The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University From Chef to Superstar: Food Media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web by Signe Hansen (HNSSIG002) Town Thesis Presented for the Degree of Cape DOCTOR OFof PHILOSOPHY University in the Centre for Film and Media Studies Faculty of Humanities UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN November 2007 i Table of Contents Declaration………………………………………………………… ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………… iii Abstract…………………………………………………………… iv 1. Theoretical Preliminaries…..…………………………………… 1 1.1 Marx and Debord: Spectres in the New World………. 2 2. Introduction, or, Mario Batali, on the subject of cooking……… 27 2.1 The Thesis…………………………………………….. 60 3. Recipes…………………………………………………………. 73 3.1 Texts in Context………………………………………. 74 3.2 Consuming Recipes…………………………………… 81 3.3 The Copyright Debates………………………………… 88 4. Cookbooks……………………………………………………… 103 4.1 Pre-War: Escoffier, Soyer, and Beeton……………….. 104 4.2 Post-War: Beard, Fisher, and Child…………………… 112 4.3 “New” Books…………………………………………..Town 134 5. Beyond Recipes: Literature, Menus and the World Wide Web… 141 5.1 Food Literature………………………………………… 142 5.2 Language and Menus.…………………………………. 165 5.3 Freedom and the World Wide Web……………………Cape 177 6. Television………………………………………………………..of 185 6.1 The Fall and Rise of Food Television…………………. 186 6.2 Jamie Oliver…………………………………………… 194 6.3 Rachael Ray…………………………………………… 210 6.4 Food Porn……………………………………………… 224 7. Eating……………………………………………………………. 233 7.1 From Production to Consumption……………………… 234 7.2 BrandedUniversity Dining and the Artist Chef…………………… 238 7.3 Molecular Gastronomy………………………………… 245 7.4 Authenticity……………………………………………. 252 7.5 Obesity…………………………………………………. 256 7.6 Hotdogs and the American Hero……………………….. 271 7.7 From Fast Food to Healthy Food………………………. 274 8. Conclusion………………………………………………………. 285 Bibliography……………………………………………………….. 305 ii Doctoral Degrees Board University of Cape Town Private Bag Rondebosch 7701 South Africa Tel: (021) 650-2155 Fax: (021) 650-2138 [email protected] Please complete and return to the Doctoral Degrees Board, University of Cape Town, when submitting your thesis for examination PhD THESIS TITLE: From Chef to Superstar: Food Media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web ______________________________________________________ I _Signe Hansen (full name) hereby (a) grant the University of Cape Town free licence to reproduce the above thesis in whole or in part, for the purpose of research; (b) declare that: the above thesis is my own unaided work, both in concept and execution, and that apart from the normal guidance from my supervisor, I have received no assistance except as stated below: ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ neither the substance nor any part of the above thesis has been submitted in the past, or is being, or is toUniversity be submitted for a degree of atCape this University Town or at any other university. except as stated below ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ I am now presenting the thesis for examination for the degree of PhD. SIGNED: ________________________________ Signature removed DATE: __13/11/07________________________________ iii Acknowledgments I am indebted to a number of people whose support and encouragement made this work possible. To my supervisor, John Higgins, who got me reading Marx and Debord, and who trusted me enough to demonstrate how their work could possibly relate to Jamie Oliver. To Ian Glenn, head of the Centre for Film and Media Studies, for giving me the freedom to take emerging research to the classroom, and to all the students who made that experience so rewarding. To Tanya Barben, who looks after the library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, and who became a good friend and colleague over animated discussions of cookbooks. The subject of food has the wonderful – and, at times, distressing – quality of being relevant and interesting to most, and there are too manyTown people to name here who have engaged in conversations around my work, both academically and socially, and who have helped to keep me engaged, and Capeto remind me of its importance. In particular, I’d like to thank Peter Anderson,of who just never fails me; Zuki Jakavula, for being almost as obsessed with food as I am; Robin Golding, who calls me the only real “foodie” in Cape Town (which I choose to accept as a complement), and Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, whose gifts to me include 15 years of friendship and some great books that have turned outUniversity to be invaluable to my research. Then there are the people who cannot be thanked enough, and who I can only make it my life’s work to repay in kind. My mother, Jette Lis Hansen, who just never stops being a mother and a friend. My sister Pernille, who insists that I am brilliant. My deepest gratitude goes to my husband, Jacques Rousseau, who has (too soon) lived through my distractions, crabbiness, and various other follies, and has only confirmed to me, again and again, why I want to spend my life with him. Finally, my thanks to Jamie Oliver et al., for giving me so much to talk about. iv Abstract This thesis examines representations of food in twenty-first century media, and argues that the media obsession with food in evidence today follows directly from U.K. and U.S. post-war industrial and economic booms, and by the associated processes of globalisation that secure the spread of emergent trends from these countries to the rest of the so-called Western world. The theoretical frame for the work is guided in large part by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), which follows a Marxist tradition of examining the intersection between consumerism and social relationships. Debord’s spectacle is not merely something to be looked at, but functions, like Marx’s fetishised commodity, as a mechanism of alienation. The spectacle does this by substituting real, lived experience with representations of life.Town Based on analyses of media representations of food from the post-war period to the present day, the work argues against the Capediscursive celebration of globalisation as a signifier of abundance and access, andof maintains, instead, that consequent to the now commonplace availability of choice and information is a deeply ambiguous relationship to food because it is a relationship overwhelmingly determined by media rather than experience. It further argues that the success of food media results from a spectacular conflationUniversity of an economy of consumerism with the basic human need to consume to survive. Contemporary celebrity chefs emerge as the locus of this conflation by representing figures of authority on that basic need, and also, through branded products (including themselves), the superfluity of consumerism. The subject of the work, therefore, is food, but the main object of its critique is media. Food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web is about the commodification of history and politics, through food, and the natural (super)star of this narrative is the modern celebrity chef. 1 1. Theoretical Preliminaries Food was not the primary focus of attention for French theorist Guy Debord, co- founder of the Situationist International (S.I.) and author of Society of the Spectacle (1967). The culmination of Debord’s years as a Situationist, and informed simultaneously by the political climate preceding the student uprisings in Paris 1968 and the by-then flourishing post-war consumer economy, Society of the Spectacle has in later years been dismissed – and often misunderstood – as obsolete, for reasons including its context-specificity, its lack of historicity, and its inability to account for new and modern forms of media and subject articulation. Yet this thesis argues that his theory of the spectacle provides a valuable tool for understanding the phenomenon under investigation, namely the ever increasing commodificationTown of human appetite through media representations of food in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Cape This chapter explains the theoreticalof framework of the thesis. Starting with the seminal influence of Karl Marx, I argue that Debord’s theory of the spectacle remains an eminently useful critical tool because, while media and technology have certainly taken on proportions in the twenty-first century that he could not have accounted for, his analyses of theUniversity effects of media-based consumption on individuals and on their place in broader societal structures endure, and with remarkable clarity, to this day. Of particular relevance are the key connections between Marx’s commodity fetishism and the primacy of appearance in the spectacle, both of which function to conceal, beneath a façade of plenty, an abundance of loss and alienation which manifest in each of the chapters to follow. These are what I term the narratives of progressive detachment that abound in food media, and which form the central argument of this thesis. 2 1.1 Marx and Debord: Spectres