SUPERFOOD ME: NEGOTIATING AUSTRALIA’S POST-GOURMET FOOD CULTURE

Katherine Eulynn Kirkwood BMassComn BMedia&Comn(Hons)

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Digital Media Research Centre | School of Communication

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

2021

Keywords

Animal products

Big Food

Culinary culture

Culinary media

Ethical consumption

Food culture

Food media

Food television

Food System Exposé

Meat

Post-Gourmet

Strategic Impact Documentary

Super Size Me

Sustainable consumption

That Sugar Film

Vegetarianism

Veganism

Waste

Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture i

Abstract

Australian food culture has arguably adopted a more health-conscious and ethical stance. This position is also reflected in contemporary food media, which is emerging in a post-broadcast environment. This thesis examines these developments in food culture and food media, positing that Australia is in the midst of what I call a post-gourmet phase. It argues that consumers are increasingly aware of the industrial food system’s consequences and that such concerns are manifested in the adoption of ethically and sustainably focused food practices. A key way in which the machinations of the industrial food system have entered mainstream consciousness is through a genre of texts I label Food System Exposés (FSEs). I argue that although these non- fiction books—like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma—and documentaries—like Super Size Me—have existed for decades, their recent proliferation warrants recognising these texts as a key genre in shaping contemporary food discourses.

These changes are brought to light in this thesis through two methods. Semi- structured in-depth interviews were conducted with members of 13 households, as well as eight participants from the food and food media industries, all of whom were based in Brisbane, Australia. Textual analysis of FSEs—including Super Size Me and That

Sugar Film—complements the interview findings, highlighting not only industrialised food’s impact on consumer health, animals, workers, and the environment, but also how the industry’s obfuscating tactics make it difficult for everyday households to make informed food choices. These developments in culinary culture have led to a renegotiation of what constitutes culinary capital. One caveat on these findings are social bonds between friends or family that are exercised over food. Social connections

ii Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture

tended to override participants’ appreciation of gourmet, healthy, or ethical food.

Together, these findings set out the Australian culinary scene in the mid-to-late 2010s and foreshadows the future direction for food culture and media in this country after three decades of lifestyle-oriented food media.

Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture iii

Table of Contents

Keywords ...... i Abstract ...... ii Table of Contents ...... iv List of Abbreviations ...... vi Statement of Original Authorship ...... vii Acknowledgements ...... viii Previously Published Works by the Candidate Integrated into this Thesis ...... xi Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Hypothesis: Post-Gourmet Australia ...... 5 Thesis Outline ...... 8 Chapter Summaries ...... 15 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet ...... 21 Tensions in Culinary Culture ...... 26 Foodies ...... 33 Omnivorousness: The New Snobbery ...... 34 Everyday Foodies ...... 46 Everyday Realities: Supermarkets, Processed, and Fast Food ...... 48 Conclusion ...... 56 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media ...... 57 Before: Contained platforms and genres ...... 58 Current and Emerging: Blending genres, Blending platforms ...... 69 Conclusion ...... 73 Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods ...... 75 Methods ...... 79 Limitations ...... 90 Conclusion ...... 91 Chapter 5: Social Food ...... 93 Calling Australia Home ...... 94 New Food Communities ...... 100 Friendly Food ...... 105 Food and Family ...... 115 Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Household Food Preparation ...... 122 Conclusion ...... 126 Chapter 6: Everyday Food Media Engagement in the Post-Broadcast Era ..... 129

iv Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture

The changing foodscape: domestication, polymedia and serious leisure ...... 131 Food on the Screen ...... 134 Food on the Page ...... 139 Food on the Web ...... 143 Food on the Web: Consequences as Observed by Industry ...... 146 Conclusion ...... 150 Chapter 7: Big Food ...... 153 Existing Conceptualisations ...... 156 The Texts ...... 160 The Beginning: Super Size Me ...... 161 A Different Bad Guy: That Sugar Film ...... 168 Need for a Local Perspective ...... 174 Conclusion ...... 178 Chapter 8: Winning Friends with Salad: The Rise of Ethical and Sustainable Consumption ...... 181 Definitions and Contestations ...... 183 Applications in Food Culture ...... 186 Evolving approaches to Meat and Animal Products ...... 193 Beyond Saving the Animals ...... 203 Conclusion ...... 212 Chapter 9: Conclusion ...... 214 Key Findings ...... 218 Considerations for Future Research ...... 220 Reference List ...... 223 Appendices ...... 247 Appendix A Food System Exposé Texts ...... 247

Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture v

List of Abbreviations

ABC - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

CCD - Campaigning Culinary Documentary

FSE - Food System Exposé

MCA - MasterChef Australia

MKR - My Kitchen Rules

SBS - Special Broadcasting Service

SID - Strategic Impact Documentary

vi Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature: QUT Verified Signature

Date: ______11/02/2021

Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture vii

Acknowledgements

Writing this PhD would not have been possible without the support of many people. Some have been with me for the entire journey and others have helped at particular times along the way. Every contribution, however, has been crucial in helping me complete this project, and for that I am grateful. Firstly, I am thankful for the Australian Postgraduate Award that helped to sustain me throughout my candidature. I have been lucky to have a supervisory team comprised of Associate

Professor Stephen Harrington, Associate Professor Peta Mitchell, and Dr Jason

Sternberg. Stephen, thank you for always seeing the simplest and clearest solution;

Peta, thank you for getting me back on track; and Jason, thank you for helping me when I needed it most.

To the interview participants. Without you, I would have no story to tell. Thank you for your time, your insight, and your interest. Special thanks to Belinda Eslick and

Morag Kobez, and Amanda Weaver of QUT Media for assisting with participant recruitment, and Alexander Gonano for transcribing interviews.

Dr Abbe Winter, affectionately known as my Fairy Godmother. Without your love and patience in guiding me towards the finish line, I am not sure that I would have completed this thesis. Thank you for being a wonderful mentor and friend who has been instrumental in helping me get through the final year of my candidature. Thank you for the coffee meetings, for emails checking in, for listening to me and for believing in this research.

Dr Michelle Phillipov, thank you for your mentorship over the past three years.

Your thoughtfulness when choosing a Research Assistant on your DECRA has had a profound impact on my career and life. You have given me the opportunity to gain viii Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture

greater experience in our field of research, provided opportunities for me to publish, and offered invaluable advice and support to me.

Karyn Gonano your unwavering enthusiasm and belief has carried me throughout the last few years. Thank you for so readily offering your time, thoughts, and expertise on work, but thank you for also being a tremendous friend. You have brought joy into not only the PhD process, but my life. Many thanks to you and David for all you have done for me.

Many people at QUT have supported my research, both in a professional capacity, but also have cheered me on during this journey. Thank you to Jo Shepherd,

Deb Lincoln, Helena Papageorgiou, Lee McGowan, Anne-Frances Watson, Lesley

Irvine, Amisha Mehta, Edwina Luck, Jean Burgess, Tess Van Hemert, Tanya Nitins,

Lesley Hawkes, Christina Spurgeon, Terry Flew, Mark Ryan, Leo Bowman, Patrik and Pia Wikstrom, Lee Duffield, and of course the late Wayne Murphy.

There are many friends I have made through studying and working during my candidature. I am thankful to Ella Chorazy, Emma Potter-Hay, Ella Jeffery, Emily

O’Grady, Emma Doolan, Morgan Batch, Freya Wright-Brough, Matt Hsu, Alex Philp,

Tim Highfield, Kate Miltner, Dan Padua, Ellen Nielsen, Nino Miletovic, Mark Piccini,

Ariadna Matamoros Fernández, Portia Vann, Sarah Ekberg, Jarrod Walczer, Felix

Münch, Aljosha Karim Schapals, Stefanie Duguay, Penny Holliday, Dion Clark,

Chanel Lucas, Kelly Palmer, Kelly Lewis, Laura Elvery, Mirandi Stanton, Joey

Kingman, Eddy Hurcombe, Alice Witt, Camilo Andrés Niño Contreras, Marge Sassi,

Xu Chen, Smith Mehta, Rachel Ji, Haili Li, Bondy Valdovinos-Kaye, Tricia King,

Fiona Suwana, Katrin Langton, and Gabbi Johnston.

The support of friends who I know outside the university context and who have provided endless love and support. Big hugs to Alyce Mollenhauer, Melanie

Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture ix

Cavanough, Jai Morton, Gabby Ullmann, Jo Evans, Sue Krahe, Eli Moore, Yonell

Doolan, Esmé Soan, Carlos Gatica, Nellie Goldspring, Katie Gemzik, Amyee Rhodes,

Tash Rojano, Jessica Murray, Billie Dullaway, Kate Harwood, Hannah Bianchi, Jake

McKinnon, Mollie O’Connor, Sophie Delmonte, Ellysia Davis, Kelsey Turner, Lucy

Wise, and Chloe Tory.

Throughout my candidature, playing football and futsal has been an invaluable outlet. I’m grateful for the support of my friends and teammates at my current club AC

Carina Football Club, as well as those from Pine Rivers Athletic Football Club,

Peninsula Futsal Club, and South Brisbane Futsal Club. Special thanks to Arash

Mohajeri, Josh Mangion, Sam Silva-Cabezas, Jake Knight, Aiz Sazali, Jamie and

Amanda Kirwan, Julie Gordon, Gaye Lane, Andrew and Jenny English, Chris Browne,

Jayla Patten, Justin Morrison, Yoel Jogiono, Anthony Costa, Nomes Langham, the

Tiggers girls, and of course, my #3tards family.

My Mum Patricia, and Dad Robert, thank you for your patience in seeing me through my candidature. The Mollenhauer and Baker families, thank you for your years of love and support. And of course, to my beautiful boys Charlie, Frankly, Ollie, and Johnny, thank you for your unconditional love and cuddles.

x Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture

Previously Published Works by the Candidate Integrated into this Thesis

Kirkwood, K. (2018). Integrating Digital Media into Everyday Culinary Practices.

Communication Research and Practice 4(3), 277-290.

https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2018.1451210

Phillipov, M. and Kirkwood, K. (2018). Supermarkets, celebrity chefs and private

labels: the ‘alternative’ reframing of processed foods. In M.Phillipov & K.

Kirkwood (Eds.), Alternative Food Politics: From the Margins to the

Mainstream (pp. 234-252). Abingdon: Routledge.

Superfood Me: Negotiating Australia’s Post-Gourmet Food Culture xi

Chapter 1: Introduction

2019 marks 10 years since reality television show MasterChef Australia (MCA) premiered. At the time of its debut, the show emerged as a watershed moment at the intersection of Australian food culture and food media where gourmet food culture became popularised. In the ensuing decade, MCA had become a beacon for aspirational and inspirational viewing, as well as attracting internationally recognised celebrity chefs as guest judges and mentors (Blackiston, 2019b). After 11 seasons however, the show finds itself at a crossroads with declining ratings and off-air scandals.1 The 2019

MCA season finale reached a metro audience of 992,000 people during the winner announcement, which Mumbrella reported was a 24 per cent drop on the previous year’s audience (Blackiston, 2019a, para. 2).

In light of Australians’ waning interest in MCA, which became known for promoting gourmet food culture, and the growing significance of streaming services and social media, this thesis argues that Australian food culture is entering what I call a post-gourmet phase. I argue that the post-gourmet phase is marked by a fragmentation in culinary concerns, in how content is accessed, and in the kinds of content produced. As well as exploring how these shifts in food culture and food media play out in the lives of everyday households, this thesis also considers the implications

1 Chef and restaurateur George Calombaris, one of MCA’s judges who has been on the program since season one, has been the subject of intense criticism after it was found he underpaid workers across his restaurant group $7.83 million dollars (Marin-Guzman, 2019). Although Network Ten maintained it stood by Calombaris, on July 23, 2019 it was announced that negotiations between the network and the whole judging team—which includes chef Gary Mehigan and food writer Matt Preston—had broken down (Martin, 2019). Reports claimed that the trio had formed their own production company, GGM, and were looking to pitch concepts to Australian networks and streaming services including Netflix and Amazon Prime (Lallo, 2019).

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

of the splintering of culinary concerns and media consumption methods in terms of negotiating the contemporary culinary environment.

This introductory chapter establishes the rationale, scope, and structure of this thesis. After outlining the circumstances of Australian foodscape in the last decade— notably the popularity of MCA—I then hypothesise that Australian food culture and food media has entered what I call a post-gourmet phase whereby fine dining and food deemed ‘fancy’ is no longer solely representative of what constitutes ‘good food’. I introduce the argument that more ethically and morally based consumption practices are becoming increasingly mainstream as the realities of the industrial food system are made common knowledge through documentary films and books. I argue these texts form a genre called Food System Exposés. Following the hypothesis, I outline the scope of this thesis which encompasses the inextricably linked aspects of food culture and media and how changes in both of these areas contribute to the post-gourmet phase of Australian food culture, as well as briefly introduce the research design.

Firstly, it is important to understand MCA as the culinary phenomenon that made having a keen interest in food culture mainstream. A locally-produced version of the

UK reality television program, MCA combined an interest in lifestyle television that had grown over the previous 20 to 30 years (see Lewis, 2008a) with the competitive, game-like conventions of reality television programs that gained momentum in the late

1990s and early 2000s like Idol, Big Brother, The Block, Top Model, Survivor, and The

Amazing Race. In observing the emergence of reality-based food programs like Iron

Chef, Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen, Collins (2009, p. 197) stated that such programming has become the norm because “[w]ith high production costs, profit- seeking investors, and fragmented audiences, it’s more prudent to stick with what’s

2 Chapter 1: Introduction

proven to work.” Thus, the proven success of the reality format has been translated into the culinary sphere.

This formula certainly worked for MCA, with the Australian public responding to the amalgamation of cooking and reality programming with tremendous enthusiasm.

Such was MCA’s popularity at the time, the program’s scheduling influenced the playing out of Australian democracy. Anticipation that MCA’s 2010 finale (season 2) would draw a large audience prompted the rescheduling of a televised debate between then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in the lead up to the Federal election held that year (Coorey, 2010; Malkin, 2010). Bringing the debate forward an hour was a prudent decision on the politicians’ part, as the MCA finale went on to become the highest rating non-sporting television program in

Australia (ABC News, 2010). 2,3

With chefs and restaurateurs—Gary Mehigan and George Calombaris—and food writer Matt Preston as judges, cohorts of contestants, along with viewers across

Australia and around the world, 4 have been immersed in an environment of recipes, ingredients, cooking techniques, chefs, and restaurants that had previously been confined to the culinary elite. Dishes like the croquembouche became part of the national vernacular, pastry chef Adriano Zumbo became a household name after appearing on the program, and the show is now a drawcard for established culinary celebrities with British chef Heston Blumenthal and compatriot cook Nigella Lawson

2 This record is based on OzTAM ratings, which were introduced in 2001. 3 The broadcasts of the weddings of Prince William to Catherine Middleton in 2011 and Prince Harry to Meghan Markle 2018 surpassed MCA’s record, but these events were broadcast across multiple networks (Burrowes, 2018; Hanrahan, 2018) . 4 MCA is particularly popular in India (D’Mello, 2013; see Piotrowski, 2012). This popularity was reflected in the readership of an article I co-authored with Michelle Phillipov for The Conversation during the show’s seventh season (May 2015), which was predominantly Australian and Indian with 35.9 per cent (7136 views) from Australia and 35.3 per cent (7024 views) from India (see Kirkwood & Phillipov, 2015).

