Food Media

Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference

Signe Rousseau

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857850836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There have been famous chefs for centuries. But it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the modern celebrity chef business really began to flourish, thanks largely to advances in media such as television which allowed ever-greater numbers of people to tune in. Food Media charts the growth of this enormous entertainment industry, and also how, under the threat of the obesity "epidemic, " some of its stars have taken on new authority as social activists, while others continue to provide delicious distractions from a world of potentially unsafe food. The narrative that joins these chapters moves from private to public consumption, and from celebrating food fantasies to fueling anxieties about food realities, with the questionable role of interference in people's everyday food choices gaining ground along the way. Covering celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Rachael Ray, and popular trends like foodies, food porn and fetishism, Food Media describes how the intersections between celebrity culture and food media have come to influence how many people think about feeding themselves and their families - and how often that task is complicated when it need not be.

Part I

Food Media: A Fantasy Industry

The two chapters in this section describe the growth of food media alongside post-war technological, industrial and cultural developments in the twentieth century. As food has become more mediated, so too have our engagements with it become more vicarious. One result of this is an experiential estrangement from food which in turn fuels the ‘need’ for ever more food media, and food personalities, some of whom take on the role of new authorities on how to live.

Chapter 1 details the ascent of food as both an academic and a popular subject, including the more elite ‘foodie’ publications like Gourmet magazine in the United States and the nascent cult of personality around Elizabeth David in the United Kingdom. Key in this narrative is the changing role and use of media, as highlighted by the contrast between the wartime interventions of the British Ministry of Food and the controversial debates around choice, responsibility and authority—in short, the perceived interference—generated some five decades later by Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners television series. (This prefigures the discussion in Part II, when Oliver’s own Ministry of Food and Food Revolution series take as their task addressing the obesity ‘epidemic’ that is the subject of the final chapter of this book.)

Chapter 2 examines the route of food publications from specialized to generalized knowledge, and how the commonness of these representations generates food as a commodity fetish. Added to the example of Elizabeth David are those of M. F. K. Fisher and A. J. Liebling, whose works have been interpreted by modern readers as ‘philosophies’ of eating and as grounds to eat now. These readings exemplify the Althusserian principle of interpellation (how we respond to being ‘hailed’, or directed, by media) and also point to a general lack of an uncomplicated and lived, rather than mediated, relationship to food and eating. Together, these chapters delineate the circular logic of docility in the attention economy of food media: the more information available, the less we need to—or seem to—learn or remember, and the more, therefore, we need to be guided.

–1–

The New Study of Food

Chef Mario Batali, on the Subject of Cooking

In 2006 an ancient manuscript called Apicii—De Re Coquinaria underwent the most recent of several restorations to ensure its survival for the next millennium. Bearing the name of Roman epicure Marcus Apicius, the text dates to the fifth century, making it the oldest surviving cookbook. The press release announcing the completion of the project explained the manuscript’s importance: ‘The work has proved invaluable to classical and medieval scholars and culinary historians and is still used extensively by top chefs around the world, including Mario Batali who kept a copy of the published work in his back pocket during a tour of Italy’ (Young 2006). The existence and preservation of De Re Coquinaria —Latin for ‘on the subject of cooking’—is a good reminder of a curiosity about food that potentially dates to the beginnings of language and communication. By telling us something of the way that some fifth-century Romans ate, the manuscript gives us a glimpse into a previous way of life, a way of eating and, most important, a way of representing that life and that food. Centuries after its compilation, De Re Coquinaria is clearly a work of great historical value.

The story of that work in Mario Batali’s back pocket is intriguing because it gestures jointly to a history of food, a history of the representation of food and, perhaps most interestingly, a representation of that history. Armed with recipes from the Roman Empire, Batali, like the title of his 2005 cookbook (and accompanying Food Network show from 1997 to 2007), is Molto Italiano: very Italian. This story, then, is also about making history appetizing to the average consumer. Incongruous as it may seem, Batali’s back pocket makes history sexy.

