Is this the end of celebrity chef era — or just a new course?

So, who was your first celebrity chef crush? Who did you gaze at with slack jaw and wide eyes as they performed on television or social media? Who made you swoon and shout at the screen: “I want to eat that right now!” Who made you hungry for more? Mine was Keith Floyd in the 1980s. Food programming had never seemed quite so cool and messy.

He made cooking and eating seem like an act of visceral, hedonistic, unadulterated pleasure, and the chaos of it all was joyful to behold (chaos relative to what had gone before, anyway). And then, when Marco Pierre White published White Heat in 1990, well, things would never be quite the same again. In my new book, Blood, Sweat and Asparagus Spears, I explore how the 1990s saw chefs emerge through the swing doors out of the kitchen and into the maelstrom of mainstream media attention for pretty much the very first time.

Sure, we’d had Fanny Cradock on our TV screens, Philip Harben, a posh American chap called Robert Carrier and the Galloping Gourmet, but the 1990s saw a full-flavoured boom in new TV programming and cookbooks started flying off the shelves like loaves from a baker’s oven. The 1990s were the start of the decade of the “celebrity chef”, which gathered pace into the new century. The chefs themselves were the stars for the first time. But with the fast-changing media landscape we have today, is the love affair over?

Public relations guru Alan Crompton-Batt is usually credited as the godfather of celebrity chefs in this country, but it wasn’t a mantle he wanted to carry, or actually deserved. He had certainly helped shine a light on chefs such as Nico Ladenis and White, but Crompton-Batt’s focus was never on getting his clients gigs on light entertainment TV shows. The Likes of Nico and Marco fostered an edginess, a soupçon of danger, and you’d better not ask for salt or your steak to be well done!

Marco Pierre White was focused on gaining three Michelin stars, which he achieved in 1995 — the first Brit to do so — and it wasn’t until much later that you’d find him hawking chicken stock. Early celebrity chefs found fame on TV shows such as Ready Steady Cook and were part of a growing national fascination with matters of food. As their stock rose, a cookbook and TV show usually followed, and their restaurants (if they had one) got more bums on seats.

With Waitrose Food Illustrated first publishing in 1998, and Delia Smith ruling the roost at Sainsbury’s Magazine for a good proportion of the decade, food and cooking was on its way to becoming a national obsession. But according to stats from Ampere Analysis, commissions for food programming in the UK are down 40 per cent on last year. What’s happening? Aren’t we hungry any more?

Indeed, we are, for this is all about consumption. How we consume our media is different. Television, if not exactly yesterday’s chip paper, is no longer the first port of call for today’s foodies. Anyone wanting to “tell their food story”, be they a chef or a keen marketeer with a clever idea and zippy turn of phrase, needs to be digital. If Jamie Oliver were 20 and not 50, he wouldn’t be pitching his idea to a TV exec, he’d be doing it himself on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. And you know what? He is doing it. Jamie Oliver has 10.6 million followers on Instagram. Gordon Ramsay has 19.4 million. Perhaps the drop in food programming says more about the state of the TV industry than it does about celebrity chefs. It reflects the fact that young people are consuming their media differently, and the savviest chefs know that.

And just maybe, there’s been a saturation of food programming; I imagine they could roll repeats of our favourite cookery TV for decades to come and you still might not see the same programme twice. Food podcasts now feed us the chefs’ stories in their own words — the likes of The Go-To Food Podcast, The Spectator’s Table Talk and Dish with Angela Hartnett and Nick Grimshaw.

The digital landscape can satisfy our hunger in moments, and food looks beautiful through a good camera lens — just perfect for the bite-sized format of your phone. Whether you follow a young creator such as Em the Nutritionist or are sticking with Jamie, you can find a recipe in minutes, even while you prowl the supermarket shelves. But even these new creators have dipped their toes into the old world, too, with Em’s book, Live to Eat: The Food you Crave, the Nutrition you Need, riding high in the Amazon charts.

But what’s No 1 in books on Amazon as I write, even beating Richard Osman’s latest murder mystery? Why, it’s only Jamie Oliver’s Eat Yourself Healthy. If we’re looking for a theme, there it is right in front of us. It’s no surprise, then, that Heston Blumenthal has just revealed a new Mindful Experience menu at the Fat Duck, aimed at those who want the same bang but with a health-driven twist.