Chapter 1: Introduction 3

also having made multiple appearances. Despite the program receiving academic criticism for essentially providing low-cost labour to the media industry and not providing a meaningful pathway to a future career as a chef (see Seale 2012), many

MCA contestants have gone on to successful culinary careers. One MCA alumna, Alana

Lowes contributed to this research as an industry participant. She now produces food and travel content as The Flying Foodie for Virgin Australia, a concept she pitched to the airline herself. Other MCA contestants who have gone on to have successful culinary careers include Julie Goodwin, Poh Ling Yeow, Andre Ursini, Marion

Grasby, Reynold Poenermo, Alice Zaslavsky, Justine Schofield, Adam Liaw, Andy

Allen, and Ben Milbourne.

The MCA phenomenon and its role in driving this gourmet phase of Australian culinary culture was the impetus for my Honours research conducted in 2013.5

Examples of the show’s ability to stimulate interest around cooking was evident in reports of sales for stroganoff meat increasing by 30 per cent the day after the dish was featured on the show. Additionally, the stroganoff recipe became the most searched on taste.com.au (Sinclair, 2010a, 2010b).

Although MCA’s popularity has since declined, there can be no doubt that the program strongly influenced everyday Australian food culture. Even Australians who

5 My Honours research examined MCA as a text, as well as garnered the insights of MCA-viewing households. MasterChef Australia served as the focal point for exploring the increasing popularity of gourmet food and cooking. The key outcome of this investigation was the emergence of the ‘everyday foodie’ (Kirkwood, 2013, 2014). This concept became apparent because I found that households were more open to experimenting with new ingredients, techniques, and recipes as a result of engaging with MCA as well as other food media texts. Johnston and Baumann (2015, 2) note that, “The details and intensity of the foodie lifestyle will differ, but what unites foodies is the fact that food serves a key role in their ‘narrative of identity’”. But when asked if they considered themselves foodies, many of my respondents hesitantly agreed, placing caveats on their ‘foodie-ism’. It became clear that everyday households were becoming more invested in gourmet food culture through learning about new recipes, techniques, restaurants, and chefs, for example. Factors such as a lack of time, money, health concerns, or a lack of confidence in the kitchen however, prevented them from making this interest in food a central part of their identity.

4 Chapter 1: Introduction

have not worked in a kitchen or visited a fine dining restaurant appear to be familiar with professional kitchen terms such as ‘plating up’, ‘sous vide’, and ‘en papillote’, have a working knowledge of prominent chefs and restaurants, and enjoy seeking out new cuisines and culinary experiences. As audience familiarity with the food, techniques, and conventions of gourmet food develop, the pre-competition knowledge and skills of each cohort of MCA contestants has grown too. In some respects, this has changed MCA’s original premise of taking amateur home cooks and equipping them with the skills and knowledge of professional chefs. The tagline for the program’s promotion in 2015 (season 7) was “ordinary people cooking extraordinary food.”

Harper (2015) questioned however if the baseline for contestants was becoming too elevated. Instead of audiences feeling like they were learning along with the contestants, Harper (2015) argued that in more recent seasons of MCA contestants have had to enter the competition with “skills and prior knowledge […] that are anything but ‘ordinary’.” For Harper, the inability to identify with the “journey” of the contestants diminished the appeal of the program, but here, I question what this scenario means for the future of food culture. Specifically, if the mediatisation of food in mainstream popular culture is beginning to push the boundaries of what is considered gourmet, then what characteristics or concerns will come to prominence in its place?

Hypothesis: Post-Gourmet Australia

This thesis investigates two aspects of Australian culinary culture: —firstly, food media and households’ everyday food practices—to understand the increasing complexity of contemporary Australian food culture; and secondly, how media shapes the way everyday households approach and negotiate choices around what to buy, cook, and eat. Taking a media and cultural studies approach that draws upon textual

Chapter 1: Introduction 5

analysis and interview data, this thesis examines food media texts, the lived experiences of everyday households, and insights from members of food and food media industries.

I argue that Australia is in the midst of a new phase of its culinary culture, one that attempts to mesh a simpler, more conscious approach to food with the pace and complexity of culture fostered by digital media and media convergence. The return to simpler food values can be read as a growing resistance to the industrialised food system that rapidly developed through the latter half of the 20th Century, the result being a politically and socially driven foodscape where consumption has a conscience.

This thesis is the first documentation of this post-gourmet phase of Australian food culture.

The inseparable nature of food and media makes analysing food media texts alongside the culinary views and everyday practices of households a natural fit.

Whether through recipes, paintings, photographs, advertising, stories, or film, food has always been mediated. Through engaging with, or passing on culinary texts, food becomes about more than immediate sustenance. The fact that food information can be disseminated and consumed through all of these different channels—and more—as well as be informative, entertaining, persuasive, seducing, or in some instances alarming, is testament to its complexity and ubiquity. Food media’s omnipresent nature means that a documentation of culinary trends and culture has accumulated over time. And through this accumulation of texts, a reflection of food culture and food trends and how they have changed over time becomes apparent. Food media’s influence in shaping the food practices of audiences has become evident in a number of ways. In the US context, Contois and Day (2018, p.16) cite a 2011 study from the

American Dietetic Association (now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics), which

6 Chapter 1: Introduction

found that Americans were more likely to consult food media rather than health or nutrition/dietetics professionals for dietary advice. Aside from the cooking skills learned at home or school, food media provides a diverse and easily accessible way to quickly broaden one’s culinary horizons (“Curtis” cited in Kirkwood, 2013, p. 59). But considerations beyond food media have shaped the development of Australian food culture, too.

Since the end of World War II, a number of factors have contributed to the transformation of Australian food culture from largely British-influenced fare to an increasingly cosmopolitan pastiche. Similarly to the US, where Contois and Day

(2018, 1) point to “[u]rbanization, modernization, mechanization, corporatization ” as key influences on its food culture, Australia has experienced waves of post-war migration, an increase in the speed and comfort of international travel, expanding suburbs, the growing prevalence of family cars, in-home refrigeration, supermarkets and shopping centres, as well as the growing pervasiveness of food media over the last

60 years. With Australia’s cultural and culinary history in mind, this thesis explores

Australians’ outlook on food in a more contemporary setting, specifically the years following the 2009 debut of reality television program MasterChef Australia, which was arguably a turning point in the nation’s food culture (see for example Kirkwood

2013; 2014; Phillipov 2012). In the decade since MCA’s introduction I argue that

Australian food culture as well as the kinds of food texts achieving mainstream popularity are changing. In terms of culture, this thesis will show that although MCA popularised a gourmet or restaurant-style approach to cooking, concerns around food ethics and sustainability are becoming increasingly mainstream. These concerns are also becoming evident in the content of popular food media. And more than this, the

Chapter 1: Introduction 7

process of media convergence and developments of digital media are altering the kinds of texts produced within the food genre.

This thesis therefore examines what everyday households consume, why these foods and cuisines are popular, and how householders learn about food. Through examining contemporary food media texts, as well as the insights of ordinary households and members of various aspects of the food and food media industries, this thesis provides a snapshot of the complexities of Australia’s contemporary culinary culture. It argues that although MCA—along with the wider proliferation of lifestyle- based food media—has introduced viewers to a more sophisticated approach to cooking and eating, Australian food culture is now moving into a post-gourmet phase.

While this thesis will show how these values are manifested in contemporary media texts as well as everyday households, it will also highlight that this transition in culinary culture is much more complex than simply eating ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ food.

And that is because not only has food science and policy evolved significantly over the past half century, it has been shaped by industry intervention and influence.

Therefore, there are numerous ideas—many of which are conflicting—of what is

‘good’ and what is ‘healthy’.

Thesis Outline

The Changing Nature of what Constitutes ‘Good’ Food For the better part of the last two decades, food media has been experiencing a boom in popularity, especially in Australia. The enduring genres of television cooking shows, food magazines, and cookbooks experienced a spike in popularity thanks to adopting the tropes of the broader lifestyle media genre. Lifestyle media, which also encompasses DIY renovations, gardening, and personal dress and grooming, is geared towards making over less-desirable homes, gardens, and personal presentation to

8 Chapter 1: Introduction

adhere to the middle-class modes of consumption promoted in such programs (Lewis,

2008a, 2008b; Ouellette & Hay, 2008; Palmer, 2008). Previous research has tended to focus on a specific element of food media, normally either exclusively on food television (Adema, 2000; Collins, 2009; de Solier, 2005, 2008; Hollows & Jones,

2010; K. Matwick & Matwick, 2014; 2015; T. Miller, 2002; Murray, 2013), cookbooks

(Adams, 2014; Brien & Wessell, 2013; Elias, 2017; Mitchell, 2010) or celebrity chefs

(Abbots, 2015; Barnes, 2014; Hansen, 2008; Henderson, 2011; Johnston, Rodney, &

Chong, 2014; Piper, 2015; Rousseau, 2012; Slocum, Shannon, Cadieux, & Beckman,

2011). It has also documented how food television evolved from instructional to entertaining (see Collins 2009), thereby appealing to broader audiences, which some scholars argue has a democratising effect on gourmet food culture (see Adema 2000).

While food television’s evolution resulted in increased viewership and popularity for the genre, it also had some problematic impacts too. Although the more entertaining aspects of cooking shows have helped broaden the genre’s appeal, the makeover aspect is sometimes perceived as intrusive. This was evident in parents who would pass food through school fences to their children in response to Jamie Oliver’s intervention in

Jamie’s School Dinners, for example (Rousseau, 2012). Oliver has also faced criticism for his cookbook Save with Jamie, which despite being promoted as an austerity cookbook would require £500 of kitchen staples and utensils before buying a recipe- specific ingredient (Ellis-Petersen, 2013). So, while becoming more widespread, the promotion of middle-class approaches to consumption are not always welcome.

It is becoming clear that what constitutes ‘good’ food in mainstream culinary culture is evolving. Such a shift is arguably a result of two factors: A democratisation of the post-gourmet values of foodies, as well as the permeation of discourses from

Food System Exposés (FSEs) like Food Inc. and Fast Food Nation into mainstream

Chapter 1: Introduction 9

food culture. Previously, Adema (2000), focusing on Emeril Lagasse, had argued that entertaining modes of food television had made gourmet food and cooking, traditionally the realm of the dominant group in the field—foodies—more accessible and appealing to a wider audience. I argue that a similar phenomenon is occurring today in a post-gourmet phase of culinary culture. The permeation of post-gourmet food into mainstream culinary culture is driven not only by television, but by a range of traditional and digital media. Existing examinations of the gourmet foodscape in both Australia (see de Solier, 2013a) and abroad (see Johnston & Baumann, 2015) illustrate that foodies are looking beyond French haute cuisine as the benchmark of

‘good’ food and towards more ethically and morality driven characteristics of food such as cultural diversity, locally-sourced/slow, artisanal, organic, and homemade. de

Solier (2013b, p. 16) also points to foodies being “culturalists rather than materialists” whereby they seek experiences and knowledge, and are hesitant to engage in overt displays of conspicuous consumption like frequenting fine dining restaurants.

Production too, in the form of cooking, growing food, or blogging about food is also seen to carry more culinary capital than mere consumption (de Solier, 2013a).

Unlike foodies, the wider population is not trying to outrun the ‘food snob’ moniker. The shift towards a more considered and morally-motivated foodscape therefore manifests differently in mainstream food culture. Texts like FSEs that are designed to have popular appeal, either explicitly or implicitly encourage audiences to embrace more mindful and ethical eating through unveiling the realities of the industrialised food system. The ethical and moral turn is not only evident in FSEs and other food media texts, but also in the changing lived experiences of everyday households. A growing interest in farmers’ markets, the growing popularity and public acceptance of vegetarian and vegan diets, recent bans on plastic grocery bags, and

10 Chapter 1: Introduction

growing calls for wider-spread bans on single-use plastics—which include food- related items like takeaway containers, plastic cutlery, and straws—are all indicative of the mainstreaming of values and practices that foodies have adopted in an attempt to shirk the ‘food snob’ label.

Although these developments in culinary culture may be viewed as positive and empowering, they do not account for the entirety of Australian food culture. As one of the aims of this thesis is to highlight the increasing complexity of culinary culture, I am not attempting to reconcile these tensions, but to articulate them as they exist and are experienced in everyday life. Difficulty in accessing ‘good’ food, which was within domain of the middle-class, is not exclusive to the era of culinary culture where haute cuisine was the benchmark. Even now, when more culturally omnivorous and seemingly democratic values are seen as important in food culture, not all households are able to eat locally, ethically, and sustainably sourced produce that is prepared from scratch at home because this produce is not accessible in terms of time, money, or proximity/location. In Australia for instance, regions like the Barossa Valley, Margaret

River, the Yarra Valley, essentially all of Tasmania, and the restaurants dotted around the graffiti-lined laneways of Melbourne, are seen as the pinnacle of the nation’s food culture. Meanwhile, the pervasiveness of fast food outlets and supermarkets elsewhere around the country highlight an aspect of food culture that values convenience and cheapness. Huntley (2008, p. 7) observed this dichotomy in the following way:

On the one hand there is the brilliant food of celebrity chefs exhibited

in glossy food publications and engaging TV shows. Then there is the

reality of Australia’s obesity statistics, the reliance of increasingly busy

people on pre-packaged and pre-prepared food, and the evidence that

we watch people cook more than we cook ourselves.

Chapter 1: Introduction 11

This phenomenon, however, is not unique to Australia. Prominent contributor to the FSE genre through his seminal book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser (2017) highlighted in a column marking a decade since the text’s publication that a similar phenomenon that had emerged in the United States:

The contrast between the thin, fit, and well-to-do and the illness-

ridden, poor, and obese has no historical precedent. The wealthy used

to be corpulent, while the poor starved.

In the introduction to her ‘food tour’ of Australia, Huntley (2008, p. 10) said it was not her middle-class neighbourhood “with its vegan sushi and eggs Florentine” that would provide the most insight into Australian food culture, but another suburb that was a 30 minute train ride away with a take-away shop that offered “Tepid roast chickens [that] glistened under lights, lying side by side with kransky sausages, piles of hot chips, sausage rolls…”, a hot bread shop “selling doughnuts, sausage rolls, pies and pasties, rolls and loaves of bread (a few with wholegrain)”, and a Chinese takeaway shop offering “sweet and sour this, fried rice with that” (Huntley, 2008, p.

3). But as images of the former gain prominence in mainstream media and mainstream food culture, the consequences of consuming the latter are glossed over and forgotten.

