Grace Dent on landing the Masterchef job, AI and what she eats at home

Food critic Grace Dent has described the moment she learned she had got a job on Masterchef as “emotional”.

Dent, who was speaking at Campaign's Media 360 event, explained how she was in a chemist in east London when her phone rang. 

“I saw the name and said, ‘I’m taking that call’. The person from the BBC said, 'We have got it over the line; we’re going with you’. I was emotional. It was a job that my parents would understand.”

Dent and chef Anna Haugh replaced Gregg Wallace and John Torrode as presenters on cookery show after their controverial departures. The first season with Dent and Haugh presenting and judging is currently airing on BBC One.

In an interview with Campaign UK editor Maisie McCabe at Media 360, Dent said while that filming the show the team is “pretty much locked inside [the] studio. I spend April to September blithely smiling at scallops.”

When asked about what she liked to eat at home, Dent described arriving for filming in the morning. She said: “You are starving but you can’t eat, because you are going to taste food. You have a little bit of all of them; you feel full and sick at the same time. You have lunch but you don’t feel like eating, because you feel sick. You go home and you have had 2000 calories but you haven’t had anything substantial. I have Crunchy Nut Cornflakes or porridge.

“I sometimes walk past M&S Simply Food and think, ‘They have invented something last week’, like a strawberry and cream sandwich. I go back to my ‘palatial’ BBC flat and sit in my jogging bottoms eating complex carbs.”

She said the show was “bound to be different” with her and Haugh as hosts. “It would be weird if I was standing there doing an impression of the [former] hosts. I bring a different approach and energy to the show.”

Dent said that she “found her voice” as a writer in 1998 while writing for The Guardian’s culture supplement The Guide, having landed a job there after writing a piece on MTV Cribs following a trip to the US. “I wrote in my voice with lots of slang,” she said. 

She also wrote a column on soaps called World of Lather before moving into restaurant reviews, which she describes as “delivering an opinion, keeping it funny, keeping it authoritative”.

Dent said she came from a working-class background in Cumbria, explaining: “I don’t come from a family where anybody wrote. We are not an academic family, or anyone had a career. People did piecemeal jobs. To be creative in my family was frowned upon. I used to write a diary that my mum would read while I was at school and pick me up on things I had done.”

Concerning the rise of AI, Dent said she used narration software but had to edit it. “I have to go back and put myself back in.”

She added: “Could Claude write my column in my voice? I think so.” But she said if a piece were longer, “it would break away from my voice and you would be able to tell it was Claude”. 

When McCabe read examples of Claude rewriting her previous restaurant reviews, Dent said: “It has taken soul out of it, the spikiness. I think there is a danger we can all end up sounding like AI.”