About

Chopped is an American reality television cooking competition show that airs on the Food Network. The show is hosted by Ted Allen and features four contestants. The contestants, usually professional chefs (though some episodes feature amateur chefs), are tasked with cooking a dish in an allotted time frame using four mystery ingredients which usually do not pair well together. The chefs then present their dishes to a panel of three judges who are culinary experts. The judges cut, or "chop," the contestant they feel made the worst dish after each round. There are three rounds: Appetizer, Entrée, and Dessert. After three rounds, the judges pick a winner based on all three dishes the remaining two competitors have made that day. The winner receives $10,000 unless another cash prize is announced. Online, the show's immense popularity has led to fans making jokes in several meme formats spoofing the show's various tropes.

History

Chopped was developed by executive producer Linda Lea, as well as Dave Noll and Michael Krupat.^[1] Its first episode aired on January 13th, 2009, and has run fairly consistently since. As of August 29th, 2017, there have been 34 seasons of the show and 424 episodes, as well as 21 special episodes (YouTube embed of a full episode shown below). Regular judges on the show include Alex Guarneschelli, Geoffrey Zakarian, Scott Conant, Marc Murphy, Amanda Freitag, Aaron Sanchez, Marcus Samuelsson, and more.

A spinoff show featuring competitors aged 9-15, Chopped Junior, was released in 2015.^[2] International spinoff shows include Chopped: Canada and Chopped: South Africa. The show was inducted into the Culinary Hall of Fame in 2012.

Online Presence

The show has an active social media presence, with over 985,000 likes on Facebook, ^[3] though it has no official Twitter account. The Chopped subreddit^[4] has 486 readers as of August 29th, 2017.

Related Memes

As there are over 400 episodes of the show, people have picked up on and jokes about several tropes on the show. For example, Mallory Ortberg of The Toast^[5] wrote an article in 2014 titled "Signs That A Contestant Is About To Lose On Chopped," in which she simply listed quotes often said by contestants about to make a costly mistake, such as “I think I’ll use the ice cream machine" (the ice cream machine is notoriously fickle on the show) and “So I go to the pantry, and I see some lentils, and I think they would make a great addition to the dish. There’s only twenty minutes left, but I think that’s enough time to cook them thoroughly.” Buzzfeed has published several articles^[8][9][10] either lightly mocking silly moments from the show or posting compilations of Tumblr users mocking the show.

People have taken to joking about these tropes in various meme formats. For example, a post by Redditor ajplee to /r/me_irl^[11] joking about Chopped gained over 1,700 points (shown below, left). A popular post by Tumblr user youngjaelesbian^[6] posted August 24th, 2017, used the Distracted Boyfriend template with a Chopped reference, gaining over 18,000 notes on the site (shown below, right). Three days later, Twitter user @hannahberry17^[7] tweeted the image and her post gained over 28,000 retweets and 92,000 likes.

Search Interest

External References