Moves toward a more political food culture have already emerged in examinations of foodie culture. de Solier (2013a), as well as Johnston and Baumann

(2015) have documented foodie culture’s transition from being simply fancy or gourmet, to being underpinned by morality and omnivorous values. de Solier (2013b) found that foodies were increasingly wary of being viewed as ostentatious. As well as limiting their visits to fine dining restaurants, foodies adopt a “morality of quality” when food shopping where they would rather spend more money on a local, or ethically produced food item. This kind of anxiety is also evident in Johnston and

12 Chapter 1: Introduction

Baumann’s (2015) exploration of foodies’ omnivorous values. They employ the concept of omnivorousness in a cultural sense. Rather than an exclusive appreciation for highbrow culinary culture like haute cuisine, foodies are showing an affinity for authentic ethnic cuisines from hole-in-the-wall eateries, local produce, and artisanal products. So, similar to foodies as examined by de Solier (2013b) who embraced cultural experiences over conspicuous consumption like frequenting fine dining restaurants, foodies emphasise consumption of humbler and ethically produced goods to deflect accusations of snobbery. This approach to consumption, however, is still employed in order to create a sense of distinction from ordinary eaters. Just as mainstream audiences were becoming more familiar with gourmet food and cooking, it appears that the dominant group in the foodscape—foodies—are redefining the characteristics of ‘good’ food. Embracing a moral, omnivorous approach to food— practices and values that were once considered alternative—are now also filtering out into mainstream culture (see Phillipov and Kirkwood 2018a). It could be argued that the mainstreaming of these more omnivorous culinary values could be the latest phase in the democratisation of foodie culture that Adema (2000) previously observed through the advent of entertaining food television.

The progression towards more culturally omnivorous values of authenticity, locality, as well as exoticism, as values that represent culinary capital are just one way in which food culture has changed in the last decade or so. A prominent way in which consumers learn about what kinds of food and approaches to consumption position one as holding culinary capital is the media. The next section introduces why it is important to examine how food discourses are disseminated across a variety of platforms and how these platforms are—like the culinary values they promote—in a state of transition.

Chapter 1: Introduction 13

The Changing Nature of Food Media Alongside investigating the changing nature of culinary capital, this thesis also presents empirical research that moves beyond the segmented approach to analysing food media as discrete platforms or content that is consumed or studied in a vacuum.

Even when researching MCA, it was clear that food media texts did not exist in isolation and so the audiences’ use of these texts had to be examined in context. The post-broadcast era means that a once-relatively discrete platform like television, for example, is now thoroughly embedded within other platforms. Television is accessible not only via terrestrial broadcast, but digitally on devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The flexibility of digital platforms also means that certain genres, like cooking demonstration are evolving. Rather than have a presenter demonstrate two or three recipes over the course of a 30-minute television show, a single recipe can be illustrated in a one-minute clip that does not show a presenter, but the mere assembly and cooking of a dish in a time lapse-style video. Considering the fluidity of platforms and genre as a result of media convergence, it is important to consider what forms of food media—both newer and more traditional—are engaging for audiences, how different platforms and genres are engaged with, and how audiences negotiate this proliferation in choice. These factors shape the impact food media has on audiences’/consumers’ food literacy.

Research Design The two methods employed in this research—textual analysis of FSE documentaries and books, and the examination of views gathered through interviews with members of 13 households and eight members from different sectors of the food industry—present two sets of discourses around contemporary food media and

Australian food culture. Establishing the FSE genre and examining the discourses found within these texts will provide insight into how audiences/consumers are being

14 Chapter 1: Introduction

told through media texts about problematic consumption practices, their origins, consequences, and potential solutions. I analyse FSEs instead of lifestyle-driven food media texts because the latter have already been extensively covered in the literature, which will be discussed in Chapter 3. Scholarship around FSEs, however, is still in its infancy.

As stated earlier, this thesis does not attempt to reconcile the complexities and contradictions of contemporary Australian food culture, but articulates them as they are. The dichotomy between wanting a more mindful foodscape, but still demanding convenience presents an interesting set of challenges for government, researchers, businesses, and individuals in the future.

Chapter Summaries

Chapters 2 and 3 examine the literature and context through which this next phase of Australian culinary culture has developed. Chapter 2 focuses on cultural flows around food, examining how the ‘foodie’ identity group became established as the dominant identity group in relation to food knowledge and consumption. Having been dubbed ‘food snobs’ in many circumstances, some of which are explored in this chapter, foodies have adopted practices that align with the concept of cultural omnivorousness in an attempt to mitigate accusations of snobbishness. Engaging in culturally omnivorous consumption means foodies seek culinary experiences and knowledge rather than only acquisition of material goods (de Solier, 2013b), and foods that have one or more attributes of “Quality, rarity, locality, organic, hand-made, creativity, and simplicity” (Johnston & Baumann, 2015, p. 3). This chapter reflects

Bourdieu’s prominent role in food culture research as it reflects upon studies that examine the practices through which culinary capital is accrued and maintained as well as how culinary capital has evolved over time.

Chapter 1: Introduction 15

Chapter 3 reviews food media research, as well as developments in the wider mediasphere that are pertinent to the future of culinary media. This chapter establishes that, historically, examinations of food media tended to focus on a single medium, predominantly television. Such an approach has allowed scholars to establish particular phenomena that are evident in a particular text or selection of texts across a medium such as food television or cookbooks, or in relation to a celebrity chef. It has enabled examinations of how gender and class operate in relation to culinary texts. The gap it leaves however, is that the everyday use of these texts does not occur in a vacuum, and this makes a case for an examination of how audiences themselves utilise different texts and platforms—both digital and traditional—in negotiating the contemporary food system. Such analysis is especially warranted at a time where both culinary concerns (as explored in Chapters 7 and 8), as well as the nature of broadcast media—where food media has been most prevalent for over half a century—are undergoing dramatic shifts.

The approach and research methods are outlined in Chapter 4. This chapter reiterates the rationale for this research and the subsequent steps taken in order to address the research question about how food culture and food media has changed in the decade since MCA’s debut. It establishes the key methods used in this thesis as semi-structured in-depth interviews, as well as textual analysis of documentary films and non-fiction books that I classify as Food System Exposés (FSEs) in Chapter 7.

Specifically, it talks through the protocols and coding techniques used in relation to the gathering and analysis of interview data, as well as the process of selecting texts for analysis in Chapter 7.

Chapter 5 is the first analysis chapter and looks at social interactions around food in a post-gourmet foodscape. As well as establishing how dynamics around shopping,

16 Chapter 1: Introduction

cooking, and eating play out in everyday households, this chapter also applies Hage’s

(1997) concept of home building in exploring how food is viewed as a vehicle to build cross-cultural relationships, but also as a way to help foster and maintain a sense of community and familiarity, regardless of whether cross-cultural interactions are involved. Significantly, this chapter provides insight as to how food media can facilitate home building, as well as the increased value of social interactions over the nutritional value of food that may be consumed during these occasions.

Chapter 6 responds to the phenomenon established in Chapter 3 whereby scholars have devoted great efforts to documenting developments in a specific text, a specific platform, or celebrity chef, and have thus far not looked at how households use various forms of culinary media, particularly in a post-broadcast environment. I apply the theories of polymedia (Madianou & Miller, 2012, 2013) and the domestication of technology (Baym, 2015) in analysing participants’ articulation of the dynamics between their engagement with both traditional and digital media. This chapter highlights the nuances in everyday households’ use of food media, illustrating how utilising the most advanced technology is not always the most desired option, and providing a glimpse into how the conditions of post-broadcast media are reshaping food media engagement.

The lifestyle media genre has garnered immense popularity in the last 30 years.

In the post-gourmet era, I argue in Chapter 7, a new genre of documentary films and non-fiction food books is coming to the fore. Using predominantly textual analysis in this chapter, I introduce the Food System Exposé genre. Anti-corporate critiques, and critiques of the food system are not new. I argue however that the number of documentary films and non-fiction books that critique the industrial food system, or specific aspects of it, have proliferated rapidly in the last decade and therefore warrant

Chapter 1: Introduction 17

analysis as a genre. Food System Exposés explore the various ways in which the industrial food system has a negative impact on animals and the environment, exploits workers, and harms consumers. Big Food’s selling of cheap, energy dense, but nutritionally deficient food financially benefits the company and its shareholders, but it is detrimental to the long-term health and wellbeing of families who consume it.

Arguably since Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super Size Me premiered at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, texts that work to expose the reality of how food that consumers reach for through the car window and pick from the shelves in the supermarket is produced have become more prevalent. But even in the last 10 to 15 years the focus of FSEs is moving from the more overtly harmful fast food to processed supermarket food that is promoted as healthy, but contains excessive amounts of sugar.

While Chapter 7 focuses on texts, Chapter 8 focuses on the adoption of ethical and sustainable consumption as expressed by the interview participants and is the last analysis chapter. This chapter does not aim to establish a direct cause and effect scenario between FSE texts and ethical and sustainable consumption, but argues that the discourses in these texts are reaching mainstream consciousness, and that such discourses are making consumers and businesses more mindful of how food consumption impacts the world around them. In light of this, Chapter 8 explores some of the practices consumers and businesses are engaging in, including vegetarianism and veganism, consuming less meat and consuming higher-welfare animal products, supporting local farmers and growers, and reducing food waste.

Chapter 9 brings together the strands of analysis that establish Australia’s embrace of a post-gourmet phase of culinary culture. This chapter summarises the enduring social value of food to fostering a sense of community and familiarity, and being the centre of rituals among friendship groups and family despite the rapidly

18 Chapter 1: Introduction

evolving nature of culinary capital. It also recaps the increasing richness of contemporary food media in a post-broadcast environment and how audiences use this to their advantage. Most importantly, this chapter highlights the complexity of the contemporary food environment for consumers seeking to adopt ethical and sustainable consumption practices in a still predominantly industrial foodscape. Such complexity is apparent in the proliferating number of ways in which audiences can access culinary information, as well as in the discourses of FSEs, which highlight the many hidden stories behind supermarket food. Even when seeking to engage in more ethical and sustainable culinary practices, some of these are incongruous. The findings of this thesis open questions of how the industrialised food system and ethical and sustainable approaches will co-exist, and how culinary media and its uses may continue to evolve in a post-broadcast foodscape.

Chapter 1: Introduction 19

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

This chapter begins with the story of McDonald’s. Not because this thesis is about McDonald’s, or because this thesis holds McDonald’s up as a bastion of good food, but because for the past half-century, The Golden Arches have been a constant in the global—and more specifically, Australian—foodscape. Its purpose in the beginning phase of this thesis is to act as a reference point against which the evolution of food culture, until today, can be examined. The corporation has faced a number of controversies—many of which will be explored throughout this chapter, as well as later in the thesis—in relation to many different aspects of its business. Despite this, the fast food chain has adapted in ways that has enabled it to survive, while not abandoning its core business of selling burgers and fries.6 Telling the McDonald’s story aids in contextualising the cultural shifts and conditions that have created the contemporary foodscape that Australian households embrace and negotiate every day.

Co-opting the history of McDonald’s is apt in explaining how the processes of globalisation and cultural fragmentation have shaped contemporary food culture.

McDonald’s is arguably one of the key drivers behind the manifestation of these concepts in contemporary society. Some of the fast food chain’s developments, however, can be read as responses to, or consequences of, these trends. Globalisation refers to the growing scale and impact of the international flows of people, brands, businesses, ideologies, technologies and information, as well as the increasing speed and ease with which we can engage in these flows (Held & McGrew, 2007). With outlets in nearly 120 countries worldwide (Ritzer, 2012, p. 2), it is unsurprising that

6 In 2016 movie The Founder, Harry Sonneborn (B.J. Novak) tells Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton), “You’re not in the burger business; You’re in the real estate business.”

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 21

McDonald’s is one of the brands Flew (2007, p. 66) cites as a key example of globalisation in Understanding Global Media. The global ubiquity of a brand that prides itself on presenting a uniform offering across more than 36,000 outlets

(McDonald’s, 2019) has led to claims of McDonald’s inducing cultural homogenisation, which Ritzer (2012) terms “McDonaldization.” Ritzer (2012) claims that along with these tens of thousands of outlets, the principles of the McDonald’s system of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control have permeated into other sectors around the globe. Appadurai (1996) argues however, that complete homogenisation is not entirely possible due to processes of indigenisation. For instance, a 2011 BBC documentary series, Secrets of the Superbrands devoted an episode to food. Presenter Alex Riley travelled to India where he visited a McDonald’s and tried a Paneer Salsa Wrap. Riley remarks:

it just tastes ‘like McDonald’s […] you could’ve blindfolded me,

and I would’ve known that it was a McDonald’s thing […] How do they

manage to give it that McDonald’s blandness? It looks Indian, sounds

Indian, but tastes McDonald’s.

Although McDonald’s can be considered an agent of cultural homogenisation in some respects, even it has had to adapt, as cultural fragmentation has altered the culinary priorities of its various markets around the world.

For Dick and Mac McDonald, owners of the McDonald Brothers Burger Bar

Drive-In, their priorities towards the end of the 1940s were to “increase the speed, lower prices and raise the volume of sales” (Schlosser, 2001, p. 19). Relaunching the drive-in as McDonald’s Hamburgers in 1948 using their new “Speedee Service

System” achieved this. The new system, mimicked Henry Ford’s assembly line approach and involved the following changes: menu items were limited to one-third

22 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

of the restaurant’s original offerings, self-service replaced waitresses, the drive-thru7 would eventually supersede carhops, paper cups and bags replaced glassware, cutlery, and crockery and a production line-like style of preparation was adopted (Ashley,

Hollows, Jones, & Taylor, 2004; Schlosser, 2001). The fact that a McDonald’s hamburger cost 15 cents instead of the traditionally “competitive” 30 cents meant

“working class families could finally afford to feed their kids restaurant food” (Love,

1995, p. 15). After being taken over by Ray Kroc in the mid-1950s, McDonald’s grew into the global fast food franchise it is today. McDonald’s first Australian restaurant opened in Yagoona, New South Wales in 1971 (McDonald’s Australia, 2019).

The fast food chain’s Australian Chief Executive Officer Andrew Gregory (in

Macleod, 2014) acknowledged that its innovations over the years are in response to changing customer needs. In 2018, one of McDonald’s Australia’s earliest innovations celebrated its 25th anniversary: the world’s first McCafé opened in Melbourne.

McCafé aimed to tap into Australia’s strong café culture, cultivated by Italian and

Greek immigrants since the 1950s, eventually leading to more European tastes across mainstream Australia (Hurst, 2014; Veldre, 2002). By the late 1980s and early 1990s however, McDonald’s was prompting growing international unrest regarding the corporation’s impact on its customers’ health, workers, children, animals, and the environment. This culminated in the McLibel trial, which proceeded throughout much of the 1990s, bringing numerous damaging accusations about McDonald’s to public attention. These claims included corporate greed, economic imperialism, environmental degradation, fuelling unhealthy lifestyles, animal cruelty, workforce exploitation and exploiting children through marketing (McSpotlight, 2010). Eric

7 The Drive-thru was first introduced in Oklahoma City in 1975 (Love, 1995, p. 390) and implemented in Australia three years later (McDonald’s Australia, 2019).

