Eating Fandom

Intersections Between Fans and Food Cultures

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Julia E. Largent, Bertha Chin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000207002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book considers the practices and techniques fans utilize to interact with different aspects and elements of food cultures. With attention to food cultures across nations, societies, cultures, and historical periods, the collected essays consider the rituals and values of fan communities as reflections of their food culture, whether in relation to particular foods or types of food, those who produce them, or representations of them. Presenting various theoretical and methodological approaches, the anthology brings together a series of empirical studies to examine the intersection of two fields of cultural practice and will appeal to sociologists, geographers and scholars of cultural studies with interests in fan studies and food cultures.

1 Introduction

Food culture and fandom

CarrieLynn D. Reinhard , Julia E. Largent, and Bertha Chin

Food matters. Not just for health and sustenance. Food binds communities together through shared experiences and meanings. Food cultures are traditionally communities built around specific food practices. Whether based on sports or media, fandoms increasingly replace traditional communities due to the modern online, global, and mobile world. Fandoms, then, have become sites for emerging food cultures. Any food, cooking technique, or culinary tradition can become distinct and elevated in an individual’s life when it is tied to a fandom-specific special event, person, or even text. When the emotional attachment of that special thing includes the food, food becomes more than just sustenance. Food becomes integral to fandom.

Nevana Stajcic wrote about the need to see food as a form of communication, as it helps to mediate and negotiate the relationships among individuals, their communities, and their cultural traditions. Food can become embedded with meanings as any other symbol or sign used to communicate between people and across time and space: “it is a nonverbal means of sharing meanings with others” (7). Given this reading, food—and here, we also include culturally important beverages such as coffee and tea—can be analyzed for how it serves as a communication vessel and topic for conveying sociocultural values, ideas, hopes, and fears that reflect, reinforce, and even shape individual and communal identities. Thus, food is more than just the means of sustenance; it can also become the means for understanding oneself and others and expressing those understandings. Such actions of understanding and expressing are commonly researched in fan studies around media texts and sports.

Those in both the food industry and the entertainment industry are paying attention to these intersections. Celebrity chefs will craft their personas and media appearances to create and maintain an energized fanbase willing to buy products beyond just their dishes and cookbooks (see Brien, Rutherford, and Williamson). Marketers who create transmedia campaigns to appeal to fans will approach those fans through their stomachs, such as renting food trucks to appeal to Game of Thrones fans—creating “miniature fan conventions” as fans converged around this foodie event (Hassler-Forest 687). Across academic and corporate circles, more people are paying attention to how fans are eating their fandoms.

This chapter provides an overview of the emerging focus for understanding fans, fan communities, and fandoms that lies at the intersection of different disciplines, such as fan studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and culinary studies. This focus concerns understanding how food becomes involved in a fandom, either as the source of the fandom or involved in the fan’s or entire fan community’s activities. In essence, this field of fan studies considers how fandoms relate to food cultures.

A food culture refers to the individuals, networks, and institutions involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of food, as well as the norms, beliefs, artifacts, and activities that constitute and circulate through that culture. Food cultures vary across nations, societies, cultures, and historical periods, with trends and techniques adapting and shaping attitudes, practices, and consumption habits. Thus, a food culture can be dependent upon, and influential to, a specific community. As a fandom can represent such specific communities, fan studies scholars are now turning more attention to how fan communities view and use food as part of the practices and values that constitute that collective, or how fan practices are being replicated in the relationship between foodies and food producers. Additionally, with the perception of fan identities as involving certain affective, cognitive, and behavioral components, the conceptualization of what is a fan can be extended to understand “foodies” within a food culture and see them identifying as a “fan” of a specific food, culinary school, technique, and so forth. Both culinary professionals and foodies could thus be classified as fans, and the networks and institutions that constitute the food culture could be studied for how they create and maintain such food-based fandoms.

