Taste and the TV Chef

Gilly Smith

Description

Food journalist, podcast producer and former academic Gilly Smith offers fresh insights into the creation of contemporary British food culture.  Her latest book explores the story of modern food culture with the creators of lifestyle and food TV and with the academics carving a new world in food and media studies. Taste and the TV Chef investigates how television changed the way Britain eats and sold it to the world.

While cooking shows are far from new, they have exploded in popularity in recent years and changed consumption patterns at a time when what we eat has an enormous impact on climate change.

What was once merely a genre is now a full-blown phenomenon: never before has food been so photographed, fawned over, fetishized and celebrated as various answers to saving the planet. Celebrity chefs and so-called ‘foodies’ have risen to new levels of fame, and the cultural capital of cooking has never been so valuable. 

Looks at the influence of chefs like Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Gordon Ramsay and the role of TV storytelling in transforming how and what we consume. A ground-breaking contribution to food and media studies, which includes rare interviews with the producers who created some of the most influential stories television ever told, Taste and the TV Chef investigates how food and lifestyle TV changed the way an entire country ate, and then fed it to the rest of the world.

Main academic readership will be scholars, researchers and students in cultural studies, media studies.  Also practitioners and students in the fields of TV production and writing.

Will also appeal to anyone with an interest in the development of food TV and the rise of the TV chef.

Introduction

Part One

• Birth of the Cool

• The Manufacture of Delight

• The Making of Britishness

• The Game-changers

Part Two

• Creating a National Conversation

• Creating Capital

• Selling Britain to the World

• Dude Food and Fairy Cakes

• Storytelling and Race

• Storytelling and Class

• The Making of Jamie

• Barthes on Jamie: Myth and the TV Revolutionary

• The Odyssey Narrative

• The Making of Dreams

• Sugar Smart

Part Three

• Intangible Memories

• Sharing the Memories

• The Utopia of Food TV

• A Hungarian Food Revolution

• How to Build a Food Culture

Part Four

• Can Storytelling Save the World?

• Are We There Yet?

Sujets

• Narratives
• Index of sociology of food articles
• Narrative
• General officer
• Television
• Cooking
• Storytelling
• General
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 22 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789383072
• Langue: English