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 23

Schlosser (2001, p. 261) found that in 20th Century United States, corporate pleas for

“freedom” led to an undermining of regulations that subsequently compromised the freedoms and rights of workers, consumers and the environment. In response,

McDonald’s in Australia hosted Open Door days in 2003 and again in 2013, released a 2012 documentary McDonald’s Gets Grilled and its “Our Food, Your Questions” website that aims to provide transparency about the origins and treatment of ingredients, nutrition and company values (McDonald’s Australia, 2013, 2015;

Reynolds, 2013). Nutrition has become a priority for Australians, with data for 2017-

18 showing that 67 per cent of the population is overweight or obese (Australian

Bureau of Statistics, 2018). In the US, another lawsuit, where two teenagers—Ashley

Pelman and Jazlyn Bradley—attempted to sue the fast food giant for allegedly making them obese, motivated filmmaker Morgan Spurlock to make the 2004 documentary

Super Size Me. Two months after the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival,

McDonald’s announced that its US outlets would cease offering the supersize option for its drinks and fries. The corporation maintained it was an exercise in “menu simplification” and “nothing to do with that (film) whatsoever” (Riker in Holguin,

2004). In Australia, 2004 also saw McDonald’s introduce nutritional labelling

(McDonald’s Australia, 2019). In August 2003 however, McDonald’s introduced its

Salads Plus menu, with new breakfast options of fruit, cereal, and yoghurt joining in

December 2003 (Williams, 2004). In 2007, nine McDonald’s meals were controversially awarded an Australian Heart Foundation Tick, but the foundation cut ties with the golden arches and other takeaway outlets in 2011 (Chapman, 2008; The

National Heart Foundation of Australia, 2011).8

8 The Heart Foundation Tick was a symbol the foundation introduced in 1989 to help consumers make healthier food choices (The National Heart Foundation of Australia n.d.a; The National Heart

24 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

Although the fast-food chain was implementing options like salads and yoghurts as healthier alternatives to its traditional fried fare, the rhetoric and true nutritional benefits of these new options were questioned rather quickly. Harris (2017) reported that in Canada, a McDonald’s kale salad contained more calories than a Double Big

Mac. Locally, a chicken Caesar salad with crispy chicken9 contains more calories, fat, and sodium than a Big Mac.10 Rather than persisting with so-called ‘healthier’ options, consumer trends led to McDonald’s Australia adding what could be considered more gourmet and exotic options to its traditional offerings.

In tracking the trajectory of fast food chains’ reactions to Super Size Me,

Spurlock (2005, p. 252) cited a Fortune article where such menu items were described as “creat[ing] the illusion of being healthier even though they aren’t” (Boyle, 2004, para. 8). In 2009, McDonald’s Australia introduced the M Selections menu

(BurgerBusiness, 2011), but has made more radical changes with its Create Your Taste customisable burgers and the renovation of a Sydney McCafé outlet to become “The

Corner” (Jabour, 2014; Macleod, 2014). Create Your Taste invited customers to design their burger on a digital kiosk, which was then brought to their tables served on wooden boards with French fries served in a wire basket (Macleod, 2014). The menu at The

Corner meanwhile, includes “salads featuring Moroccan roast chicken breast, chipotle pulled pork, brown rice, pumpkin, lentil and eggplant salads, sandwiches and barista made quality coffee” (Oxenham in Colgan, 2014, para. 4). Journalist Bridie Jabour

(2014) described The Corner as “a McDonald’s disguised as a hipster café,” while

Foundation of Australia n.d.b). Food products awarded the Tick if they meet the Heart Foundation’s nutritional guidelines (The National Heart Foundation of Australia n.d.b). It was discontinued in 2015. https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/healthy-eating/heart-foundation-tick

9 https://mcdonalds.com.au/menu/chicken-caesar-salad

10 https://mcdonalds.com.au/menu/big-mac

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 25

Chris Jager (2014) called Create Your Taste “the final step in McDonald’s hipster gentrification.” Analysts claim that in the US, McDonald’s moves to provide customisable options and higher-quality ingredients are aimed at competing with “fast- casual” outlets like Chipotle (Lutz, 2014). Parallels could be drawn between

McDonald’s innovations locally and increasing competition from places like Grill’d

(burgers) or Guzman Y Gomez (Mexican).

Tensions in Culinary Culture

Understanding how markers of good food in contemporary Australian food culture has evolved means developing an understanding of what constitutes good taste and how good taste is determined. Bourdieu (1984) conceptualised the defining of one’s place in society, expressed through consumption of cultural goods, cultural knowledge, and practices (Featherstone, 2007). Achieving a higher standing in society is accrued in three forms of capital: cultural, economic, and social (Bourdieu, 2005).

Cultural capital relates to the knowledge, artefacts, or qualifications one holds, and obtaining this kind of capital is somewhat dependent on one’s networks—social capital—and ability to purchase goods, entrance to courses and the like—economic capital (Bourdieu, 2005). In establishing the idea of culinary capital, Naccarato and

LeBesco (2012, p. 2) echo Bourdieu in recognising that “food and food practices play a unique role as markers of social status.”

In examining the American gourmet foodscape, Johnston and Baumann (2015, p. 128) claim that “Food is deeply politicized” in that it is “interlarded with relationships of power and privilege. Most everyday food choices both reflect and reproduce societal power divisions of economic and cultural capital…” Their chapter entitled “Foodie Politics: One Delicious Revolution” however, is primarily focused on the macro food politics of locavorism, organics, and ethical or sustainable food. It is

26 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

not until the next chapter “Class and its Absence,” that the economic and cultural inequalities are analysed. The chapter’s title suggests that foodies’ omnivorous turn results in a more egalitarian and democratic foodscape. It becomes clear however, that discourses which romanticise and minimise inequality serve to ease foodies’ moral anxieties about food snobbery, and that knowledge of authentic and ethnic cuisines function as another way to create culinary distinction. Looking at the social dimension of food, Germov and Williams (1999, p. 2) articulate that “Food is not only essential to survival; it is also one of the great pleasures of life and the focal point around which many social occasions and leisure events are organised.” Fine (1996, p. 1) highlights that what we eat “conveys images of public identity.” Projecting a particular relationship with food to the world makes statements about one’s economic and cultural capital and therefore inherently creates divisions in society (Johnston &

Baumann, 2015). More specifically, there are different values attached to food consumption (e.g. eating), and production (e.g. cooking), with the latter viewed more highly than the former (de Solier, 2013a). Categories of social and cultural distinction or exclusion are then formed around the culinary practices people exhibit.

Food culture, and the media, views, and practices contained within can be seen as an example of Bourdieu’s concept of field whereby actors hold different positions in relation to one another in a particular cultural space (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 97). Bourdieu acknowledged that cultural fields are “fluid and dynamic, rather than static, entities” (Webb, Schirato, & Danaher, 2002, p. 22). The construction of cultural fields—the interaction and conflict between “a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations, appointments and titles” in the formation of an

“objective hierarchy”—is complex (Webb et al., 2002, p. 21). Relatedly, in setting out four forces that had shaped food trends in the latter part of the 20th Century, Warde

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 27

(1997, p. 183) pointed to the idea of community or ‘communification.’ This does not necessarily refer to personal interaction with those in one’s neighbourhoods, but is more aligned with Bourdieu’s (1977, p. 72) habitus, which are particular ways of being that help one structure behaviour, including consumption. Community according to

Warde (1997, p. 183) is the sense of security that comes from knowing one is engaging in “appropriate ways to act, to have aesthetic judgments affirmed by like-minded people, to share in a consensus on what comprises a decent and good life.” Like the dynamic nature of field, as Bourdieu established, Warde (1997, p. 183) states that community too “evolves piecemeal over time.” He points to the ephemerality of food too as a way in which approaches to eating can evolve, “I could eat traditional

Cantonese meals in May, junk food in June, and be vegetarian in July.” This reinforces the shifting nature of one’s place within the culinary field.

Just as cultural fields are dynamic, the assigning of value to practices and commodities in the form of cultural capital is continually updated and varies across fields (Naccarato & LeBesco, 2012; Webb et al., 2002). The culinary field is no exception. I argue that trends of globalisation and cultural fragmentation have contributed to a substantial rearticulation of what constitutes culinary capital, thereby adding further layers of complexity to the everyday food choices consumers make.

Such shifts mean that the distinction between sub and dominant cultures has dissipated

(Chaney, 2004). Johnston and Baumann (2015, pp. 5–14) document that since the

1960s, French haute cuisine—once the “culinary bastion of the elite” (LeBesco &

Naccarato, 2008, p. 226)—has gradually been de-sacralised. Figures such as Julia

Child, Craig Claiborne, and Jacqueline Kennedy popularised French cuisine (Ocepek,

Aspray, & Royer, 2014), while Alice Waters infused it with an environmental and political conscience (Johnston & Baumann, 2015). In 1965 the Immigration Act

28 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

opened the United States to a more diverse array of immigrants and the cuisines they brought with them (Cowen, 2012). In the 1970s chefs were recognised with professional status and by the 1980s they were becoming celebrities (Johnston &

Baumann, 2015, p. 11). Also, in the 1980s, Yuppies “who were thought to cultivate dining experiences as a source of status,” sought increasingly exotic foods (Johnston

& Baumann, 2015, p. 11). The essence of using food as status is captured in a scene from 1987’s Wall Street featuring Charlie Sheen’s character, Bud Fox, and Daryl

Hannah as Darian Taylor:

They cement their new relationship with an elaborate cooking

spree – handmade sushi, fresh pasta, gourmet ice-cream and a wealth

of other personally crafted treats. Once the grub is all laid out in front

of them on their $15,000 dining table, Bud says ‘Let’s not even eat.

Let’s just watch it’ (Huntley, 2008, pp. 161–162).

In the 1990s and into the 2000s as the United States’ population travelled more and the country’s ethnic diversity grew, interest in exotic cuisines went deeper than exploring national cuisines to regional ones (Johnston & Baumann, 2015). Diners now seek cuisine, not just by country, but by region—for example, distinguishing Szechuan from Chinese food more broadly (Johnston & Baumann, 2015, p. 13). Furthermore,

Johnston and Baumann (2015, p. 3) also point further to attributes including “locality, organic, [and] handmade” as new signifiers of food that hold culinary capital. While this is an American perspective, it is through this 50-year transition that foodies have come to adopt an omnivorous stance, assigning value to authentic and exotic cuisines, as well as ethical and sustainable approaches to food (Johnston & Baumann, 2015).

Simultaneously, members of the wider population have had access to information,

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 29

commodities and experiences once reserved for foodies, offering cultural capital that allows them a better standing in the field (Adema, 2000; Kirkwood, 2013).

Aside from the constant evolution of what constitutes culinary capital, multiple forms of culinary capital can exist simultaneously, sometimes overlapping and contradicting each other (Naccarato & LeBesco, 2012). Australian cooking show Good

Chef, Bad Chef highlights this. The show’s hosts Adrian Richardson and his counterpart Zoey Bingley-Pullin both hold cultural capital through their standing as chefs, with Bingley-Pullin also being a nutritionist (Bingley-Pullin, 2015; Lifestyle

Food, n.d.). Different forms of culinary capital are enacted through the dishes they cook on the program. Richardson relishes in cooking dishes like Pasta Carbonara,

Chicken Kiev and Potato Pie, emphasising indulgence and taste. Bingley-Pullin meanwhile prioritises health, cooking Mango, Quinoa and Black Bean Salad, and

Steamed Seafood Spelt Pasta Bags, for example. After presenting her gluten-free almond, vegetable and ricotta slice, Bingley-Pullin jokes, “It’s fresh, clean. Lots of fresh veggies in there as well. The perfect antidote to all of Adrian’s unhealthy dishes that he makes” (season 7, episode 24). These contradictions add to the complexity of the culinary field that everyday households negotiate alongside time and financial constraints.

The fluid nature of cultural capital results in overlapping and contradictions in what constitutes cultural value. This is evident in the tension between taste and health on Good Chef, Bad Chef. The program highlights however that the field is further nuanced in that hierarchies can exist within hierarchies. de Solier (2013a) highlights that while one may claim culinary capital through the consumption of ethnic cuisines, some are considered more legitimate than others. Johnston and Baumann’s (2015) earlier example, promotes the joy of enjoying a meal native to the Szechuan province

30 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

in China as holding more culinary capital than purchasing “Westernized versions” of

Chinese dishes “such as Sweet and Sour Pork or Lemon Chicken” (de Solier, 2013a).

Foodies dismiss such fare as inauthentic (de Solier, 2013b, p. 61). Such distinctions exacerbate the intricacies of the field.

To establish a position within a cultural field, one can draw from many types of cultural capital, as evidenced in the practices of Richardson and Bingley-Pullin, as well as de Solier’s findings. Additionally, the amount of cultural capital one acquires contributes to determining one’s position and subsequently the power and individual or group has in influencing which commodities and practices are recognised as legitimate (Webb et al., 2002). “Cultural choice positions us: it tells us and others who we are, and it defines for us and others who we are not” (Bennett, Emmison, & Frow,

1999, p. 8). In the culinary field it has been foodies who exert power in determining the direction of gourmet food culture. Increasing access to information about food in the media—which forms the focus of chapters 3 and 6—and increasing rates of travel and migration shape how foodies develop the progression of the field, as Johnston and

Baumann’s (2015) account illustrated the move toward omnivorousness.

The relationship between food and popular culture is evident when retracing the influences of globalisation in popular culture. While Ritzer’s (2012) theory of

McDonaldization reflects the view that globalisation and the ensuing cultural fragmentation is creating increasing cultural homogenisation, Grove (2007, p. 158) contends that global flows can produce new cultural hybrids. This research acknowledges the presence of McDonaldization, but the establishment of the everyday foodie has occurred as a result of the spread of cultural diversity that is more aligned with Grove’s (2007) perspective.

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 31

Appadurai (1996, p. 33) introduces five “scapes,” designed as a framework through which the “disjunctures” of global cultural flows can be explored. This framework consists of ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. In the cultural studies field in which this research is situated, using the concept of foodscapes “can be helpful in understanding complex social systems in which, humans, artifacts [sic] and environments interact” (Mikkelsen, 2011, p. 210), especially when the phenomena are “unevenly distributed in space and appear in a variety of shapes and contexts” (Brembeck & Johansson, 2010, p. 800). While

Goodman (2016, p. 257) notes that foodscapes had increasingly become a site of research alongside post-disciplinary studies of food, Panelli and Tipa (2009) also acknowledge the term’s use across art, journalism, as well as in the social and health sciences. The five scapes Appadurai (1996) refers to relate to the global movements of people, information, technology, capital, and philosophical outlooks, respectively.

Foodscapes can be thought of as a hybrid of the ethno-, techno-, and mediascapes. In drawing from Appadurai (1996), Mikkelson (2011), as well as Brembeck and

Johansson (2010), foodscapes can be conceptualised as the global movement of cuisines, culinary figures, technologies and information.

Developments in the foodscape over the past half-century have closely reflected the cultural fragmentation that has been occurring in wider society. Cultural fragmentation refers to the disintegration of a single dominant culture into a “plurality of lifestyle sensibilities and preferences” (Chaney, 2004, p. 47). In suggesting four trajectories behind the changing nautre of distinction, Warde (1997) refers to individualisation and an increasingly niche market segmentation. These two related social forces relate closely to Chaney’s observation around cultural fragmentation.

Individualisation as explored by Beck (1992), and the vision of consumer as reflexive,

32 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

discerning consumer (Featherstone 1987) is nuanced by Warde’s (1997, p. 16) contention that individualisation has not led to “patternless individualtion, but rather new, more intricate and more specialized, small group formations.”

Flew (2007) notes that although the processes of globalisation have been evident since the 1940s, they gained momentum during the 1980s, coincidentally around the same time the foodie identity first appeared. The evolution of foodie culture and the impact of this on the culinary practices of the wider population can be conceptualised as shifts in the foodscape. These shifts, such as the rise of omnivorousness and emerging popularity of exotic and ethical food practices have significantly altered the interactions between people, food, marketplaces, and the cultural value ascribed to these interactions.

