6Topic 5 TV and Food

MCC235 Television, Food and You

FDN102 Food For Thought Lect 15

• Guest lecturerDr Felicity NewmanSemester 2 unit

MCC284 Food, Media

and Culture

Today’s Lecture• TV cookery - early models• Cultural capital - how do cooking/lifestyle

programs teach us to become ‘consuming citizens’?

• What do we “do” with TV cooking programs?• Gender differences on TV• Food as performance• Multiculturalism and Gastro-tourism


TV Cookery – began with…• Fanny Craddock• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2pOFIDUEzk&feature=r

elated• this film was produced by the British Gas Council and features

Fanny Craddock and her husband Johnnie. The film tells the story of a young wife who wants to impress her Mother-in-Law with a fantastic meal.Estimated to be from 1963, this clip is taken from an original 16mm Technicolor print. Shown in two parts.70s

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylphj-LW9q0&feature=relmfu

• Graham Kerr: The Galloping Gourmet 1969 - 1971• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLE22EYmrHQ&feature=r

elated• What has changed?• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L6d0rcWozk


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2pOFIDUEzk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2pOFIDUEzk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylphj-LW9q0&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylphj-LW9q0&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLE22EYmrHQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLE22EYmrHQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L6d0rcWozk

Bernard King King's Kitchen 1980sFlamboyance and sophistication


Posh Nosh


Fanny Craddock -> Delia Smith• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awi1v6nPBQ8&

feature=related• These women taught more than cookery – how to

entertain in middle class fashion• Pioneer of “here’s one I prepared earlier”• Parodied by Posh Nosh can be seen

http://www.abc.net.au/iview/?series=3128320#/series/3128320

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzjR0yL4f0Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awi1v6nPBQ8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awi1v6nPBQ8&feature=related

“Cult” of celebrity chef• These programmes teach us how to become

“consuming” citizens. • They show us how to acquire “cultural capital”

how to perform lifestyle – Pierre Bourdieu - Distinction

• “Cult” ? We worship at Jamie’s table…he has taught young men how to enjoy the kitchen and its products as “lads” should.

• TV chefs have replaced our elders as the source of knowledge


Cultural CapitalJamie Oliver, has been described as having “demystifyed the notion of cookery for a generation of youngsters”, he pays for the supplies he procures, an attempt at “realism”. It is not so much the cooking that is demystified but the social importance of food - food as cultural capitalThrough Jamie we see how food is used to impress, to entertain, to bring together, to reminisce. How food is used to cement an idea of family and community – boys night.


Cultural CapitalNigella does the same thing, cooking becomes part of a whole way of life, a lifestyle, rather than simply a rhetorical exercise in the kitchen. We are taught not so much how to cook food but how to use it. Have Jamie, Nigella and Gordon replaced grandma as keepers of the culture?


The Masterchef Effect

What can we “learn” from Masterchef?

• Gender• Performance• Ethnicity• Cultural capital• Multiculturalism• Modern Australian

cuisine


Is this your dinner plate?Gay Bilson’s critique:“What is worrying is that the huge audience held in sway by the program watched people they could easily relate to aspiring to cook like chefs, slavishly producing pictures on plates … Restaurant food makes up only a tiny percentage of food consumed in this country. Television’s endless parade of food programs gain audience in inverse proportion to the number of people who handle real food and cook good meals”. (2009, 51)Aspirational and unrealistic

http://www.masterchef.com.au/stuffed-loin-of-lamb-with-pommes-gallete-and-beetroot-glaze.htm


Does TV Teach Us How to Cook?

TV is often accused of being shallow, trivial and superficial: all froth and no substance. However, TV is more suitable for presenting certain kinds of knowledge - TV is good at making introductions, while print is a better medium for extended and involved argument. As Joshua Meyrowitz suggests - print is a more suitable medium for conveying complex knowledge and extended arguments.



TV is very suitable for picking up techniques and ideas. If we do decide to have a go ourselves, we probably buy the book or magazine or download the recipe. The relentless marketing of lifestyle TV with its commercial tie-ins (magazines, web sites) reinforces the notion that though TV shows us how things are done, in order to actually do them ourselves, we still need (written) instructions!


Does TV Teach Us How to Cook?• How many of you have ever

bought a cookbook?• How many of you have

watched a cookery program?

• How many of you have cooked a recipe from a cookbook?

• How many of you have cooked a recipe from a TV program?

• Downloads?