There is a good reason for this. He may be no David Beckham to behold, but Batali is a celebrity in all senses of the word. He is an award-winning chef and restaurateur, author of cookbooks (including one for NASCAR fans), food television personality and Iron Chef contestant, not to mention an (in)famous wearer and brand ambassador of bright orange Crocs (now manufactured as the Bistro Mario Batali Edition). This proved the right ‘combination of earnings and sizzle’ for chef Batali to make it onto Forbes magazine’s Celebrity 100 list in 2006, to be named in 2007 as one of the ten most influential chefs in America and in 2008 as one of the ten top-earning celebrity chefs. In April 2007 Playboy Brazil ran a day-in-the-life-of feature on Batali—perhaps an obvious nod to the idea of food porn, though just as likely an affirmation of the fame of a man who regularly hangs out with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow (also co-presenter on his 2008 PBS show, Spain… On the Road Again), Michael Stipe and Bono.

In short, this is a man whom people know, and judging from his expanding empire, this is a man whose food people want to eat and watch; whose books, cookware and wine they want to buy—despite his reported claim that ‘No one chases me down the street. I’m not the Beatles. I’m a fucking cook’ (Heilemann 2008). This is also a man whom people trust, and he does not disappoint. As a Chicago Tribune writer put it in an article called ‘Keeping It Real’, the most important thing for fans waiting to have their copies of Batali’s then-latest cookbook signed was ‘that he was genuine’ (Jenkins 2007). Who better, then, to signal to the public the appeal of a historical text like De Re Coquinaria and to forge a link between past and present? Sure enough, as his website used to proclaim, ‘Through his restaurants, cookbooks, products and television shows, Mario Batali breathes the spirit of the Old World into modern day America and shows us how to revel in the inherent joys of daily life.’¹

The theme of the old in the new is not confined to food celebrities like Batali, whom we will leave for now with De Re in his back pocket. History is what animates many of our reflections on food: we enjoy talking about, eating or recreating food with stories. Sometimes those stories involve grandparents, or a recipe handed down through several generations. Sometimes they revolve around a special occasion or an accident with a delicious result. Sometimes the stories are political or sociologically revealing, like the histories of particular foodstuffs—the potato or bread or sugar—which helped to cultivate both popular and academic interest in food in the twentieth century (here Sidney Mintz’s iconic 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History is exemplary). With food studies a recent but established (and fast-growing) field,² there are by now numerous scholarly works which examine the role that food plays in wider socio-economic contexts, but the culinary monograph also continues as a popular bookshop genre, from Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977) to Mark Kurlansky’s The Big Oyster, History on the Half Shell (2006) to Ken Albala’s Beans: A History (2007), to name just a few.

As for the food industry itself, the Second World War was a watershed for many of the developments in food media. While recipes and nutritional advice have been in circulation for as long as the written word, it is fair to say that in the decades since the war, food’s media presence has grown concurrently with media advances themselves—as the hundreds of magazines, television shows and (thousands of) websites dedicated to food which have flourished in the last six decades amply demonstrate. These advances were helped by two things: interest and technology. Although magazines had been printing recipes for housewives for many years already, it is not surprising that people should have a heightened interest in food during and after the war, given its relative scarcity during those years. This was also the case during the First World War when magazines like the American Good Housekeeping cautioned that ‘Extravagant and wasteful use of food is reprehensible at any time; with the nation at war and the food-supply scarcely adequate, it is little short of treasonable’ (‘Tested and Approved Recipes’ 1917).

But the years following the Second World War were particularly significant for food media because they launched a new, more concentrated phase of consumerism which was a combined result of the end of rationing and rapid post-war advances in trade, agriculture and food production. Industrial developments in the latter part of the twentieth century progressively made more food available to increasing numbers of people. Similarly, developments in media technology combined to make more information about food available to more people. Paradoxically, these developments would also be instrumental in making food media about much more, and much less, than food. These were the beginnings of a consumer base of foodies whose interests in food lay beyond the mere eating of it.