Foodies

So far, this thesis has recognised the identity group of foodies as the culinary elite. Food became another way in which Yuppies and Bobos11 could express their wealth and worldly tastes (Huntley, 2008). The foodie term was established in the

1980s, and foodies are defined as people who build their identity around having extensive food knowledge and sophisticated consumption practices in order to achieve social distinction (de Solier, 2008, 2013a, 2013b). For foodies, displays of their culinary pursuits function “as [a] status symbol, like a bespoke watch or handmade attaché case” (Huntley, 2008, p. 162). In Australia, foodies tend to be middle-class as they hold “high levels of cultural and/or economic capital” (de Solier, 2008, p. 72).

More specifically, in her study of foodies, de Solier (2013a, p. 12) categorised the

11 The Bobo term is used to describe the combination of the yuppie and the hippy. It is where a person possesses or exhibits both bourgeois and bohemian characteristics (1996, p. 901).

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 33

majority of her sample “as members of the new middle class or knowledge class.” In her study of 50 foodies, more than half of de Solier’s (2008) sample had obtained university qualifications and worked in white-collar professional or managerial roles, while 40 per cent earned upwards of $80,000. Although lavish and expensive fine- dining meals epitomised foodie culture in the 1980s, there is an important shift occurring in contemporary foodie values and behaviours.

Omnivorousness: The New Snobbery

The prevailing discourse that foodies are food snobs is still evident in contemporary culture. At the crudest level, one of the top three definitions of foodie on Urban Dictionary is “A douchebag who likes food” (“Archer in Chicago,” 2011).

Foodie tastes are transitioning, however, from being exclusively haute cuisine-oriented to more inclusive and eclectic—or omnivorous (Johnston & Baumann, 2015, p. 35).

Excessive or overt displays of consumption and snobbery, like Bud Fox and Darian

Taylor’s display in Wall Street are frowned upon (de Solier, 2013b). For instance,

Craig Claiborne received widespread criticism—even from The Vatican—for a review published in 1975. Claiborne, a former New York Times food editor and restaurant critic, used a charity auction prize as an opportunity to indulge in a $4000, 31-course, five-hour meal for two at a Paris restaurant (B. Miller, 2000; Ocepek et al., 2014). This meal was indulgent not only in cost, but the number of courses meant that Claiborne and his colleague Peter Franey only “took a few bites” of each dish (Ocepek et al.,

2014, p. 15). Claiborne and Franey’s jaunt reflect the traditional view of foodie as snobs. Forty years later, and foodies feel increasingly anxious about frequenting fine dining establishments, restricting visits to “a couple of times a year […] spend[ing]

$300 to $400 at a top flight restaurant in the city” (“Raymond” in de Solier, 2013b, p.

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18). They would rather pursue their interest in food in a way that is morally comfortable, and are therefore more aptly referred to as omnivores.

In the most literal terms, to be an omnivore, or to be omnivorous, means that one eats both plants and animal products. Being culturally omnivorous, however, means that “highbrows,” or high- status persons” are taking a greater interest in what were considered middlebrow and lowbrow genres (Peterson & Kern, 1996). Peterson and

Kern (1996) confirmed the presence of this phenomenon in relation to music tastes.

Between 1982 and 1992, highbrows—defined in Peterson and Kern’s study as people who like both opera and classical music and nominate one of these genres as their favourite—expressed a statistically significant increase (1.74 out of five to 2.23) in the number of lowbrow genres12 that they enjoy. A study of the tastes of Australia’s post- war elite, spanning literature, music, movies, and cultural activities found this segment of the population was omnivorous in they had eclectic tastes and did not use their engagement with culture as a source of distinction (B. S. Turner & Edmunds, 2002).

Demographically, the highbrows examined by Peterson and Kern (1996) are similar to foodies who also tend to be more educated and have higher incomes (2008, 2013a).

While the highbrows in Peterson and Kern’s (1996) analysis were “more likely to be white,” foodies in Australia were from a variety of ethnic backgrounds (de Solier,

2013a). It is important to note, however, the different contexts in which these studies were conducted. Peterson and Kern (1996) analysed quantitative data from the US, while de Solier (2013a) conducted ethnographic research in Australia 15 years later.

12 Peterson and Kern (Peterson & Kern, 1996, p. 901) defined the lowbrow genres utilised in the study as country, bluegrass, gospel, rock and blues. These are considered lowbrow because they are created by groups considered “socially marginal” based on their “ethnic, regional, age or religious” backgrounds (Peterson & Kern, 1996, p. 901). The middlebrow genres examined were mood/easy- listening, Broadway musicals and big band, which had “been in the mainstream of commercial music throughout the twentieth century” (ABC, n.d.). There was not a statistically significant increase in the enjoyment of the middlebrow genres.

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 35

Johnston and Baumann (2015) have only recently attached the cultural iteration of omnivorousness to foodies and gourmet food culture. However, foodies have slowly directed the field toward embracing omnivorousness as the accepted or dominant foodie ethos since the 1960s (Johnston & Baumann, 2015, pp. 5–14). Cultural omnivorousness in the culinary field means having openness to, and desire for, cuisines from lowbrow culture. Fine dining and haute cuisine are therefore no longer the only markers of culinary capital (Naccarato & LeBesco, 2012). Instead, authenticity and exoticism are increasingly important for contemporary foodies

(Johnston & Baumann, 2015).

Interestingly, even in the most wide-ranging cultural analyses undertaken in

Australia, it has not until very recently that food as an object of cultural taste has been examined. In the mid-1990s Bennett, Emmison and Frow conducted the Australian

Everyday Cultures survey, the findings of which were which was published as

Accounting for Tastes (1999). Although Bennett, Emmison, and Frow (1999) included

“eating habits” as cultural practice examined in their survey, this aspect of the study did not figure significantly in their findings with culinary histories by the likes of

Symons (2007) and Santich (2012) providing much more substantial accounts. In

Bennett, Emmison, and Frow’s study, analyses of Australians’ approach to food were confined to small sections across the chapters “Leisure and Work,” and “Care of the

Body, Care of the Self.”

Unlike the Turner and Edmunds’ (2002) look at Australians’ cultural consumption, or de Solier’s (2013a) examination of Australian foodie culture, Bennett,

Emmison and Frow’s (1999) look into food and eating as part of everyday Australian culture is given only a cursory glance that focuses on age, gender, and income as determinant factors in whether Australians dined-out at pubs and clubs, restaurants or

36 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

fast-food establishments. Perhaps a consequence of methodology, Accounting for

Tastes does not have the class- or lifestyle- driven analysis of Turner and Edmunds, and de Solier’s work.

Contemporary Australian foodies consider themselves to be more “culturalists rather than materialists, people whose self-making is bound up in the acquisition of cultural experiences and knowledge, rather than the accumulation of material things”

(de Solier, 2013b, p. 16). Foodies now emphasise that good food can be inexpensive, but that it should also be authentic or exotic (Cowen, 2012; Feuillet, 2007; Johnston &

Baumann, 2015). The omnivorous turn in foodie culture has legitimised “Quality, rarity, locality, organic, hand-made, creativity, and simplicity” as signifiers of culinary capital (Johnston & Baumann, 2015, p. 3). This trend represents an erosion of the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow cuisine, and foodies utilise omnivorous consumption to distance themselves from “food snobs,” but to still signify their cultural and economic capital (Johnston & Baumann, 2015, p. 3). For Feuillet (2007), the foodie is positioned in opposition to the “food snob” who seeks expensive overt displays of consumption, but has not invested time in acquiring the knowledge or skills to cook, and the “food slob” who eats indiscriminately and may be characterised as

“compulsive” (Guthman, 2003, p. 45). Foodie consumption, conversely, is “driven by conscious reflexivity” (Guthman, 2003, p. 45). Foodies are knowledgeable about where to eat and how to cook good food, inexpensively (Feuillet, 2007). Although

Cowen (2012) describes himself as an everyday foodie, his “experiment” to avoid mainstream supermarkets and frequent his local Chinese supermarket and his detailed guide to spotting the most authentic hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants are more akin to the values of omnivorousness. These characteristics seemingly embody the democratisation of foodie lifestyles, and increasing inclusivity within the culinary field

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 37

that began with the desacralising of French cooking by Julia Child more than 50 years ago.

Omnivorousness is becoming increasingly visible in the Australian foodscape.

The opening of the “world’s cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant” Tim Ho Wan in

Sydney and Melbourne13 in 2015 was just one example of the newfound reverence for simple, but authentic and exotic fare in Australia (Bolles, 2014). Omnivorousness is also embodied in sites like Brisbane’s Eat Street Markets, which opened in November

2013, events such as the Brisbane Powerhouse’s World Food Markets held in

December 2014, or Melbourne’s International Street Food Festival that first took place over the 2015 Australia Day long-weekend. The trend is also evident in entrepreneurial projects like former MCA contestant Poh Ling Yeow’s Jamface. Jamface is Yeow’s café, based at Adelaide Central Markets, having grown from a stall at the Adelaide

Farmers’ Market. The former MCA contestant sells not only jam, but handmade crackers, pot-set yoghurt, pasta sauce, French pastries and cold press juices.

Marketgoers can also order pancakes, seafood paella, salami pesto mozzarella toasties, and Yeow’s famous pizza fritta (Yeow, 2015). Johnston and Baumann (2015) attribute the rise of omnivorousness in the culinary field to the media’s influence in spreading culinary information, haute cuisine’s infusion with a political and environmental conscience, and increases in travel and migration.

Jamface’s embodiment of omnivorousness encapsulates three of the trends Flew

(2007) claims contribute to the process of globalisation and illustrates the importance of globalisation in the formation of the contemporary culinary environment.

Specifically, Yeow’s business captures the increasing scale and impact of “the

13 Tim Ho Wan’s Sydney locations have closed, but the restaurant retains a Melbourne site and another has opened in Perth.

38 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

international movement of people,” “communication flows,” and “global circulation of ideas, ideologies and ‘keywords’” (Flew, 2007, p. 67). The international movement of people and the ease and speed with which media is accessible globally is evident in that Yeow is a Malaysian-born Australian whose market-stall menu features among other dishes, French pastries14 and Spanish paella. Yeow’s participation in MCA, which initially brought her into the public spotlight for her cooking ability,15 has been broadcast not only locally, but in 35 other countries.16 Yeow’s popularity is such that

Stockholm-based food-blogger Miss Marzipan visited Adelaide and documented her excitement of a morning working with Yeow at the Jamface stall when it was based at the Adelaide Farmers’ Market (Miss Marzipan, 2014). Yeow’s promotion of Jamface reinforces the presence of the omnivorous ideology in Australian food culture, with stall signage touting “handmade crackers” and her Instagram updates featuring the preparation of Jamface cold press juices, for example. These correspond with the markers of being handmade and local that Johnston and Baumann (2015) highlight.

Seale (2012, p. 34) contends that MCA contestants who do not go on to become professional chefs illustrate that the show’s premise to transform ordinary people into

“master chefs” is largely unfulfilled and the contestants are exploited in order to

“subsidise the costs of production.” While there may be some truth in this criticism, almost 70 per cent of MCA contestants from 2009 to 2013 continue to work in the food industry (Network Ten, 2014). Such a perspective also ignores cultural fragmentation, which has resulted in pursuits like Yeow’s Jamface that embody omnivorousness having substantial traction in the culinary field.

14 Yeow hosted a cooking show on the ABC from 2010 to 2013 called Poh’s Kitchen where French- Australian chef Emmanuel Mollois was a frequent guest. 15 Prior to entering MCA, Yeow was an established artist (Zangara, 2014) 16 Estimated. Seeking confirmation from Network 10.

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 39

So far, the rise of omnivorousness appears to represent a democratisation of conventional foodie culture. Adema (2000, p. 116) defines the democratisation of food culture as the “present[ation] of sophisticated food in ways that break down social and language barriers,” and the opening of food and cooking to a wider and more diverse audience. Julia Child is credited with doing this in the 1960s, stating later that “The more one knows about it [cooking], the less mystery there is, the faster cooking becomes, and the easier it is to be creative and to embrace new trends and ideas” (Child in Mitchell, 2010, p. 527). Child’s statement represents not only an offer of knowledge and skills to her audience, but also a transfer of culinary capital. Programs like Child’s demystified French cuisine at a time when “French food was perceived to be the very essence of sophistication and worldliness” (Collins, 2009, p. 79). For Australian audiences at this time, for whom Margaret Fulton could be an Australian equivalent of

Child, cooking shows presented housewives with the knowledge and skills required to

“signify and solidify their status as members of the middle class” (de Solier, 2005, p.

472). Contemporary primetime food programming goes beyond targeting housewives to position cooking as a “glamorous hobby for men women and children” (Adema,

2000, p. 116). Adema (2000) posits that one of the ways in which cooking show presenters like US celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse does this is through reducing the intimidation associated with culinary jargon. For instance, Lagasse (in Adema, 2000, p. 116) discounts the term “génoise” as “just a big, fancy word” for sponge cake. Yeow does the same at her Jamface stall, selling mille feuille as “Milly Filly.”17

Media is not the only site where culinary capital has become more accessible.

Farmers’ markets also operate as another domain through which the wider population

17 Mille Feuille, otherwise known as Vanilla Slice or Napoleon is a French dessert of layers of puff pastry with Crème pâtissière sandwiched in between (2013a, p. 61).

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can obtain culinary capital. In Australia, farmers’ market numbers have soared from

70 to 152 between 2004 and 2011 (Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forestry,

2012). For everyday foodies, who will be explored in more depth shortly, visiting farmers’ markets may only represent “a mini-break from the banal consumption we might experience in the more usual places we shop for food: the convenience store, the shopping centre and the supermarket” (Huntley, 2008, p. 161). Ashley et al. (2004, p. 117) observe that “farmers’ markets are predominantly middle-class spaces, trading not simply in produce, but also in culturally rich values of authenticity, simplicity and

‘heritage’…” In terms of financial accessibility, a pizza fritta from Jamface at the

Adelaide Farmers Markets for $12.90 is somewhat more accessible than the $525 tasting menu from Heston Blumenthal’s Melbourne iteration of his Fat Duck restaurant

(Shah, 2015). Although more accessible than fine dining, food blog Adelaide Food

Central still noted that $12.90 was “a bit more” than it was expecting to pay for Yeow’s pizza fritta (Adelaide Food Central, 2015). The access to gourmet food culture afforded to the wider population through farmers’ market visits and cooking programs is, as LeBesco and Naccarato (2008, p. 224) highlight, “limited and temporary,” but with “evidence of a trickle-down effect” (Gallegos, 2005, p. 109). Pursuing a foodie lifestyle requires skill, as well as economic and cultural capital that largely remains elusive to the wider population (Collins, 2009; Gallegos, 2005; LeBesco & Naccarato,

2008). Gallegos’s (2005, p. 109) analysis of Australian cookbooks highlighted that although recipes were touted as “easy-to-prepare” and for the “home kitchen,” the time, ingredients, knowledge, and skill required suggested that they were directed to a middle-class audience. Despite the emergence of omnivorousness, “food-as-lifestyle” remains “intrinsically exclusive” (Collins, 2009, p. 225).

