Cooking with Conviction

Religion and the Moral Life on MasterChef

My wife and I recently finished watching the latest season of MasterChef, the competitive cooking show with judges Gordon Ramsay, Joe Bastianich, and Aarón Sánchez. We watched the first few episodes as they came out late this spring but then, after a summer hiatus on our part, binge-watched the rest of the season over the past couple of weeks.

We had never watched MasterChef before, but what intrigued us about this latest season was that it was billed as a competition between the generations: MasterChef Generations. For this season, twenty aspiring chefs, five from each of four generations—Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z—were pitted against each other. For the first half of the season, each generation worked as a team. At times this meant collaborating together on a challenge, but more importantly, when the judges selected the chef who had done the best cooking during each episode, the remaining chefs from the winner’s generation were likewise safe from elimination in that round (Spoiler alert beginning here). Naturally, I was rooting for Gen X, but unfortunately my generation was the first to have all of its chefs eliminated. Slackers!

During most episodes, the contestants are given a challenge, a specific set of requirements for a dish they must complete within a certain amount of time. They are then judged on who had the best dish and who had the worst, the latter of whom is eliminated from the show. For the tenth episode, the contestants were required to cook a dish using at least one of several varieties of Blue Moon brand beer. As the chefs got ready to begin cooking, two contestants—Becca Gibb and Fatima Ayotunde—expressed anxiety, both explaining that they don’t drink alcohol for religious reasons. Both went on to participate in the challenge, but they were at a significant disadvantage since neither had experience cooking with alcohol, and both chose not to taste their dishes as they were preparing them, to avoid consuming the alcohol. The disadvantage proved too steep for Fatima, who was eliminated after her dish was chosen by the judges as the worst of that round, but Becca survived. She faced a similar problem, however, in the thirteenth episode, when the contestants were required to cook a dish with coffee, and Becca again explained that her religion prohibits her from drinking coffee. Despite the disadvantages, Becca survived again, and she went on to be one of two runners-up in the season finale.

Although I don’t believe Becca and Fatima’s specific religious affiliations were ever mentioned during the show, the fact that Becca does not drink both alcohol and coffee (and the fact that she is from Utah) gives away that she is Mormon, while Fatima, who wears a hijab, is clearly Muslim. Given the pressures of competition and self-promotion inherent to reality television, I was impressed by the two contestants’ commitment to articulating and following their religious values, even when it put them at a disadvantage. It would have been relatively easy for someone to hide the fact that they were raised with these beliefs and to violate these dietary prohibitions by tasting the food being prepared to check its quality.