Overview of food culture studies

Food exists at the intersection between biological sustenance, physical goods, and sociocultural meanings. The materiality of a food industry, the values of a food culture, and the relationships of a foodscape exist in any dish (Johnston and Baumann 3). “Food plays a structuring role in the social organization of a human community” (Poulain 1); the importance of food lies in how vital it is “in the creation of meaning, the construction of bonds of solidarity and attachment, and the creation of everyday forms of politics” (Johnston and Baumann 31). A food culture or foodscape could be as small as the attitudes and practices of an extended family’s meal habits for a particular holiday, or as large as a nation’s appreciation of a specific dish as representative of that nation’s identity. From a sociological or anthropological perspective, food links a person to social, cultural, and national norms, drives, customs, and identities (see Germov and Williams; Gofton; McIntosh; Murcott; Poulain). People derive pleasures not just from fulfilling their biological needs with the food they consume; the person’s society, culture, and nation inscribe meaning into those foods, and consuming those foods means that the person is also engaging with those meanings and thereby relating to the larger communal forces in their lives. Food is a social construction, as symbolic of larger meaning as any other system of signs that circulate within a community.

Being a member of a food culture helps a person learn what is appropriate and inappropriate for food production and consumption, as those norms shape, reflect, and reinforce ideological perspectives. Food is part of the world, and thus food can be used to communicate about the world and how to live with it. Thus, vegans and raw food enthusiasts have different relationships to food and the world than hunters or snout-to-tail enthusiasts. Locavores think about their relationship to the world differently than fast food purveyors. As discussed by Meredith Abarca and Lucy Long in this collection, studies of food cultures seek to understand how people interact with food, or with each other around food (see also Anderson; Germov and Williams; McIntosh). Such work seeks to understand the complex ways in which people, their communities, and the nature of food interact with one another to form habits, tastes, preferences, and appetites.

Studying food cultures can involve a variety of questions by seeking to understand “the myriad sociocultural, political, economic, and philosophical factors that influence our food habits—what we eat, when we eat, how we eat, and where we eat” (Germov and Williams 5). Studies look at food systems for how food is produced and circulated. Sometimes the focus is on the nutritional value and health of the food being produced and circulated. Other research considers matters of social class and hierarchy as they relate to tastes and sociocultural values (see Johnston and Baumann). Sometimes the focus is on how different norms and identities form around and become enmeshed in the food’s production, circulation, and consumption. Studies from a functionalist perspective seek to understand how food represents social relations and structures, while studies from a structuralist perspective consider how a society or culture informs specific rules regarding food production, distribution, preparation, and consumption (see Mennell, Murcott, and van Otterloo).

These different sociological and anthropological approaches to food demonstrate a field of study concerned with understanding the roles food plays in an individual’s life and a community’s formation and maintenance. While entire nations, ethnic cultures, and regional communities tend to be the food cultures studied with these approaches, fandoms and fan communities have emerged as another location to study these relationships, practices, and meanings surrounding and embedded in food.

Overview of fan studies

Already an interdisciplinary field, fan studies draws on theories and methods from various academic disciplines to understand what it means to be a fan, to be part of a fan community, and to have a fandom. It consists of different disciplines and methods, all focused on defining, exploring, understanding, explaining, predicting, and criticizing fans. Whatever the approach, it begins with a definition of “fan.”

Typically, this definition begins with a conception of someone having a “positive emotional engagement with popular culture” (Duffett 17). At the same time, this affective aspect could involve immensely negative emotions, such as hate-watching, resulting in a perceived antifandom. Other definitions add a cognitive dimension to this basic affective foundation, such as engaging with texts to understand the world, construct meanings, identify with others, adopt ideologies, and so forth (see MacDonald). On top of these cognitive and affective dimensions, then, emerges a behavioral aspect, as fans regularly engage with the text or object of affection (see Sandvoss). In a sense, then, someone’s fandom represents their attitude toward some object of affection. “Breaking down being a fan to these constitutive, attitudinal elements allows comparison of fans across different fandoms, as well as the processes involved in fandom” (Reinhard 4). On an individual level, being a fan means repeatedly returning to something to which one has a positive emotional connection and uses to, in some way, relate to and make sense of their lives, others, and the world.