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 41

While foodies do not necessarily control the price of farmers’ market fare, or the complexity of cookbook recipes, it is not uncommon for members of this group to manipulate the terms of their omnivorousness, or to be imperfect omnivores (de Solier,

2013a), in order to assert their “superior” tastes. Peterson and Kern (1996, p. 901) differentiate middlebrow from lowbrow culture, as “lowbrow forms created by socially marginal groups” are seen as more desirable than the “commercial” middlebrow forms. Retaining this distinction between middle and lowbrow tastes is important in investigating everyday foodies, as de Solier (2013a) points out that not all foodies are true omnivores. Peterson and Kern (1996, p. 901) define an omnivore as “at least open to appreciating” high, middle, and lowbrow forms, but many foodies express contempt for middlebrow processed and fast foods (de Solier, 2013a).18 This rejection was common across both de Solier’s (2013a) as well as Johnston and

Baumann’s (2015) foodie samples. While Johnston and Baumann’s (2015) foodies rejected fast-food as not fulfilling omnivore values of being authentic and exotic, for de Solier’s (2013a) foodies such fare did not meet their expectations of quality.

Respondents from my previous research where I established the idea of everyday foodies meanwhile, appear to not hold such prejudices. Melanie (in Kirkwood, 2013) claimed “I will say I love fine dining, but if you offered me up Sizzler on a Sunday,

I’m right there. McDonald’s – there’s a special place in my heart for McDonalds…

I’m not a snob by any stretch of the imagination.” Interestingly, members of a Dutch digital production agency masqueraded as restaurateurs at a culinary expo offering a

“new, organic alternative to fast food,” which in reality were portions of McDonald’s products. Victims of the prank claimed the food tasted “rich” and even, that “It’s

18 de Solier refers to these foods as lowbrow. However this analysis uses Peterson and Kern’s (1996) distinction between middlebrow and lowbrow.

42 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

definitely a lot tastier than McDonald’s” (Godoy, 2014). It would appear that foodies’

“aesthetic judgement of quality” is based on context of consumption and associated culinary capital, or lack thereof. Foodies’ rejection of fast food appears to be justifiable when one considers the mainstream derision of these outlets, but the Dutch prank highlights the role status plays in influencing foodies’ consumption. This blip in foodies’ adherence to the values of omnivorousness not only highlights the contradictions of culinary capital within the field, but that these values can be manipulated to accommodate an underlying snobbishness, an entrenched desire to distinguish oneself through their consumption of food that omnivorousness does not entirely overcome.

Omnivorousness carries its own elitist discourses, rather than representing a wholly democratised and inclusive food culture. Johnston and Baumann (2015, p. 19) acknowledge that the proliferation in food media, tourism, and migration “suggest a democratization of food culture, but simultaneously maintain that there are “persistent divisions within the gourmet foodscape.” Although observing the gourmet foodscape in the US, the comments made by de Solier’s (2013a) foodies in relation to fast food for example show how Johnston and Baumann’s (2015) claim applies in an Australian context. It is surprising that an underlying snobbery exists among Australian foodies, as Turner and Edmunds (2002) found evidence to the contrary. It could be argued that the discrepancy between the two studies is because Turner and Edmunds’ (2002, p.

234) study surveyed cultural tastes more broadly and their sample was “firmly committed to their careers” and used “leisure activities principally as a source of therapeutic relief from work.” de Solier’s (2013a) study conversely, focused on foodies pursuing the lifestyle practices they are passionate about. Although

“ostentatious” displays of highbrow consumption are seen as distasteful and in conflict

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 43

with the nation’s dominant ethos of larrikinism (B. S. Turner & Edmunds, 2002, p.

235), foodies feel justified in pursuing a “morality of quality”—valuing quality over price when buying food—as they do so in order to emulate professional chefs (de

Solier, 2013a, p. 99). This may still be interpreted as a snobbish display of consumption, even though a Sunday morning jaunt to the farmers’ market is not as glamorous as a night at a white tablecloth establishment. Just as the $12.90 pizza fritta from Jamface was viewed as expensive by the Adelaide Food Central blogger, a seven- item selection Huntley (2008, pp. 160–161) proposed buying from her local farmers’ market would have cost $73. She suggested anyone who paid this was a “sucker prepared to spend a lot of money on not a lot of food” (Huntley, 2008, p. 161). Just as cultural capital is dynamic and changing, so too is snobbishness. Foodies now mitigate or justify their behaviour with the claim of emulating their professional counterparts in an (seemingly unsuccessful) attempt to shirk the aura of snobbishness associated with their lifestyle.

Adema (2000, p. 117) claims that as culinary knowledge that was once exclusive to the elite is disseminated to a wider audience, “the value of gourmet food and cooking as cultural capital decreases” (emphasis added). The rise of omnivorousness suggests however, that this culinary capital has not been eroded, but that foodies have exercised their power as the dominant group within the field to change what constitutes culinary capital. Turner and Edmunds’ (2002, p. 222) claim that defining taste is “a game, a competition between social groups.” Foodies have been able to reassign value to ethnic, hole-in-the-wall eateries as “there is nothing inherent to particular cultural activities that make them either ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’” (B. S. Turner & Edmunds,

2002, p. 222). Interestingly, “kitsch foods,” like “dude food” dishes typically associated with people of low socioeconomic standing, presented in a “playful” way,

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are enjoyed by foodies (Johnston & Baumann, 2015, p. 187). Anderson (2012) summarises the contradiction, concluding, “A greasy hamburger made by a minimum wage teenager is ‘fast food’ but an equally greasy pork bun with onion rings made by some tattooed hipster is ‘dude food’.” It could be argued that foodies prefer the hipster fare over fast-food outlets because as Johnston and Baumann (2015, p. 198) found in their sample, fast-food chains are “too common to serve as a basis for drawing symbolic boundaries.”

The Katering Show: The Journey of a Food Intolerant and an Intolerable Foodie is a six-part satirical cooking show that captures the “new snobbishness” of omnivorousness, especially in relation to aspects of ethical and sustainable consumption that have become increasingly popular. The web series features Kate

McCartney (the food intolerant) and Kate McLennan (the intolerable foodie) who poke fun at foodie trends including street food and farmers’ markets. The “Ethical Food” episode opens with the comediennes selecting produce at a farmers’ market.

McLennan claims that the market sells “organic, bio-dynamic, sustainable and locally sourced foods.” She says, “In theory, this should be my happy place, but the people here make me involuntarily bleed out of my anus.” McCartney points out that these people include “architects on 150k a year,” “hippies playing crockery as musical instruments,” and “pregnant women wandering around wearing organic cotton.”

McLennan goes on to highlight that eating sustainable and local food is easy as “these days there are so many options available to people who can afford to have principles.”

This sequence highlights the middle-class nature of foodies and the distinction they maintain from the wider population as principles are something one needs to be able to “afford.” Through their satirical cooking show, McLennan and McCartney articulate

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 45

why the “douchebag” association lingers for foodies despite their embracing of the seemingly more democratic values of omnivorousness.

At face value, it appears that omnivorousness in foodie culture has democratised the culinary field through the processes of globalisation and cultural fragmentation.

The emerging interest in exotic cuisines, as well as ethical and sustainable approaches to food makes engaging in food culture in some ways more accessible for everyday people, but also appears to eschew the stigma of food snobbery associated with fine dining and haute cuisine. But in redefining the boundaries of what constitutes culinary capital, it could be argued that foodies have simply found new values through which they can distinguish themselves from the wider population. This position can be argued because the time, money, knowledge and skills required to consistently research and eat at authentic ethnic restaurants, to source high quality and ethical ingredients, and to cook from scratch, are more within the reach of middle-class foodies.

Everyday Foodies

Cowen (2012) originally the coined everyday foodie term in An Economist Gets

Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies. This text advises readers to shop at ethnic supermarkets and on how to select restaurants that serve the most authentic ethnic cuisines. While one of Cowen’s (2012, p. 11) key premises is that “Good food is often cheap food,” his preoccupation with authentic and ethnic cuisines, plus the time and expertise one would need to follow these “rules,” suggests that Cowen’s (2012) everyday foodie is better categorised as a contemporary foodie who has omnivorous tastes.

My conceptualisation of the everyday foodie emerged from a study that investigated the impact of MCA. Through conducting a textual analysis of 24 episodes of the program, in-depth semi-structured interviews with seven MCA-viewing

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households, plus an observation of their grocery shopping behaviours, it became clear that everyday Australians were expressing a desire to engage with foodie culture.

Time, money, health concerns or a lack of confidence however, reshaped their integration of foodie culture into their lifestyles. The social and political tensions of food were explored using a theoretical framework based around DIY citizenship in opposition to arguments about exploitation and commercialisation, or a ‘middle- classing’, of society. Hartley’s (1999) DIY citizenship is a process whereby audiences assemble their identity using chosen elements of the surrounding environment, both real and mediated. This argument contends that audiences are active and take advantage of various viewing strategies available to them (see Ouellette & Hay, 2008).

Further, I argued that shows like MCA enable social mobility, functioning as accessible lifestyle guides for people who wish to understand how to choose the “correct” commodities in the acquisition of cultural capital (see Adema, 2000; de Solier, 2005,

2008; Ouellette & Hay, 2008). Conversely, claims of exploitation accuse lifestyle television of reinforcing class divides through attempts to makeover the working-class.

These audiences may not be able to afford or desire, as seen above in relation to

Jamie’s School Dinners, the bourgeois values and consumption practices imposed upon them (see Lewis, 2008a; Ouellette & Hay, 2008; Rousseau, 2012). Having examined MCA and its audience, I identified that viewers’ attitudes and behaviours more closely reflected Hartley’s (1999) ideas regarding DIY citizenship. This led me to establish the everyday foodie concept.

Everyday foodies appreciate gourmet food culture and enjoy some aspects of the foodie lifestyle. However, health concerns or a lack of time, money or confidence limits or reshapes their pursuit of gourmet food, experiences and products (Kirkwood,

2014). In the case of the ‘everyday’ versus the conventional foodie, both share an

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 47

interest in gourmet food, but ‘everyday foodies’ are not necessarily tertiary-educated, inner-city dwellers working in white-collar occupations, as was often the case in de

Solier’s (2008, 2013b) research. Everyday foodies embrace celebrity chefs, who provide “productive play” and distance viewers “from the mundanity of everyday life and the labours of domesticity” (Lewis, 2008b, pp. 56–57). Additionally, time and financial constraints mean everyday foodies purchase ingredients at their local supermarket, a practice validated and encouraged by shows such as MCA where contestants use ingredients sourced from the show’s major sponsor, Coles. It can therefore be established that the everyday foodie enjoys gourmet food, but does not pursue the interest in the same way as foodies.

Everyday Realities: Supermarkets, Processed, and Fast Food

So far, foodies’ rearticulation of culinary capital to embrace the omnivorousness values of quality, locality, organic, creative, and hand-made foods, as outlined by

Johnston and Baumann (2015), has been made clear. Although this shift in some respects makes high-status food more affordable and accessible, explorations of foodie culture tend to gloss over the realities of everyday life. I identified the time and resource factors of work and family commitments, a lack of confidence, and money as the limits for everyday households to engage with food culture (Kirkwood, 2013).

Supermarket food, processed food, and fast food are means by which households manage these limitations. It is clear there is a trade-off in everyday households between eating freshly cooked meals or pre-made and processed ones. The former takes more time, and skill, but is seen as better for health and for the household. The latter requires less time and skill, but does not hold the same cultural capital. Eating meals freshly cooked, from scratch in the family home, is seen as the most legitimate way of eating, while using processed ingredients, eating ready-made meals, or fast food is considered

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inferior (Parsons, 2014; Stead et al., 2004). This view was shared regardless of whether one was from a middle-class (Parsons, 2014), or working-class (Stead et al., 2004) background. At the crux of this distinction are cultural value judgements about the amount of processing food undergoes, with food that is fresh and processed within the home, signifying more cultural capital than food processed in factories. These judgements in determining cultural capital, however, ignore that processing is vital to securing the food supply.

The tension Parsons’s (2014) and Stead et al.’s (2004) respondents articulate in relation to the processing of food is a complex debate, and one that affects everyday households. Although Cowen’s (2012) views predominantly reflect contemporary foodie views of omnivorousness, he deviates from omnivore values with his views on agriculture. He claims that the culinary field’s shunning of large agribusiness, “Our largest source of cheap food” is misleading (Cowen, 2012, p. 9). The reluctance of the

Indian government to allow foreign investment into agriculture until 2011, for instance, results in high spoilage rates, high food prices, and hunger for “millions of poor families” (Cowen, 2012, p. 160). Cowen (2012, p. 160) claims that the improved infrastructure and hardier crops that agribusiness brings can “save lives and fill bellies.” His stance is more aligned with Laudan (2001) who claims Culinary Luddites’ romanticism of slow food and traditional ways of eating are based on historical untruths that our ancestors thrived off fresh foods cooked at home. Cowen (2012, p.

148) supports this stating, “We’re not going to solve the obesity problems by going back to the food world of 1890.” Just as Cowen (2012) asserts technological advancements in the production of food can aid in securing the food supply, Laudan

(2001, p. 36 and 38) explains that fresh foods were in reality “something quite nasty”

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 49

that were made “tasty, safe, digestible and healthy” through processes of breeding, fermenting, soaking, leaching, and curdling, for example.

These processes too are the subject of criticism, debate, and even celebrity chef intervention, highlighting the complexity everyday households face in negotiating food choices. This complexity be seen in relation to a more recent development in food processing—freezing, which came to Australia in 1949 through the Birds Eye brand

(Birds Eye, n.d.; Symons, 2007). Symons (2007, p. 247) views frozen food with disdain, saying that rather than eating seasonally, reliance on frozen food compromised quality and was an attempt to “adjust our climate to our habits.” While fresh food is the domain of the “peasant, small farmer, shop keeper, and home cook and gardener,” frozen food was the domain of bureaucracies that could store, transport and sell frozen product easily for profit (Symons, 2007, p. 247). Such claims appear to be somewhat justified by a February 2015 outbreak of Hepatitis A, which was traced back to the consumption of frozen berries packed in China (Department of Health & Human

Services, 2015). There were 18 confirmed cases across Australia (Department of

Health & Human Services, 2015). If handled and stored correctly however, frozen fruit, vegetables, and fish offer many genuine advantages to home cooks. Cowen

(2012) disputes Symons’ (2007) claims that freezing compromises quality, stating that flash-freezing produce is better for keeping it fresh and maintaining quality than refrigeration. “Frozen produce is still produce,” seconds Bittman (2014, p. 53). In fact,

Cowen (2012, p. 258) claims that good quality sushi “relies on the flash-freezing of fish on the open sea.” Celebrity chefs reinforce these claims as well. Recipes in Jamie

Oliver’s Save with Jamie cookbook advocate the use of frozen products. Oliver (n.d.) writes about “Fantastic fish tikka curry,” saying “This is a cracking version, and in the spirit of keeping costs down, a wonderful opportunity to embrace quality frozen fish,

50 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

which is perfect here, as well as frozen cauliflower – both great value products.” The version of this recipe that appears on Oliver’s website has a “buy ingredients at

Woolworths” button at the top of the ingredients list. While Oliver supports the use of frozen food in his recipes, there are other forms of food processing he staunchly opposes. The celebrity chef’s partnership with one of Australia’s big two supermarket chains opens a tension regarding the legitimisation of supermarkets in gourmet food culture.