Enter the Foodie

Three examples summarize this shift, each in turn anticipating the occasion, decades later, when foodies would officially be christened as such by Ann Barr and Paul Levy’s The Official Foodie Handbook in 1984.³ The first is Gourmet magazine (1941–2009). Although launched on the eve of war, so to speak, the magazine’s longevity speaks to the success of a then-budding market for ‘good living’ centred around, but not confined to, food: ‘There was almost nothing that the editors considered outside the magazine’s purview’, writes Ruth Reichl (2002: ix) in her introduction to Endless Feasts, a collection of writings from sixty years of Gourmet. Gourmet represented a popular version of one of the elements that early food studies texts recognized: that food, more than simply sustenance, is a way of life. But in contrast to sociological, anthropological and historical analyses of the role food plays in broader social contexts, Gourmet dished up food largely as a distraction from life (as we also saw in the Introduction).

The example of Gourmet—both as a long-standing publication and as a prototype for the massive food magazine industry—underlines an important ideological pivot of food media: the political and economic luxury of indulgence. If food studies recognizes food as essential, food media capitalize on food as an essential distraction. Roland Barthes, in his 1975 introduction to ‘kitchen philosopher’ Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste (first published in 1825), explains the primacy of this luxury, or non-essential, consumption to Brillat-Savarin (here B.-S.)’s paradigm:

In the schema of food, B.-S. always marked the distinction between need and desire: ‘The pleasure of eating requires, if not hunger, at least appetite; the pleasure of the table is generally independent of both.’ At a period when the bourgeoisie knew no social culpability, B.-S. sets up a cynical opposition: on one side, natural appetite, which is of the order of need; and on the other, appetite for luxury, which is of the order of desire. Everything is here, of course: the species needs to procreate in order to survive, the individual needs to eat in order to subsist; yet the satisfaction of these two needs does not suffice man: he must bring on stage, so to speak, the luxury of desire, erotic or gastronomic: an enigmatic, useless supplement, the desired food—the kind that B.-S. describes—is an unconditional waste or loss, a kind of ethnographic ceremony by which man celebrates his power, his freedom to consume his energy ‘for nothing’. (Barthes 1986: 251)⁴

Brillat-Savarin is of course best known for the aphorism ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are’ and, for that reason, is something of a foodie hero. Yet the dichotomy between needs and desire that Barthes describes here is a more useful reminder of what it actually means to be what you eat—in other words, the privilege that is attached to being able to celebrate that declaration to the exclusion of other concerns.

The second example is Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food, first published in London in 1950. The result of years of travelling that kept David abroad for most of the war years, the recipes in Mediterranean Food called for ingredients like olive oil, lemons and almonds, which were—to the consternation of some of her readers—nowhere to be found in post-war, stillrationed Britain. Only later, as she put it in a subsequent essay, did she ‘realize that in the England of 1947 those were dirty words I was putting down’ (cit. Chaney 1998: 217). The book nevertheless proved a great success, and David was soon ushered into the national culinary imagination. Mediterranean Food helped to create an appetite for the kind of food fantasy we now describe as culinary tourism. In the words of ‘Fat Lady’ Clarissa Dickson Wright:⁵

It is this vision of a land that existed solely in Elizabeth David’s imagination which has shaped our food, our dreams, and our thinking over the past fifty years. Those who rush to buy holiday homes in France or Chiantishire (as Tuscany has now been renamed) or those endless books that have only to mention purple lavender fields or baskets of lemons to make the best-seller lists, all are searching for a place that isn’t there except in the heart of this great food writer. (Dickson Wright 2002: iii)

But it was not all daydreaming. This fantasy also unleashed a very real consumer demand. As David noted less than ten years after the original publication of Mediterranean Food:

