirty food secrets, food we are a bit ashamed to say we like. Yours seems to be that white squishy sliced bread. Gary and George, care to share yours with us?
GC: Ham and pineapple pizza.
GM: I have so many. I don’t have any qualms about the fact that I love a whole range of things. I love the squishiest, gooiest French cheese. At the same time I will eat a Kraft single and appreciate it for what it is. I am not a purist.
Q: Finally, I want your response to a quote from the second edition of Michael Symons’ One Continuous Picnic, the seminal history of eating in Australia. In that edition, Symons’ wrote “Australians now eat both much better and much worse” than they did twenty years ago. Do you agree?
GM: I would agree with that.
MP: The truth about Australian society is that we are polarized. People either have a huge kitchen, they buy food magazines and watch MasterChef or they have a house with a microwave and that’s it. People are pulling in different directions. And the purpose of this show is to pull as many people as possible over to our side and to show them there is value in cooking, that you can create great food in short periods of time.
GM: There are a lot of lost people out there who know we need to return to values gone by. I know that sounds a bit wanky. But a lot of us know we work too hard and that the 4 wheel drive and the 50 inch plasma shouldn’t be important as they are. It goes back to simple pleasures and food is part of that.
MP: How did Australians become like this? You take the three most laid-back cultures in the world – the Irish, the Greeks and the Italians, you bang them all in a hot climate and we should have a laid back attitude but we don’t.
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