This individual level, however, is usually not enough for understanding what it means to be a fan or to have a fandom. In addition, to understand a fan requires an understanding of their communal, social, and cultural relations: “One becomes a ‘fan’ not only by being a regular viewer of a particular program but by translating that viewing into some kind of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the program content with friends, by joining a ‘community’ of other fans who share common interests” (Jenkins 41). Indeed, any “social dimension of fandom can intensify the cognitive, behavioral, and affective aspects of being a fan” as well as allow fans to co-construct each other through “establishing the boundaries and expectations for their interacting with one another” (Reinhard 4). The object of affection lies at the center of the individual and communal levels, “but fans only recognize themselves and others as fans by how they engage with one another in the community that emerges around this object” (Reinhard 4). Fan studies, then, can understand how an individual views themselves as a fan, or how they view themselves in relation to a community, or how a fan community views itself—or all three as they relate to one another.

Fan studies tackles many questions, from exploring and explaining different fan practices and perspectives to critiquing social and cultural practices involved in fandoms. Overall, the historical trajectory of such studies has gone “from categorizing and understanding such individuals as ‘fanatics’ to appreciating and even celebrating their active participation in modern capitalistic economies” (Reinhard 4–5). Fan studies truly emerged and gained legitimacy as a scholarly discipline during the “‘Fandom is Beautiful’ phase” that sought to normalize fans and redeem them from the label of “fanatics” by studying fandom as the means to resist sociocultural or economic conditions or as just a regular function of everyday life (see Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington). Fandom became conceptualized as “how we make sense of the world, in relation to mass media, and in relation to our historical, social, cultural location,” thereby explaining “what it means today to be alive and to be human” (Jenson 312). As everyday life also involves tension and strife, contemporary fan studies does study the darker side of fandom and fan communities, such as antifans and fan harassment. However, most fan studies remain focused on understanding fan practices, whether as individuals or communities, and how those practices impact people’s lives and relationships.

Food as popular culture

Fan studies often aligns with popular culture studies, from the perspective that fan communities represent a populace that has coalesced around some text, thereby demonstrating the popularity of that text for that specific era or over a length of time. Popular culture studies emerged from a critical distinction regarding low and high culture, and the need to celebrate low culture as being the culture of the masses. As mentioned, fan studies also emerged from this need to reconceptualize fanatics from obsessive actions to common, everyday practices. Over the past decade, if not longer, social and cultural conceptions of food have also changed, with distinctions between low and high culture being reworked: high culture food has become more available to the wider populace, and low culture food has increasingly been celebrated (see Johnston and Baumann; Parasecoli). In this way, food has become another aspect of everyday lives studied as a popular culture phenomenon. For some researchers, the focus is on a specific type of food culture, such as beer culture as a popular culture, or more generally considering food in popular culture.

With so many different approaches possible for studying the intersection of food and popular culture, these studies exist under the interdisciplinary umbrella of popular culture studies, various disciplines have offered diffe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Food culture and fandom
• 2 Food studies: The language and narratives that define us
• 3 Food and fandom: A folkloristic food studies perspective
• 4 In search of “Hestonthusiasts”: Heston Blumenthal’s liminal celebrity chef status and hybridized fan practices
• 5 Poaching from the preserves: Navigating the Food Network’s nomadic fandom
• 6 Food poisoning: The Rick and Morty Szechuan Sauce debacle and the temporalities of toxic fandom
• 7 Learning how to cook without lifting a knife: Food television, foodies, and food literacy
• 8 A layover of food: Understanding Anthony Bourdain’s approach of describing cultures through culinary interactions and journalism
• 9 Consuming butlers and curry buns: Cooking, becoming, and desiring with Black Butler
• 10 The promise of cake: Food fandom, tourism, and baking practices inspired by Portal
• 11 Making and marketing fan food and drink: Immersion and transformative work
• 12 The “eatymologies” of the theme park: Re-creation, imagination, and the “extra/ordinary” in Disney foodstuff
• 13 Taste culture: Fan food as sensorial play and pilgrimage
• 14 Procaffeinating: Mapping regional coffee fandom via social media
• 15 For the love of beer: Craft beer fandom
• Index