As I watch Eva Bonnet, who runs the Instagram handle @bonjour.mate, list ingredients for a multi-fruit clafoutis in a video barely a minute long, I am reminded of the smattering of French words I learned years ago in a classroom—beurre, sucre, œuf, lait, farine—butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour. Only this time, immersed in Eva’s beautiful kitchen, watching her banter with her son as she mock-scolds him for not eating the fruit before it needed rescuing, I realise I am more likely now to remember the terms than I did back in the classroom.
Sometime around the early 2000s, while doing my master’s, I found I had most evenings free, and a popular, globally recognised French institute offered language classes not too far from where I worked as a novice editor. I decided to enrol on a whim, confident I would enjoy the lessons. Before I knew it, however, I completely lost interest—turns out, reciting conjugations for the better part of the hour-long class was not my idea of learning a new language. Luckily or unluckily, I came down with a bad bout of malaria in just a few weeks and lost enough time to never make it back to class again.
A few years later, I took on the job of an instructor at a company that offered courses in English to Japanese learners. I’d taught a few classes to adult learners earlier, but it was here that I really understood the concept of immersion. Armed with just a basic understanding of English or, oftentimes, little beyond script recognition, students were asked to write full-length essays. Sometimes, we received barely 100-word paragraphs, but that changed completely by the end of the course. Students received feedback in English—edits and line-by-line explanations of the grammatical concepts employed. It may seem like an extreme sport but simply conversing with the students in the language they hoped to acquire worked better than any textbook on grammar would have. One of my students began his first course with a six-line essay and proceeded to do four courses with me over two years, by the end of which he was composing poetry in English. This experience showed me that immersion worked because the learners never forgot they were learning.
And then, more recently, as I scrolled through Instagram catching up on my favourite regional food creators’ work, this concept of immersion came back to me. I wondered if watching food shows on social media channels might be effective low-pressure opportunities for language learning. Was the lure of a new language the primary reason why I returned hungrily (pun intended) to Midnight Diner on Netflix and Bong Eats on YouTube? I began wondering if food videos offered the same low-stress immersion that I had seen work so effectively before.
SENSORY DESCRIPTORS
Language learning slips into our lives unknowingly—through music, foreign-language dramas and films, memes and without us knowing it, through food shows. The sheer volume of culinary media that is now available to us is simply impossible to ignore—it’s on every platform from podcasts to social media to OTT.
Regional food content in India is plentiful with recipe-focused YouTube channels such as Bhat n Bhat (Kannada), Neha’s Cookbook (Gujarati) and Bong Eats (Bengali) rising to popularity alongside global food and lifestyle shows such as Midnight Diner, Tastefully Yours and Street Food Latin America/Asia. Of course, what lures us to these is the tasteful camerawork, the storytelling, and the greed of learning about a new culinary tradition or recipe; not language learning, but a linguaphile has an added advantage, for sure.
Cooking videos are multimodal—the pairing of spoken instruction with simultaneous visual demonstration (a particular cut of potato, the browning of onions, the temperature of oil as it sizzles and receives the ingredient it will transform) allows the viewer-learner to immediately map words into actions and objects.
Before the internet and more recently, content creation, became de rigueur, television was successfully used to establish visual context in order to improve and retain new vocabulary. Culinary vocabulary reinforces this with greater effectiveness given the use of high-utility terms—imperative verbs such as chop, stir, and rest. Or sensory descriptors such as tangy, dry and burnt or simply words that indicate time or number—2 minutes or a short while later.
As Aabha Chaubal, a Pune-based German language teacher who uses cooking media in her lessons notes, verbs such as abschmecken (to season), unterheben (to fold in) and phrases like bei mittlerer Hitze (over medium heat) “stay with you because they’re repeated so naturally” in the context of food. She was most drawn in by German cooking shows where one could “see language in action”.
Apart from internalising the structure and clarity of the language itself, she also found expressions such as aufs Feuer setzen (to put something on the fire), which carry a cultural and historical meaning, pointing to a time before modern stoves.
While exposure to foreign language food shows cannot replace formal learning, Chaubal treats them as an enjoyable supplement for intermediate and advanced learners because they offer a balance of language and cultural insight. She returns often to her favourite German food shows, Deutsche Welle Food, Thomas kocht and Rewe Deine Küche on YouTube.
CINEMATIC APPEAL
It’s easy to see why food shows have that pull. The cinematic appeal of such videos, through closeups of picture-perfect ingredients, onomatopoeic sounds of cooking, and text overlays together throw a spotlight on vocabulary, and these repeated collocations establish recognition and retention, and eventually result in comprehension and fluency.
Krish Ashok, author, content creator and researcher, says that if he finds an interesting dish, he will “go and see 10-12 different versions of that dish” online. In the context of L2 acquisition (second language acquisition), this means exposing oneself to similar lexicons in different avatars—a naturally effective method to internalise new vocabulary.
I couldn’t agree more—Bong Eats, the incredibly popular YouTube channel run by Saptarshi Chakraborty and Insiya Poonawala, can often send me down a rabbit hole from Fish Kabiraji to Fish cutlet to Vegetable Chop, lulled by the sweet words that make up the Bengali culinary lexicon.