Does TV Teach Us How to Cook?Caraher, Lange and Dixon (2000) surveyed over 5,000 English subjects, asking them “How did you first learn to cook?” Here are some results from their survey in 1999 show that most women learn to cook from: 1. their mothers (76.1%)2. cookery classes at school (48.6%)3. cookbooks (25%)4. grandmothers (13.1%)



while men learnt to cook from:1. their mothers (58.3%)2. wives or partners (17.6%)3. cookery classes at school (15%)4. cookbooks ( 14.9%)


Does TV Teach Us How to Cook?A mere 4.5% of women and 4.8% of men claim to have learnt from television. Many respondents saw T.V. cookery offering entertainment but they also made the distinction between teaching and entertaining, with viewers showing preference for programs which entertained. Many respondents insist that they learn a good deal from these programs about other cultures, rather than cookery.Increasingly cookery programs become ‘cookumentary’


This is called “gastrotourism”.• Gastronomic tourism is

becoming increasingly popular with cooking tours becoming the new way to gain “cultural capital”

• Photos of the pyramids impress no-one – you need a local recipe for hummous or camel kebab

• Kylie Kwong: My China


Gastrotourism• The majority, if not all, of Australian programs need some

form of “ethnic cred” in combination with “ocker” Australian. Kylie Kwong, for example, was signed up to do an 8 part series bringing to the screen what she does in her restaurant “re-inventing traditional Chinese favourites”. Lavish production values, highlighted aesthetics are softened by the migrant child narrative...

• Kylie is a fourth generation Australian born Chinese - she has ethnic cred and Ozzie cred and very slickproduction values

• http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1519329/kylies_in_the_kitchen/


TV and Gender• When it comes to TV

cookery different rules apply to men and women.

• The public/private distinction continues- the majority of men cooking on TV are CHEFS - they are trained and certified – making them “authoritative”.

• Perth’s own Anna Gare is a caterer but not a chef


The public/private distinctionThe vast majority of women cooking on TV are not chefs (Delia, Nigella, Stephanie, Madhur Jaffrey, 2 Fat Ladies). Though they may be food writers or even restaurateurs they are generally COOKS, immediately suggesting the domestic context of women in the kitchenDelia Smith’s TV career has been marketed on the back of her hugely successful cookbooks just as Nigella Lawson moved from food writer to celebrity cook.


. (The Cook and the Chef)

The public/private distinction• Male cooks like Rick Stein and

Keith Floyd visit private kitchens in order to bring the domestic setting to their programs, but inevitably they take centre stage to do the cooking themselves.

• By taking themselves on tour they are also fulfilling the hunter-gatherer stereotype required of their gender. Surfing the Menu

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQC-FWRGQuA


male/female public/private binary • Traditional gender divide went out the window with the arrival of The Two Fat

Ladies who defined a new genre of cookery show, paving the way for the Naked Chef and Nigella. (1996-1999)Here are some conventions they flout:

• women tend to eat less meat than men• women are more health conscious than men• women (ladies!) don’t display excessive appetite (Delia Smith for example

manages to cook while barely touching the food and certainly doesn’t eat it!)• women are less bawdy than men• Defy domestic context by going on tour• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9NZ3pq29Aw• Magda Szubanski and Marg Downey• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOoxXXp4zv4&feature=related


male/female public/private binary • Phoebe Shi Chao believes that Jennifer and Clarissa have introduced a new era in

TV cookery. She says:“These women fit several transgressive categories: their obesity, their lesbian-suggestiveness, and, in an age of media-formed esthetics (sic), their age (they are not young and nubile). Unruly women that they are, and Rabelaisian, their bawdy one liners lascivious leers, abrupt guffaws are precisely the signs of carnival.” (1998, 27)

• The 2FL were on television because their transgressiveness is televisual, they

entertained and as such were watched by a very inclusive male and female audience and they did so by stepping out of the roles usually assigned to female cookery presenters. Thus the 2FL brought appetite to the foreground, paving the way for Nigella.


male/female public/private binary

Appetite indeed! Nigella is so at home in her (TV) kitchen or is that so on TV in her home, that she can suck Mozzarella on camera, she even bastes pork in her pajamas. Well, all right they are satin. Nigella and Jamie owe much to the 2FL. certainly Nigella's exuberant use of fat now goes without comment, where the 2FLadies created a sensation when they did this. Jamie and Nigella both inherited the spirit of the kitchen as carnival, and the 2FL made explicit the food/sex nexus, of which viewers have long been aware. Alert!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtS2Ikk7A9I&feature=related


