From New York Times:
In a world of glossy food magazines, $50 cookbooks and television hosts who seem to care more about make-up than marinades, a quieter, cheaper and decidedly more old-fashioned way to explore cooking is getting new play. Driven by inexpensive podcasting equipment, the freedom of the Internet and a nation obsessed with what it eats, food broadcasting is more democratic than ever.
At the top of the market is the polished work of the Kitchen Sisters, a pair of Bay Area women whose National Public Radio series “Hidden Kitchens” this year became the first piece of food journalism to win a duPont-Columbia Award, widely considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcast journalism.
At the bottom with a bullet are hundreds of food podcasters, whose ranks have been growing in number and quality almost daily. Since the summer of 2005, when Apple first offered an organized way for people to file and find podcasts, the company’s list of free food-related shows to which listeners can subscribe has grown to more than 300.
Fans of the medium say that radio taps deeply into one’s food memories, feeding directly into the brain in a way the written word can’t. Where television cooking evokes a sort of slack-jawed passivity, radio requires the listener to hear the sizzle of butter and bread on a griddle and conjure the sight and smell of a grilled cheese.