As I internalise the methods they demonstrate and apply them to my own cutlet-making exercise, I find words such as the verb “raandhne”, meaning “to cook”, a commonality between a language spoken so far away from my home state here in Maharashtra and the neighbouring Gujarat, where it is abundantly used, too.
Ashok says he deliberately watches shows in as many languages as he possibly can because it is one way to consume a diversity of authentic cooking content from various cultures. “If I’m making pulusu, I want to watch that video in Telugu. If I’m making shukto, I want to see that recipe video in Bengali. Language and food are really part of the cultural continuum of a specific region or community, and they form the basis for the identity of that particular culture,” he says.
He treats watching and analysing thousands of food blogs and videos as an exercise in data analysis—filtering out techniques that matter from those that are just quirks and finding culinary similarities between cultures.
Interestingly, Pranav Joshi, food content creator and researcher, says the differences in approach hit him first, not the similarities. He enjoys a nerdy, almost scientific approach to food, and enjoys shows that break down a technique rather than rely on the narrative strength of the oral tradition. Context matters, he says, and one learns better when one is not learning in a vacuum. So, if language learning can be seen through the lens of food—something we cook, eat, talk about and order everyday—it is more likely to stick easily because it is absorbed in a fun, low-pressure environment.
What makes regional language cooking shows interesting (even addictive) is that they are not regimental classes but narratives that draw you in. Good culinary storytelling unknowingly takes you through migration history, class conflict, and economic change.
Joshi reflects on an Anthony Bourdain episode where he says, “if a tribal chief is offering you the best his people can manage…the least you can do is respect it and eat it”—a quote that made Joshi rethink his perception of Dalit foods traditions such as rakti and mundi, stews made using goat/sheep blood and meat from the head—dishes that were born from a fight for survival and rooted in centuries of injustice. It’s not just language, therefore, that one finds oneself learning; it is also a cultural literacy that can only otherwise be accessible through travel.
THE INFORMAL CLASSROOM
One could credit international television with making the world a smaller place in that regard. Foods we might once have encountered only through travel or books our visual vocabulary through sitcoms, dramas and films.
Characters ordering takeaway Chinese that arrived in cartons, cooking blueberry muffins for breakfast, shopping for stone fruit at farmer’s markets, and so on. The popularity of Korean dramas on OTT platforms is a case in point; repeated exposure to ramyeon, kimchi, tteokbokki, gimbap or soju has created such a curiosity about the flavours and the contexts in which these are eaten that it has resulted in a mushrooming of speciality grocery stores and Korean restaurants. Screen culture, in this sense, has accidentally become an informal classroom for both language and appetite.
But what about languages that we speak already—basic, workable versions, at least—do we find ourselves gravitating to food shows in these languages as well? I may not have exactly enjoyed my lessons in Hindi back in school, but plant me in front of a Raja, Rasoi aur Anya Kahaniyaan episode, and you will have my full attention. Not simply because the series traces the history of regional foods, a subject I always find fascinating, but also because the script and narration is in a Hindi I wish I could speak, and a Hindi that sounds more mellifluous as compared to the local parlance one is used to.
An episode may start with a folk rendition of “Yahaan milega har rason ka ras—yeh hai Benaras (Where every flavour of life can be savoured—this is Benaras)” and leave you with images of chaat and jalebi and thoughts on food critic and historian Pushpesh Pant’s reflection that a “Kashi naresh” (king of Kashi) and a rickshaw puller share the same “santosh” (satisfaction) on eating a street-style breakfast, and that the “mizaaj” or temperament of Benarsi food is an “abhinna” or inseparable component of the region’s folk music, literature, and art.
CONVERSATION OVER DINNER
Of course, one might argue that exposure to food shows could be inconsistent or incidental, which could strengthen passive recognition of a few stray phrases at most, but could it be of productive use? The answer is subjective—productive in what sense? Could one use this knowledge to place an order at a restaurant when travelling perhaps? Or when explaining something about one’s own culture to a visitor from another region? Or could it, as the 1980s film Khoobsurat advocates, lead to nirmal anand—the sheer pleasure of learning a new language?
I stumbled upon a French film from the 1980s recently—Un Dessert pour Constance (A Dessert for Constance), that reaffirmed my belief that one gets attracted to a food medium for reasons beyond a curiosity for recipes and traditions. In this film, the two protagonists, Senegalese immigrants in France, find a 19th century French cookbook, and are fascinated by its language of haute cuisine. Unbeknownst to them, the book becomes an immersive tool that fuels that quest to win a cooking competition on TV.
Their friendly banter reflects their perception of this entirely unfamiliar food world; in one scene, Mamadou, immersed in the book, lists the eight courses of a classic French meal while his friend reacts in part mockery of the fine cuisine standards and part realisation that their working class lives will likely never give them the opportunity to sample such delicacies as a sorbet au rhum between the first and second course or a series of entrements later.
I watched that scene a couple of times to see if I could remember the French names of the eight courses and because that divide between who gets access to what was so universal that I could feel their fascination sitting in a 2026 Mumbai.
We live in times when attention is fragmented, and structured activity of any sort feels regimental and stressful. Food is a unifier and a kitchen, irrespective of whose it may be, offers an environment of familiarity. Similarly, food shows do, in some measure, what good language teachers do—they make language seem less like a lesson but more like a conversation—in this case, over dinner.
Saee Koranne-Khandekar is a Mumbai-based food and fiction writer.