Extrait

Taste and the TV Chef
Taste and the TV Chef
How Storytelling Can Save the Planet
Gilly Smith
First published in the UK in 2020 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © Gilly Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or byany means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Cover designer: Clare Whiting
Cover photos: Brooke Lark, Unsplash, Steve Edwards at etch. and Shutterstock
Production manager: Laura Christopher
Typesetter: Newgen KnowledgeWorks
Print ISBN 9781789383058
ePDF ISBN 9781789383065
ePUB ISBN 9781789383072
Printed and bound by Hobbs
To find out about all our publications, please visit our website.
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
For Pat Llewellyn, whose story this is.
(1962–2017)
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One
Birth of the cool
The manufacture of delight
The making of Britishness
The gamechangers
Part Two
Creating a national conversation
Creating capital
Selling Britain to the world
Dude food and fairy cakes
Man vs food
Storytelling and race
Storytelling and class
The making of Jamie
The Odyssey narrative
The making of dreams
Sugar smart
Part Three
Intangible memories
Sharing the memories
A Hungarian food revolution
How to build a food culture
Part Four
Can storytelling save the world?
Are we there yet?
References
Further reading
Acknowledgements
My thanks to all the producers and academics who gave me so much of their time as I researched this book over the last seven years. In particular, I’d like to thank Pat Llewellyn, Jo Hook, Zoe Collins, Nick Thorogood, Jo Ralling and Amanda Murphy from the TV camp, and Dr Louise Fitzgerald and Dr Jess Moriarty from the academic, without whom this book would have been a very different beast. My thanks to Amanda Martin, mother of two small children and struggling novelist who transcribed all my interviews.
Interviews with British television producers and (international) academics were held in person or by Skype or phone, and some (Pat Llewellyn, Zoe Collins, Nick Thorogood, Amanda Murphy, Signe Rousseau) over a period of years. Dr Louise Fitzgerald was my academic Jiminy Cricket and I am but the Morecambe to her Wise. As a journalist in television (as well as print, radio and podcast) first and as an academic second, I straddle both worlds, and Louise was my scholarly coach, prodding me to rethink Nigella within fourth-wave feminism and pulling apart the producers’ business-focussed answers to reveal their impact on society.
Thank you too to the gang of ‘editors’, friends and colleagues who read through the manuscript as it morphed from academic to mainstream, bubbling with voices from the front line of the food revolution: Dr Jess Moriarty, Dr Liz Maudslay, Rob Steen, Lyn Weaden and Jed Novick.
Introduction
‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are’, wrote the epicurean Parisian lawyer and food philosopher, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, in 1825. Since he threw down his gauntlet, Brillat-Savarin’s words have been spun into one of the most famous epithets of all time: ‘we are what we eat’. But more than shape and size, we are what food itself has come to represent in society. Our diet is a signifier of who we are, what we would like to be and, perhaps more importantly, what other people think we are. It defines our peer group, divides the rich and the poor, the first world and the developing world and, increasingly, the billion bottoms and the bottom billions. A lesser-known quote of Brillat-Savarin is perhaps even more timely: ‘The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves.’
How we nourish ourselves has changed fundamentally in the last 30 years, about the time-span of my career in television, radio, print and podcasting, telling stories about food. Back in the early 1990s, when I was a young researcher on Food File (1992–96), Channel 4’s first TV series about the politics of food, the films we made about high-welfare farming practices, mobile abattoirs and diets from the Mediterranean that could change our lives in the UK were ground-breaking for British television. While Derek Cooper on Radio 4’s investigative food series The Food Programme (1979–present) was quietly prodding at the deeper questions around what we ate, British food culture was largely about fuelling up. Pret a Manger, Eat. and Yo! Sushi had yet to revolutionise our lunchtimes, and unfeasibly exotic foods were years away from being a regular Friday night out. Popping out for a bite from our offices even in multicultural Camden High Street would usually mean a tuna sandwich from M&S, although the Portuguese café downstairs did a mean nata even then. Location lunches in middle England were a smorgasbord of Hula Hoops and Diet Coke; dinner was a pizza accompanied by a raffia-bound bottle of house red.
In terms of a take-out, the high street in 1990s Britain was stuck in the 1970s, although a smattering of immigrant delis was beginning to give the sandwich a fragrant makeover. But the seeds of change were beginning to grow new ideas on the book shelves. Among our consultants on Food File were Geoffrey Canon, co-author with Caroline Walker of Food Scandal: What’s Wrong with the British Diet and How to Put It Right (1985), and Tim Lang, who would go on to advise Jamie Oliver and become Professor of Food Policy at City University London’s Centre for Food Policy. Lang was also one of the 37 leading food academics and scientists to write the 2019 EAT-Lancet report on how to feed the 10 billion people likely to live on the planet by 2050. (Spoiler alert: there’s not a lot of meat in its conclusions.) It was a feisty time for food, and it would take a whole new turn when a young researcher called Pat Llewellyn, who would go on to discover Jamie Oliver, took her seat in that office above Camden High Street.
It would be another ten years before we met in 2005 – I moved to another TV job while Pat discovered a wild-haired environmentalist cook called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and tried him out as a guest presenter, but we shared an unusually foodie childhood only 40 minutes away from each other. Mine was in Abergavenny, before it became the food Mecca of the UK, with my parents’ love of food playing out on a plate of pigs’ brains on toast or a milky tripe and onions. There always seemed to be a hock simmering away on the stove, fresh from my father’s regular trip to the abattoir. I still find offal a challenge. While my brother and I were dispatched to boarding schools, they would dedicate every Saturday to a recipe from their growing Cordon Bleu part work spending the entire day shopping for the ingredients and the evening prepping, cooking and feasting, mostly just the two of them, sometimes for lucky friends. During the school holidays, the four of us would put aside the seething tensions of our family life and chop and chat as if the Galloping Gourmet himself were in the room.
Meanwhile, Pat’s parents ran a hotel further down the A40. ‘I think my mum and dad probably brought the first duck a l’orange to Newcastle Emlyn!’ Llewellyn told me as we chatted about the smells and tastes in our family kitchens. My chats with her began as I researched a biography of Jamie Oliver in 2006, and continued well into the work on this book. We’ll meet her co-architects of Lifestyle TV, Mark Thompson, Peter Bazalgette and Jane Root, later; when they all told me that it was their similarly anachronistic foodie childhoods that inspired their interest in Food TV, I realised just how much my parents’ curries, inspired by living in the Far East when I was a small child and perfected over the rest of their lives, had influenced mine.
It was with the second edition of my Jamie Oliver biography, The Jamie Oliver Effect: The Man, the Food, the Revolution ( 2008 ), with a further three chapters dissecting the intention behind and impact of his campaigning (as seen on Channel 4’s Jamie’s Fowl Dinners [2008] and Jamie’s Ministry of Food [2008]), that I began to ponder the influence of television in changing the way we live. By the mid-2000s, food was becoming serious. The issue of peak oil, as told in David Guggenheim’s 2006 film The Inconvenient Truth , showed us that wasting precious oil reserves by buying shrink-wrapped groceries really could bring about the end of civilisation as we know it. The success of the film in getting people to come together in the Transition Town movement all over the world had me scratching my head and making more notes. It also had me signing up for my local Transition Town’s food group to envisage a post-oil future. As austerity struck in 2008 with the fall of the banks, and the food conversation changed again, my new role as senior lecturer in Broadcast Media and Broadcast Journalism at the University of Brighton had me teaching my students why to tell stories, as well as how.
The journey of this book stretches from that second edition of The Jamie Oliver Effect , through Transition Town and into the lecture halls, not just of my own university, but around the world to conferences where I would listen to academics deconstruct television shows and discuss narratives around storytelling. It occurred to me that there were some important people who had yet to be invited to the debate about what I was beginning to realise was one of the most important media feats of all time: the power of TV to change the way w