Oliver’s partnership with Woolworths, announced in 2013, was not his first supermarket endorsement. He was previously linked to UK chain Sainsbury’s from

2000 to 2011 (Bowers, 2011; Luft, 2011). Nor is Oliver the only celebrity chef partnering with a supermarket, with Heston Blumenthal and Coles also joining forces in 2013 (Marriner & Whyte, 2013). Supermarkets are the antithesis of the foodie lifestyle, yet these celebrity chefs have extensive self-branded product lines for their respective partners. Blumenthal’s “Heston for Coles” line featured two varieties of gourmet sausages, burger patties, porterhouse steak with “applewood-smoked salt” and “mushroom ketchup,” three gourmet pies, Asian marinated chicken wings, a line of sauces, as well as caramel apple pie popcorn (Coles Supermarkets Australia, n.d.- a). Oliver features extensively in Woolworths advertising, and has an extensive

“Created with Jamie” line of pre-marinated meats, sausages, burger patties, and desserts. A range of “Jamie’s Dinnerware” is also sold at Woolworths supermarkets.

Oliver’s Woolworths partnership is even more extensive with his “Jamie’s Table” recipes published on the Woolworths website. The involvement of these celebrity chefs in the supermarket space creates different tensions however.

Oliver’s presence in the supermarket may be perceived as somewhat hypocritical. In his 2010 television series Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution for example,

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 51

he states that healthy food should be cooked using unprocessed ingredients, “with love, from scratch” (Oliver in Slocum et al., 2011, p. 179). Oliver campaigned against unhealthy and processed food in schools in Jamie’s School Dinners (2005), yet he advocates the use of frozen produce, and he currently has his “Created with Jamie” pre-prepared products on Woolworths shelves. Interestingly, in a study of 100 recipes from chefs who appeared on UK television and 100 ready-made meals from UK supermarkets, it was found that none of these recipes or meals were in full compliance with the World Health Organization’s nutritional recommendations (Howard, Adams,

& White, 2012). Between the ready-made meals and celebrity chef recipes, the latter were considered less healthy and a total of 47 recipes were from Oliver’s 30 Minute

Meals and Ministry of Food cookbooks (Howard et al., 2012). Such results seemingly go against his health advocacy, highlighting the contradictory positions the celebrity chef holds in the field (Lewis, 2008b).

While Oliver’s involvement with Woolworths appears hypocritical,

Blumenthal’s involvement with Coles highlights how different types of processing are assigned different positions in the culinary field. This is similar to how Blumenthal’s fellow Briton and culinary celebrity, Nigella Lawson legitimises indulgence. Rousseau

(2012, p. 100) highlights that only a “fine line” separates “food porn queen and fat frump.” This line, she continues, is “decided by the arbitrary collusion of class and the hierarchies we have constructed around eating by which some foods spell unacceptable gluttony, while others remain enviably indulgent” (Rousseau 2012, p. 100).

Blumenthal also presents an interesting example of the contradictory nature of cultural capital at work. Blumenthal is famous for the molecular gastronomy creations served at his restaurant, the Fat Duck at Bray with “snail porridge and egg and bacon ice cream” being two of his signature dishes (Hollows & Jones, 2010, p. 522). The

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term “molecular gastronomy” was established in the early 1990s as a way to legitimise science-driven cooking for academia (Adrià, Blumenthal, Keller, & McGee, 2006;

Rayner, n.d.). Using food chemistry and technology including tools such as “modern thickeners, sugar substitutes, enzymes, liquid nitrogen, sous-vide, dehydration” among

“other nontraditional means” Blumenthal and his colleagues strive to make “delicious and stimulating dishes” (Adrià et al., 2006). Having been awarded three Michelin stars suggests that the Fat Duck provides its patrons with the “delicious and stimulating” experience Blumenthal seeks for his diners. Dining at the Fat Duck is an exclusive, highly sought-after experience as evidenced in the overwhelming response to the

Melbourne restaurant’s ballot where 90,000 entries, representing 257,000 potential diners vied for 14,000 seats available at the Fat Duck’s six month stay (Wright, 2014).

The use of thickeners and other additives in many supermarket items like soft drink and ice-cream are viewed as lowbrow, manufactured food because it is simply a product manufactured for profit. For instance, Schweppes created a marketing strategy including packaging and advertising for its lemon squash drink Solo before the drink itself was created (Symons, 2007, pp. 228–229). Meanwhile Blumenthal’s scientific approach establishes his dishes many echelons above those churned out of food factories. He aims to “perfect culinary technique” and to “challenge diners to reflect on seemingly obvious categories—for example, the distinction between sweet and savory, hot and cold, raw and cooked.” Hollows and Jones (2010) cite one such example, Blumenthal’s crab ice cream, of which Blumenthal (in Derbyshire, 2001, para. 11) says, “if, for instance you are told that you are about to eat frozen crab bisque, then you know what to expect. But with the word ice cream in your head, then your brain starts preparing for something sweet.” His approach as a culinary scientist is made more authentic with his “safety-goggle styled spectacles and his lab-coat style

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 53

chef’s whites” (Hollows & Jones, 2010, p. 527). With Blumenthal’s position as owner of one of the most exclusive restaurants in the world, consumer psychologist, media commentator and Global Chief Strategy Officer at Cummins&Partners Adam Ferrier

(Marriner & Whyte, 2013, para. 19) questions Blumenthal’s association with Coles, saying “Heston doesn’t represent the values Coles has, Coles isn’t about molecular gastronomy.” While both Blumenthal’s dishes and products sold at Coles are both processed, Blumenthal’s version of “processing” is imbued with vastly more cultural capital than supermarket fare.

Although it appears counterintuitive and somewhat hypocritical for celebrity chefs to be in the supermarket space, it is not the first time supermarkets have had a gourmet turn. As supermarkets grew in Australia during the post-war period, so did consumer affluence (Symons, 2007). The emphasis on cheapness as supermarkets promoted was in conflict with consumers’ desire and ability to pay for high-quality, artisanal products from the specialty outlets that supermarkets had largely pushed out of business (Symons, 2007). Supermarkets responded with “gourmet sections,” and

“This mixture of the efficient and the exotic encouraged experimentation and novelty in cooking” (Symons, 2007, p. 214). The partnership between Blumenthal and Coles,

Oliver and Woolworths, and Coles’ sponsorship of MCA can be seen as a more sophisticated approach. Like with processed foods, Symons (2007) sees supermarkets as diluting Australian food culture.

Supermarkets account for a significant share of Australian food retailing.

Compared with the United Kingdom, United States, and China, Australia’s grocery market is the most concentrated (Mortimer, 2013). Seventy per cent of the UK market is held by five major retailers, while in the US four retailers have 55 per cent market share. China’s market is the most diverse of the group, with five retailers controlling

54 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

only 38 per cent of the market (Mortimer, 2013). In December 1978 the Coles-

Woolworths duopoly accounted for 37.3 per cent of the Australian market, with Coles having 17.3 per cent and Woolworths 20 per cent (Symons, 2007, p. 211). Forty years later, the big two have 67.5 per cent market share. Woolworths holds 37.2 per cent alone, while Coles has 30.3 per cent (IBISWorld, 2018). The closest competitor is

German chain ALDI with 9.2 per cent followed by Metcash Limited, which trades as

IGA, Supa IGA, IGA X-press, IGA Fresh, Foodland, and Friendly Grocer, with 7.4 per cent (IBISWorld, 2018). The highly concentrated grocery market suggests a largely homogenised, or McDonalidized one. Similar to Ritzer’s (2012) identification of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control as the four dimensions of

McDonaldization, Symons (2007) cites four comparable characteristics of supermarkets: self-service, cash and carry, variety, and consistent quality. Just as the

McDonald brothers fired their carhops as part of their Speedee Service System

(Schlosser, 2001), shoppers were expected to “locate and select products without expert guidance” (Symons, 2007, p. 214). Cash and carry meant that consumers could no longer accrue an account as they had done previously with a local retailer, and had to pay for and transport their goods home upon purchase (Symons, 2007). Variety and consistent quality are similar to the predictability principle of McDonaldization, whereby the same products were to be available at a consistent quality across a supermarket chain’s outlets throughout the year, regardless of seasonality (Symons,

2007). As early as 1967, Briggs and Smyth (in Symons, 2007, p. 214) judged that consumers were becoming “homogenised” and claimed that “Before the self-service revolution, food was less homogenous, more textured, more highly flavoured, less sugary and somewhat more palatable”.

Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet 55

Conclusion

Although Australia has a highly concentrated supermarket sector, which Symons argues creates a bland, homogenous foodscape, it is evident that shoppers still need to navigate a wide range of factors in attempting to discern which kinds of foods will be most beneficial. These factors include health, finances, being time efficient, easy to prepare, and kind to the environment, among other considerations. Celebrity chef partnerships with supermarkets provide a reference point for consumers, but as has been illustrated, there are tensions and contradictions around their promotion of processed foods carrying their name, while simultaneously urging audiences to cook from scratch. Nonetheless, these celebrity chef partnerships highlight the media’s significance in shaping culinary culture and influencing food trends. The study of food media and how it has evolved over the last half century is the subject of the following chapter.

56 Chapter 2: Cultural Shifts Towards the Post-Gourmet

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

Chapter 2 articulated the concepts, cultural flows, and developments that mark a shift in foodie culture from exclusively valuing haute cuisine, to ascribing increasing cultural capital to morally, ethically, and culturally driven culinary practices. I argued this shift represents the emergence of a post-gourmet phase of culinary culture and so this chapter looks to the intertwined area of food media. Drawing on wider shifts in the mediasphere, this chapter asserts that it is time for food media research to move beyond scholarship that looks exclusively at one media platform, which in this field tends to be either cookbooks or television. As the post-broadcast era is embraced, it is important to show how this technological shift impacts cooking shows as one of television’s longest standing categories, and food more broadly as a subject of popular culture. This chapter shows that despite food’s long history across multiple platform and the accompanying upswing in research on these texts, that there are new areas of food media scholarship to explore.

The changing nature of culinary culture—as established in Chapter 2— combined with technology’s increasing sophistication, which facilitates increasingly diverse ways to engage with food media content, opens these new research opportunities. This analysis considers how the food media category has developed— particularly in the last two to three decades—in terms of both platform and content.

Specifically, in terms of platform, this chapter examines the prevailing ways in which food media texts and audience engagement with these texts have been analysed, as well as how broader shifts in the mediasphere are contributing to changes in the culinary category.

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media 57

Before: Contained platforms and genres

Food has been a significant genre across multiple platforms and tends to have a presence as long as the platform itself. The first cookbook, Kuchenmeisterey was reportedly printed in 1485 (Ashley et al., 2004, p. 153), but Ashley et al. (2004, p. 154) also claim that “[a] number of medieval cookery manuscripts are still in existence”. In the US, Amelia Simmons’ 1796 volume American Cookery is recognised as the nation’s first cookbook (Collins, 2009, p. 14; Elias, 2017, p. 9). Meanwhile closer to home, Edward Abbott was revealed to be the author of Australia’s first cookbook The

English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as Well as for the Upper

Ten Thousand, which was published anonymously in 1864 (Evans, 2015; Gallegos,

2005). Before television emerged around the time of World War II, radio was a way in which culinary information was transmitted to the masses. From the 1920s, audiences in the US tuned into the likes of Aunt Sammy’s Housekeeper’s Chat as well as Betty Crocker’s Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air (Avery, 2013; Collins,

2009). But it is television that arguably became the dominant culinary medium of the

20th Century, with many scholars recognising food television as having a history almost as long as the medium itself (Adema, 2000, p. 114; Brost, 2000, p. 1; Collins,

2009, p. 26; Murray, 2013, p. 187; Rousseau, 2012, p. 12). Although the BBC’s first television broadcast was in 1936 and was introduced to the US in 1939, the advent of

World War II means that it was only in the post-war period that food television really emerged (Collins, 2009, p. 25; Rousseau, 2012, p. 12). Scholars have documented common prominent themes across food-focused print and television texts that include tensions around class and distinction, gender, domesticity, and economy.

In their comparison of Eliza Acton’s and Delia Smith’s cookbooks, Ashley et al.

(2004, p. 159) highlight that both authors cover “issues of domesticity, economy, and

58 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

tradition.” Significantly however, expressions of class and distinction were prevalent in both Acton and Smith’s texts. Cookbooks have also been the subject of contemporary research with Gallegos (2005) and Mitchell (2010) examining

Australian and American texts, respectively. Gallegos (2005) explores Australia’s formation of national identity throughout its cookbook history. Mitchell’s (2010) analysis of cookbooks penned by five of the Food Network’s most popular names meanwhile found gender influenced each text’s discourse. A distinct difference between the nurturing and teaching-focused female-authored cookbooks, versus male- authored egocentric books was uncovered.

Gender has significant and well-documented links with food. Indeed, the view of food as “women’s work” (Mennell, Murcott, & van Otterloo, 1992, p. 1), whereby the practices of shopping, cooking, and cleaning up afterwards are “strongly associated with the mundane, unglamourous labour of housework, the traditional domain of women…” are commonly perpetuated (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997, p. 2). Analyses of print and televisual texts highlight that these texts were traditionally geared towards housewives (de Solier, 2005; Moseley, 2001) But at the same time there were exceptions to this rule.

Even in more instructionally-based, female led texts, there has been a shift in the nature of delivery during the 1980s and 1990s. Food writer turned celebrity television cook Nigella Lawson embodies the persona of her 1998 cookbook How to Be a

Domestic Goddess, where Hollows describes her mode of address as “arch and flirtatious” (2003a, p. 182). Although in one respect she reinforces traditional gender divides around cooking as she is not formally trained, as Collins (2009, p. 179) puts it,

A sexy woman who makes breakfast while wearing a silk

bathrobe and who utters in a silky British accent, “I’m going to

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media 59

imbue these strawberries with a luminescent ruby glaze” is not

your mother’s cooking show host [original emphasis].

Indeed, the sensual nature of Lawson’s delivery has not been lost on viewers, with YouTube user 80gumdrops (2011) uploading a two-minute video titled Nigella

Talks Dirty, which edits together a number of segments from Lawson’s cooking shows to form sexual innuendos. As of July 2019, the video has over 8.4 million views. For her part, Lawson (in Hughes, 2017) claims to have been “astonished to be told I was suggestive and coquettish and so forth…” adding that television is “an editor’s medium.”

Lawson’s standing as part of the British middle-class has influenced how she is understood as a celebrity cook and the texts she produces are read. Class is another important area of exploration in relation to food media that I will return to in more depth shortly, but is worth interrogating here in relation to Lawson specifically. Her father, Nigel Lawson is a Conservative Politician and journalist, having been

Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s government from 1983 to 1989, and is currently a member of the House of Lords. Questions about his daughter’s privileged position in the community have been scrutinised in the past, with Scotland

Yard being accused of excusing middle-class drug taking by not prosecuting the celebrity cook for admitting to taking cocaine and cannabis during a fraud trial of two of her former assistants (Whitehead, 2014). Critiques of class have been levelled at

Lawson in relation to her cooking programs as well. In using class to delineate between “food porn queen and fat frump” (Rousseau, 2012, p. 100). Rousseau (2012, p. 100) paints the following picture:

[I]magine a poor, obese person tucking into a deep-fried Mars

Bar. Now imagine Lawson sneaking her third helping of the day from

60 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

the fridge, dressed in a satin nightgown and surrounded by fairy lights

in her perfect kitchen. Equally likely as they are, only the first of these

scenarios would typically be subject to moral judgement.

