The Gentrification Theory of MasterChef

It all starts with auditions. Contestants introduce themselves while cooking a dish, trying to cram their entire life into it. Forty-five minutes flat isn’t easy—especially with three multi-star Michelin judges breathing down your neck.

They’re all awkward, all a bit clumsy, but they believe in the dream and they’ll do anything to get into the “MasterClass.” They repeat it to themselves and scream it at their judges at regular intervals—YES, CHEF! YES, CHEF! The white apron is the goal.

Between a blunder, a broken plate, and a few tears, they twist themselves into knots trying to finish the test. And, in the meantime, they tell their story.

A relentless background jingle shifts with the emotional temperature of each scene—tracking jokes, details, tics, idiosyncrasies. Trauma. The most dramatic moments happen backstage, in a little “confessional” room where the aspiring cooks spill all their shit. And it’s as if a space-time rip opens inside the Sky studios where they shoot: while they’re dumping all their shit in the confessional, at the very same time they’re still cooking in front of the three judges. The editing, the script, the direction—perfect. In a few minutes of airtime, a human slurry of desperate people gets turned into characters with a storyline. Their misfortunes, after all, are the same ones as the people watching from the couch.

The three judges taste, laugh, sometimes whisper ironic asides (and in those cases subtitles pop up to stretch the audience’s laughter a few seconds longer). Other subtitles translate Chef Antonino’s Neapolitan sketches, as if to underline that down South they speak another language—that Italy is a nation, sure, but not exactly. The marking of accents, idioms, syntax is pushed to the limit. Chef Bruno, speaking in a magnificent Bolognese made of double-breasted jackets and fancy double entendres; Chef Giorgio, laying out theorems on parsley spherification in an aristocratic Varese dialect mixed with English. All three immersed in a globalized gastronomy that quietly carries an intrinsic capitalism—one that looks back to the Middle Ages, to feudalism (lords and serfs), but also to the present, to high finance: feeding whole generations of Western oligarchs with three-star plates.

To the aspiring cooks, the three judges are idols embodying everything that no longer exists—or, more simply, never existed: the American myth of the self-made man, specifically the myth of the dishwasher who, believing—BELIEVE IN YOU! BE CONFIDENT!—in their chances as a modern human being equipped with a cock and/or a pussy, breaks through; and after decades of success (plus a couple of openings in London, New York, and Dubai), devotes himself, as a TV star, to training the next generation.

And like a priest of the religion of business, he’s tasked with deciding who gets in and who doesn’t, in this last-man-standing bloodsport of desire.

This is exactly where—starting from the so-called “selected contestants”—the process of MasterChef gentrification begins to take shape.

But first we need a distinction: the macro-categories the contestants fall into. They’re always the same, though the headcount shifts slightly depending on the political moment in which the show airs.

Here’s the list:

• Africans, Middle Easterners, Southeast Asians, Sino-Koreans with rough backstories.

  They claim they’re perfectly integrated into Italian society, yet they barely scrape by on precarious jobs. They hope to win so they can finally get the fortune they actually deserve. They dream of opening their own restaurant and publishing a cookbook. They’re gold for storytelling: useful for giving the show a decent—if engineered—patina of open-mindedness, and decisive for winning over the silent majority. The politically correct crowd, you know: cheering for them, eager to taste the “flavors of the world,” but also secretly hoping they’ll get eliminated as soon as possible—getting pissed every time they translate a traditional recipe into Cantonese fried rice or four gyoza.They tend to win because, unlike their rivals, they may be the only ones driven (at least at first) by a real feeling—something beyond the mere gratification of a frustrated European ego.

• Anti-speciesist girls with pink/blue hair.Ego aside, they follow more or less the same dynamics as the category above, with one exception: they constantly mention the importance of their partners, with whom they have an open relationship. They struggle with some form of mental illness, and any excuse is good to bring up their parents—the ones they distanced themselves from when they decided to reveal their “true nature” to the world. What unites them, besides anti-speciesism, is having racist parents—except in the rare case where either the father or the mother (never both) understood them and accepted them.They make it almost to the end.

