Collins, a college librarian with a lifelong love of cooking shows, gives a decade-by-decade breakdown of the evolution of TV cooking as a dead-accurate social barometer. From providing helpful hints for homemakers in the 1950's, catering to the lavish lifestyles and culinary excess of the 80's and satisfying the celeb-hungry, reality-crazed audience of the new millennium, Collins examines how far cooking programs have gone to adapt their content, style and character to both suit and define various moments in the 20th century. Her thorough research is spiced with anecdotes and personal testimonials from chefs, historians and foodies about the world of TV cooking and the eccentric personalities that populate it.

TIME Magazine

"Cooking is so huge on television today that it has made chefs as famous as movie stars. From the earliest days of flickering black-and-white sets, food shows have infused the tube with class and character that makes this one of the richest genres of programming. It is about time this fact was recognized and explored in depth, with insight and good humor, as it is in Kathleen Collins' Watching What We Eat. This is a book not only for foodies, but for anyone with an interest in this vital vein of American popular culture." --  Jane and Michael Stern, authors of Jane and Michael Stern's Encyclopedia of Pop Culture (HarperCollins) and American Gourmet (HarperCollins)

"In her lively and informative narrative of television food shows, Kathleen Collins captures the phenomenal growth of food as entertainment, what has  evolved into a new form of spectator sport in America. The rise of TV celebrity chefs within the context of the nation's growing sophistication about food are stories that needed to be told, and Collins has told them well." --   Barbara Haber, food historian, author of From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals (Penguin)

"Dione Lucas started them in the 1940s, Julia Child popularized them in the 1960s, and the Food Network hit them out of the park in the 1990s. Since the dawn of TV, cooking shows have captivated Americans, and in Watching What We Eat Kathleen Collins explains why. With an easy wit and a "me, too" voice that pulls readers right in, Collins charts the rise of TV cooks as educators, mentors, entertainers and co-conspirators; indeed, as beloved, central and enduring characters in our national pop culture." --  Adam Ried, Equipment Guru, PBS' "America's Test Kitchen"

"[Watching What We Eat] is bound to become the go-to reference for anyone who wants to learn about this important, compelling aspect of food's mass-mediation in the modern age."-Gastronomica

"What makes [Watching What We Eat] both more interesting and important, however, is not so much a review of all the people and programs, but rather its insignt into such programming as a social barometer of changing American life... Based on extensive interviews as well as archival work, this is a delightfully written record of a type of program all too often overlooked in the past."-Communication Booknotes Quarterly