Why children are the better cooks and better people - How MasterChef Junior reinforces the 'taste of luxury and freedom', gives children high culinary capital and portrays them as having a multitude of positive characteristics

Abstract: In this paper I explore how the US-American competitive cooking show MasterChef Junior assigns its 8 to 13- year-old contestants with a notion of strength. In the first part of the paper I will demonstrate how the show constructs different categories of knowledge and values of food and food practices which I will define as soft and hard culinary capital. I will describe how food is presented, how cooking is illustrated and what information the audience can gain from how the jury judges the dishes in the show. The portrayal of food will be categorized with Bourdieu's ideas of 'taste of necessity' and 'taste of luxury and freedom'; the idea of cooking will be analyzed by applying the Kantian categories of 'genius', 'artist' and 'imitator' and the language of judging will be evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. Those findings will demonstrate that the junior cooks posses high hard and soft culinary capital, as they are 'geniuses' and have practical cooking skills, while the viewer can only gain a vocabulary and some rules of how to judge food and express a distinct taste. The second part of the paper will show that the depiction of those young cooks can be seen as opposed to current concepts of children in popular media. I will provide an historical background of concepts of children and an overview of current roles of children in reality TV to demonstrate that children in MasterChef Junior are portrayed as more independent from adults as well as more equal to them than in most current TV roles and concepts of popular media. As a result the paper will explore connections of the visual culture of children and food in an example of the current phenomenon of cooking competition shows between children.