So startlingly different is the food situation now as compared with only two years ago that I think there is scarcely a single ingredient, however exotic, mentioned in this book which cannot be obtained somewhere in this country.… Those who make an occasional marketing expedition to Soho or the region of Tottenham Court Road can buy Greek cheese and Calamata olives, Tahina paste from the Middle East, little birds preserved in oil from Cyprus, stuffed vine leaves from Turkey.…, Italian salame and rice, even occasionally Neapolitan Mozzarella cheese.… These are details which complete the flavour of a Mediterranean meal, but the ingredients which make this cookery so essentially different from our own are available to all; they are the olive oil, wine, lemons, garlic, onions, tomatoes, and the aromatic herbs and spices which go to make up what is so often lacking in English cooking: variety of flavour and colour, and the warm, stimulating smells of genuine food. (David 1958: 12–13)

Here David’s remark that the main ingredients of a Mediterranean meal are ‘available to all’ is an early indication of the diversity of foods and food habits that now characterize one version of globalization. It points to the genesis of a modern multiculturalism that has come about from the movement of people and products in the second half of the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, not unlike Gourmet magazine, David’s claim also rests on a classist assumption that the availability of ingredients corresponds to a global, or equal, level of disposable income. Olive oil, wine, lemons and garlic, even more so now than then, are certainly available for purchase almost anywhere, and at any time of the year. But they are not, and were not then, ‘available to all’: available does not mean universally accessible. David’s text in this way prefigures the ideological tensions that underpin one of the central debates around food and globalization today, where a celebration of variety is often pitted against the so-called McDonaldization⁶ of the world. Both of these scenarios are based on an assumption of access.

The question of pluralism and diversity is also linked to that other discursive bedfellow of globalization: democracy. The apparent democratization of food is evident not only in the countless cultural or ‘ethnic’ food experiences available to us now in supermarkets and restaurants, but also in the multitude of cookbooks, television shows and blogs that promise to make ‘available to all’ what was previously the domain of professional chefs. Much like debates over whether globalization represents pluralism or threatens the imposition of a monoculture (typically the vaguely named ‘American’ culture), this new democracy is likewise not without anxieties. Some of these are played out in the food world, for example in media disputes about the copyrightability of ‘signature’ recipes (Buccafusco 2006), calling into question whether chefs have earned, or even have the right to earn, the status of artists. These antagonisms betray a central paradox of globalization, namely that the apparent blurring of traditional boundaries—between countries, professions, classes—often leads to heightened competitiveness and insecurities that result in ever stronger impulses to safeguard precisely these categories. Historically, Mediterranean Food is situated before these conflicts emerged to any significant degree. But David’s non-inclusive ‘all’ importantly anticipates the highly selective interpretation of globalization so familiar today, whether from the perspective of those who celebrate it or that of those who despise it.

In 1966 the Marxist critic Pierre Macherey argued that meaning emerges as much from what is made explicit as from what remains silent, and this Machereyan silence is useful for understanding some of the discrepancies between ‘democratic’ stories of globalization—such as David’s celebration of availability—and the experience of those who, like some modern chefs, perceive the elimination of historical boundaries as a threat. Macherey (1981: 194–5) writes: ‘The order which it [a narrative structure] professes is merely an imagined order, projected onto disorder, the fictive resolution of ideological conflicts, a resolution so precarious that it is obvious in the very letter of the text where incoherence and incompleteness burst forth’. Seen from this perspective, Mediterranean Food marks a paradigm shift not only because it describes and helps to set in motion the traffic in culinary information and products that characterizes much of the developed world today, but also because it ignores certain things: on publication, the non-availability of ‘Mediterranean’ ingredients generally; after publication, the non-availability of these ‘basics’ to a number of people.

Exacerbated by an attention economy which makes available more information than most people can effectively filter and process, this dynamic of silence—of leaving certain things unsaid and of representing order and consensus where there is none—is enduring in food media, particularly when it comes to the controversial topic of obesity. But f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Do You Remember When Chefs Just Cooked?
• Part I: Food Media: A Fantasy Industry
• Part II: The Rise and Rise of Food Television
• Part III: How Not to think About What to EAT
• Coda
• Notes
• References
• eCopyright