The public/private distinction

The spectacular success of Nigella Lawson, of Nigella Bites, we may attribute to the ‘package’ she offers: she came to TV as a high profile food writer from a high profile British family; her carefully crafted image and exploitation of her children, personal tragedy and glamour cemented her appeal.Run Nigella


• I am not a chef. I am not even a trained or professional cook. My qualification is as an eater. (cited in Scholes 48)

• According to Joanne Hollows, “ Nigella actually ‘refuses the fantasies of the past upon which feminism itself depends, creating in their place an alternative fantastic space that acknowledges that it is a fantasy.’” (49)

• Discuss in class – is she merely recognising the “importance of fantasy in the life of the modern woman” or encouraging unachievable middle class goals a la 1950s?

• Does this elevate the “womanly arts”?• Is this “post feminist” culture?

male/female public/private binary Nigella conforms in many ways to previous models, sticking to the domestic context. Her repositioning of mundane domestic chores as rather, the celestial tasks of the domestic goddess, with the aid of lavish production values, ignores the reality of class structures. She is loved by the middle class, professional men and women for whom a day in the kitchen may well be a novelty, but is this the case for those of us who cook because we have no budget for doing otherwise?Consider Nigella in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” Nigella inherited hers (Nigel Lawson) but we can all enjoy a peep into her designer fridge but we know that this “reality” is as constructed as any of TV’s representations. Does Nigella offer us achievable instruction, or just more of what most of us cannot have?


Heston’s Victorian Feast - Absinthe Jelly

• What Nigella does offer is of course “performance”, her cookery program is immensely entertaining but we are now entering a new zone, where cookery is simply performance

• Heston takes food performance to a new level – don’t try this at home kids!

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2pfhD1Bu4g


Hestons Feasts SBS 1 Thursday 8.30 pm

multicultural identityThese programs, set out to create a sense of community. A virtual-community — a community that can be engaged within the home as sanctuary, providing people to swap recipes with, and a series of food producers and purveyors with whom virtual relationships can be developedThey are vehicles for making sense of the other or as Meyerowitz indicates they help “to decrease the strangeness and ‘otherness’ of the other” (85).

.


multicultural identityThis other, however, is no longer limited to the migrant but has expanded to include other AngloCelts, particularly those in rural Australia, and in a limited fashion, the Australian indigenous population.


multicultural identity• There are very few episodes of indigenous

Australians cooking on Australian television (a notable exception being Mark Olive aka The Black Olive) and very little content which examines indigenous foods presented by indigenous Australians.

• Native Foods• http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/message-stick-

black-olive/clip1/There is however a great deal of attention being payed to “bush tucker” by non-indigenous presenters.


Washing Up

• Many of you watch cookery or food programs –

• Why do you choose these programs?

• what do you gain from them

• Does gender impact on these choices?


References• Bonner, Frances. “Lifestyle Programs: No Choice but to Choose.” Ed. Graeme Turner and Stuart

Cunningham. The Australian TV Book. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. 103-116.• ———. “Representations of the Female Cook.” Ed. Kay Ferres. Coastscript: Gender

Representations in the Arts. Brisbane: Australian Institute for Women’s Research and Policy, Griffith University, 1995. 63-71.

• Bourdieu, Pierre. “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste”. London: Routledge.• Caraher, Martin, Tim Lange, and Paul Dixon. “The Influence of TV and Celebrity Chefs on Public

Attitudes and Behavior Among the English Public.” Journal for the Study of Food and Society. 4.1 (2000): 27-46.

• Chao, Phoebe Shih. “Gendered Cooking : Television Cook Shows.” Jump Cut. 42 (1998): 19-27.• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.• Duruz, Jean. “Cuisine Nostalgie? Tourism’s Romance with ‘the Rural’.” Communal/Plural. 7.1

(1999): 97-108.• Featherstone, Mike. Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity. London: Sage,

1995.


References• Gabriel, Yiannis, and Tim Lang. The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption

and its Fragmentations. London: Sage, 1995.• Gillespie, Maria. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. London: Routledge, 1995.• Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959/1990.• Hage, Ghassan. “Locating Multiculturalism’s Other: A Critique of Practical Tolerance.” New

Formations. 24. Winter (1994): 19-34• ———. “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant

Home-Building.” Ed. Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth, Michael Symonds. Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1997. 99-153.

• Marc, David. “Literacy: Love it or Leave it”, Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy and Long-Term Memory Loss, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

• Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.


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6Topic 5 TV and Food