• Half-bald anti-speciesist guys.Often Southern men transplanted to Milan, dressed in gender-fluid outfits (pastel-purple overalls) and—when they aren’t bald—sporting hair that belongs to the macro-category above. Almost always, at a sudden peak of pathos, they reveal an ex-boyfriend met during an unforgettable Erasmus, with whom they lived in Berlin, or in some suburb of Düsseldorf. The relationship cracked after repeated cheating (unlike the pink/blue-haired anti-speciesists, they’re too jealous to do open relationships), but above all because he didn’t make them feel like enough.With their deconstructed pasta e provola e patate, they can only aim for the top ten.

• Old people, 60+.Recently divorced, they join because their kids pushed them into it after a near-fatal midlife crisis—survived thanks to heavy antidepressants, yoga sessions, and summer retreats of transcendental meditation.Middle-bourgeois, liberal-conservative types, they run motivational blogs to help hysterical older women rediscover confidence—confidence they themselves believe they’ve regained by hiding the fear of death behind badly executed gourmet plates. They don’t have real talent in the kitchen—just a kind of “passion,” maybe closer to survival instinct than to cuisine.They haven’t had sex in years and vent by endlessly cracking sex jokes at the judges.They’re almost always eliminated before the semifinals.

• Straight women and men.From eighteen to a hundred, they survive a couple of episodes at most—kept afloat by the last remaining old-school slice of the audience, satisfied with an ass or a pair of tits, maximum: a macro-category on the verge of extinction.

It’s precisely through this subdivision of human elements—and the actions that follow—that, in effect, the “gentrification theory of MasterChef” takes shape.

In every episode, contestants go through a real process of formation, evolving along the hard road of cooking as well as the hard road of existence. Their disgusting creations become “WOW, WOW, WOW!” plates; their defeated, scoliosis-bent backs turn into proud, chest-out, colonial postures. They scream when they win. They rage when they lose. They take pleasure when someone else gets eliminated instead of them. And if they cry, they’re acting. In the MasterClass they learn technique, live together, hate each other, love each other. They probably have sex. They definitely feel things they’ve never felt before. They come out as completely new people—like gentrified cities.

Yes, it’s true: finalists usually don’t become real chefs; they become unbearable content creators. But that’s what happens to any urban zone subjected to gentrification: it loses its identity to big investors. Public housing gives way to massive shopping centers; everything gets “upgraded” according to market laws. The neighborhood becomes fashionable, the perfect spot for an aperitivo, and it loses every trace of charm—leaning on feelings to sell the transformation. So the narrative of the process remains admirable and sweet. And it can be easily projected onto MasterChef contestants: by passing the tests, the off-site challenges, the “Pressure Tests,” they absorb the values the three judges preach from the very first auditions.

Like in a fully completed psychodynamic therapy, a total metamorphosis takes place: from neatly labeled clusters of losers into individual-individualists perfectly integrated into competition. They abandon and renounce their status as a human condominium riddled with bills, trash, and dealers, and rise into a vertical forest, an open-plan apartment, a skyscraper—essentially, a symbol.

They start believing in dreams for real: building, executing, finding the courage that’s been dormant for too long in their forgotten souls, hungry for redemption. As the show goes on, the foundations get exposed more and more: old patterns, self-sabotage, personal tragedies that have become, by now, everybody’s. You can look into the aspiring cooks’ eyes and see yourself again—right there from the couch. Depression, betrayal, beatings, the need to flee a life that no longer belonged to you; being gay in middle school in some small town in the province of Lecce; love—the only possible solution. The strength to make it, despite everything and everyone.

And then come the tears, pouring like rivers amid knives slicing reductions and bisques, topinambur and ginger. Dish names dedicated to a family member who isn’t there anymore.

For the viewer it’s impossible to stop watching, impossible not to get hooked, because in MasterChef everything is so selfish and vile, everything is so fake and banal, that it ends up being so damn true—and moving.

Note: This theory applies to any talent format—for example music talent shows: deeply controversial programs, yet irresistibly gripping.