A common trope regarding men on cooking shows is that they “locate their cooking in the male-dominated professional domain, and therefore elide any unease about cooking being a gendered activity” (Seale, 2012, p. 31). A more interesting theme that has been explored in relation to men on cooking shows is the emergence of men as entertainers rather than instructors in a televisual setting. As Lewis (2008b, p.

64) points out, “TV Chefs such as Emeril Lagasse and Jamie Oliver offer an approach to food in which entertainment, fun, and spectacle are brought to the fore.” About the

Food Network’s Lagasse, Adema (2000, p. 116) explained, “He is not showing viewers how to cook so much as he is leading a cooking pep-rally.” Half a century before

Lagasse’s catchphrases “BAM!” or “kick it up a notch”, or Jamie Oliver’s “pukka tukka” or use of “lovely jubbly, James Beard’s 15-minute cooking show was entertaining men in bars in the mid 1940s. This audience stayed to watch Elsie

Presents James Beard in “I love to Eat” after Friday Night Fights, even receiving fan mail from a group of 26 such viewers (Collins, 2009, pp. 27–28). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Graham Kerr’s The Galloping Gourmet, had a strong focus on entertainment with the introduction of a studio audience, and Kerr’s slapstick physical comedy style where he “galloped about the studio kitchen, flirting, hamming, and performing a veritable slapstick routine […] He once cooked in a suit of armor and another time in boxer shorts and swim flippers” (Collins, 2009, p. 109). Even though the term metrosexuality had not yet been established, Collins (2009, p. 109) said it

“fully embodied his being” and “was an essential part of his charm.”

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media 61

Jamie Oliver however, brought a different kind of sensibility to his on-screen persona. His mode of presentation still sought to entertain but was done in a way that reconfigured traditional distinctions made between men and women in relation to food and cooking. Oliver’s kitchen experience dates back to his childhood where started serving food at in his parents’ pub, The Cricketers in Clavering, Essex from the age of

11 before going on to work at The Starr in Great Dunmow and going on to receive his formal culinary education at the oldest catering school in the UK Westminster

Kingsway College (Smith, 2008). Unlike some of his contemporaries like Gordon

Ramsay and Marco Pierre-White who “have gained fame through accentuating their

‘macho’ credentials” (Hollows, 2003b, p. 230), Oliver adopted a ‘new lad’ persona, which can be seen as a rejection of the “hegemony of the male restaurant chef”

(Hollows, 2003b, p. 236). Although he was first noticed at London’s River Café,

Oliver established himself during his media career “as a kind of everyman” (Lewis,

2008b, p. 61). Lewis (2008b, p. 61) describes Oliver:

As a young, blonde, good-looking ‘lad’ who wears his hair a little

long and is softly spoken […] his self-presentation embodies the

upwardly mobile ‘lifestyled’ male consumer while also attempting to

negotiate some notion of an ‘authentic’ working class identity.

On the surface, this everyman approach is non-threatening, but Oliver’s desire to appeal to working-class viewers despite his overtly middle-class standing has attracted controversy and become a source of class tensions, which will be discussed next. Oliver’s relaxed approach however, has arguably set the tone for male cooking personalities going into the 2000s, with Oliver’s fellow chef and personal chef Ben

O’Donoghue presenting Surfing the Menu (2003-2006) with Curtis Stone, and former

MCA contestants Daniel Churchill and Hayden Quinn hosting a reboot Surfing the

62 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

Menu: Next Generation. Another ex-MCA duo Andy Allen and Ben Milbourne who went on to present Andy and Ben Eat Australia share a similar dynamic, with the pair’s friendship frequently described in the media as a “bromance” (Digges, 2019).

Earlier, Nigella Lawson was examined above in relation to class. Like gender, class tensions have been another prominent theme of analysis in relation to food and sometimes, they are intertwined. Early culinary television in Australia, which was aimed at housewives performed the function of providing the practical and ideological capital that “housewives could signify and solidify their status as members of the middle class” (de Solier, 2005, p. 472). While Rousseau (2012) made an astute judgement about Lawson’s class privilege, Lawson’s compatriot Jamie Oliver provides analysts—both in academia and the popular media—much more fodder to analyse how class tensions play out in food media. Class distinctions—particularly in the last 15 to 20 years has become an even more dominant object of analysis in the reading of food media. In Chapter 2, the implications of Oliver’s attempts to makeover working-class approaches to food from his middle-class standing and expertise, particularly with his Jamie’s School Dinners television series and Save with Jamie

Cookbook were illustrated. The former being met with resistance from students and parents alike with parents passing junk food through the school fence (Rousseau,

2012), and media critique of the latter, with Ellis-Petersen (2013) highlighting the high cost of Oliver’s so-called austerity approach. The celebrity chef has likewise been met with scorn from some middle-class foodies who believe Oliver and others like him are more interested in different ways to extract money from consumers, rather than really caring about food (de Solier, 2008, p. 74).

It is difficult for Oliver to maintain authenticity with the working-class when his wealth and standing in society are also on show. As part of his Feed Me Better

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media 63

campaign which was the focus of the Jamie’s School Dinners television series for instance, Oliver was able to meet with the then British Minister for Education, Charles

Clarke, as well as present a petition with more than 270,000 signatures to then Prime

Minister Tony Blair (BBC News, 2005; Smith, 2008). More recently, despite enduring a substantial financial loss as his restaurant chain collapsed—and also left more than

1,000 people out of work—Oliver and his family moved into a £6 million mansion in

Finchingfield, Essex (Fillingham, 2019; Vonow, 2019). From the examples explored in Chapter 2 and here in Chapter 3 it is clear that Oliver is a encapsulates many of the class tensions of contemporary culinary culture.

In relation to the future of food television, Murray (2013, p. 193) highlighted a number of areas that require further scholarly attention. In acknowledging the diverse nature of food programming Murray calls for research to move beyond studies on “the instructional stand-and-stir format,” citing “food-inflected game, travel, talk and trivia shows as well as elimination-based and documentary-style reality television.” The popularity of reality shows like MCA—best described in relation to Murray’s categories as elimination-based reality television—has prompted a diverse array of reflections and research on the record-breaking program. In pursuing research around

MCA scholars have incidentally begun filling other gaps in food television research that Murray identified. Murray’s call for research around identity and representation have been answered in-part by Lewis’ (2011) reflections on how MCA asks contestants to work hard in developing the self, while I look at MCA and the abundance of culinary texts available to everyday consumers as tools that help build a culinary identity, in the spirit of Hartley’s (1999) DIY citizenship (Kirkwood, 2013). Bonner (2015) meanwhile explored representation, highlighting the increased visibility of Asian-

Australians thanks to MCA discussing the successes of Asian-Australians who have

64 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

appeared on the program, including Poh Ling Yeow (season 1), Adam Liaw (season

2).

Scholars are also turning to investigate offscreen aspects, including “food television production and the mechanics of the television industries that operate behind these texts” (Murray, 2013, p. 193). Seale (2012) critiqued the potential of MCA’s ability to enable its contestants to navigate the divide between amateur and professional, arguing that the show is constructed to keep the contestants in the realm of the amateur due to the limited number of contestants who go on to become chefs.

This perspective aligns with Turner’s (2010) demotic turn concept. Turner (2010, p.

2) coined the idea of the demotic turn to challenge a “taken for granted connection between ordinary people’s representation in the media and a process of democratization”. In critiquing MCA, Seale (2012) argues that the program actually works to maintain distance between professionals and amateurs, perpetually using amateur labour to further the television program. While this may be the reality of the contemporary television industry, contestants are in many cases discerning in using the opportunity to forge the culinary-based careers they desire, even if they are in an

“ambivalent post-MasterChef status, somewhere between amateur and professional

(Seale, 2012, p. 34). Former MCA contestant Alana Lowes for example, has explained how she leveraged experience on the reality television program to enable her to combine her previous expertise and journalism qualifications as a travel writer, with her love of food to pursue career interests including her current role as Virgin

Australia’s ‘flying foodie.’

Van Ryn’s (2019) examination of MCA’s evolving approach to managing food waste in partnership with OzHarvest provides insight to the offscreen aspects of food television production. This was another area in which Murray called for increased

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media 65

scholarly attention. van Ryn’s work is notable as it also intersects with another key concern in contemporary food culture that will be explored in this thesis, which is the ethical and sustainable consumption of food (see Chapter 8).

This thesis seeks to push beyond analyses of “stand-and-stir” programs—not by looking specifically at another genre or sub-genre of food television—but by acknowledging the diverse mediasphere food content exists within and examining how different kinds of culinary media are used in conjunction with one another, but also separately (see Chapter 6). In doing so, this thesis responds to Murray’s (2013, p. 193) assertion that work is needed around understanding how audiences “obtain, interpret, and utilize information from television about food, food industries, and food policies.”

This research extends its examination of food media beyond television to examine the contributions of print, online, and documentary films as well.

Such analysis is needed because as many have already speculated, consumers in markets like the US, the UK, and Australia have a complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship with food media wherein consumption of copious amounts of food information does not necessarily translate to improved cooking skills or consumption of healthier foods. Although like Murray, Rousseau (2012, p. 12) too was focused primarily on television, she points to audiences’ increasingly complicated relationship with food media:

While there can be no doubting the enormous informative and

educational value of a medium that reaches millions of viewers

worldwide every day, the story of food television is revealing of the

paradoxes that come with an unsurpassed wealth of information,

when global obesity levels continue to rise along with an abundance

of data about how to potentially prevent it.

66 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

Others have similarly commented on the contradictory nature between the saturated food media field, and the realities of everyday households’ relationships with food. Huntley (2008, p. 7) noted a “sharp contrast” between Australia’s obesity rates, a time-poor population’s reliance on processed food, “and evidence that we watch people cook more than we cook ourselves.”

This complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship between audiences’ consumption of food media and lived food practices will undoubtedly become more complex as scholars gain a greater understanding of the role digital food media plays its users’ lives. Lewis presents (2018) perhaps the most comprehensive overview of the different ways in which digital media is becoming entangled with culinary culture, encompassing social dimensions of sharing food content online, activism via apps, and the opportunities digital media provides for the mainstreaming of alternative food practices and networks.

Food blogging is an established area of digital food media research receiving increased academic interest (see Cox & Blake, 2011; de Solier, 2006; Lofgren, 2013).

As Lofgren (2013) notes, the sharing of recipes is evolving, and achieving growing prominence online, and food blogging and reviews have so far been the primary focus of researchers of digital food media (de Solier, 2018). What makes blogging distinct from other food writing genres is the added cultural value it carries for identity groups like foodies who recognise producing something in relation to food, rather than simply consuming food to carry greater culinary capital (de Solier, 2013a). Investigations of food blogging reveal the tensions that globalisation, cultural fragmentation, and media convergence create in the contemporary foodscape. Lofgren (2013) highlights that as part of food media’s evolution, the Internet has democratised food writing and that food bloggers need to negotiate distinctions between amateur and professional. Kobez

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media 67

(2016; 2018) has documented the emergence of amateur food reviewers and how they compare to the work of professionals, as well as provided broader analysis of how digital media is reshaping food reviewing as a profession. She found that while professionals’ reviews draw on discourses of distinction that Johnston and Baumann

(2015) outline around authenticity and exoticism, amateur reviewers are more concerned with the practical aspects of the dining experience and reflecting upon their pre-conceived notions of what the experience would be like (Kobez, 2016). In relation to digital media’s impact on food reviewing as a profession, Kobez (2018) cited aspects of immediacy, a loss of anonymity, concerns about the integrity and credibility of amateur food reviews, as well as the increase in listicles and clickbait as key factors.

Finally, food media’s presence on social media platforms is also an emerging area of research. Lofgren (2013) claims that food bloggers have contributed to the popularity of sharing images via platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. But Twitter and YouTube too have become sites of interest to researchers. Rousseau (2012) and de Solier (2018) have contributed significantly to understandings of food and social media. de Solier (2018, p. 55) highlights the varying ways in which food and social media intersect:

Yet what they lack in history, they make up for in scale and

diversity. Not only can we watch BJs eat their dinner online,19 we can

share pictures of our meals with friends and strangers via Instagram

and Snapchat; post our reviews of restaurants on Yelp or

Urbanspoon; find recipes via Epicurious and Yummly; and order

19 de Solier (2018, p. 54) is referring to the practice of watching people eating, known as Mukbang. These videos are hosted by broadcast jockeys (BJs).

68 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

home-delivered fast food or haute cuisine via UberEATS or

foodpanda.

Current and Emerging: Blending genres, Blending platforms

The scholarship reviewed above analyses food media in terms of discrete platforms, whether it is food television, cookbooks or other food writing or literature, or the emerging online presence of food. Here, the analysis looks more widely to the changes occurring in the mediascape to understand how emerging technologies and platforms are shaping the post-gourmet foodscape.

Internet distributed television emerged in the late 2000s, becoming a mainstream phenomenon in Britain in 2008, and in the US two years later (Gray & Lotz, 2019, p.

121). Gray and Lotz (2019, p. 1) cite Internet distributed television as one of the key changes to the television studies field in the last 20 years. The changes associated with such technologies and their impact on television industries is referred to the post- broadcast era (Tay & Turner, 2008). Hartley (2004, pp. xiv–xv) describes the post- broadcast era as being defined by “interactivity, customization, multiple platforms and non-broadcast screen entertainment carried via video, cable, streaming, or archive systems such as TiVo.” The change is considered fundamental due to television’s recognised role as a social activity and agenda-setter. Strangelove (2015, p. 4) described television as “both the norm and the norm-setter.” Collins (2009, p. 103) explains:

In the pre-cable 1970s national television was our communal

living room. It brought us together to watch All in the Family and Roots,

see President Richard Nixon deliver his resignation speech, catch the

peace-sign brandishing streaker at the Academy Awards ceremony, and

understand that we were expected to sport hip-hugging bell bottoms.

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Audiences still continue to engage with television content, but due to the increasing array of technologies through which audiences can access this content, the rituals are no longer as Collins described above. Rather, “television use has become increasingly complicated, deliberate, and individualized” (Lotz, 2014, p. 3). One such example of the increasing complexity and individualisation of television is the emergence of YouTube. Originally started as a way to remove barriers to sharing video online for amateurs, YouTube was bought by Google in 2006 and now hosts amateur content, video from legacy media and creators who exist between the amateur and professional categories (Burgess and Green, 2018). As the group of creators who produce content across YouTube and other platforms in an increasingly professionalised manner grows into an industry itself, Cunningham and Craig (2019, p. 4-5) have established the term social media entertainment to describe this offshoot of screen industries in a post-broadcast environment.

Shifts—as evidenced in the case of YouTube and the associated rise of social media entertainers—may be cause for concern as television has been recognised as

“fundamentally connected to the governance of the nation-state” (Tay & Turner, 2008, p. 72).The social significance of television and televisual content however, is not under threat argue Tay and Turner (2010). The “perception that we are watching [television] as part of a larger, customarily national audience”, may need to change from a “co- present nation” to a “co-present globalized taste culture or subculture” (Tay & Turner,

2010, pp. 44–45).

In Australia, looking at Internet distributed television, the market has evolved in terms of new entrants to the market like Netflix, new services from traditional broadcasters like ABC iView and SBS On Demand, new joint-ventures from existing

Australian media enterprises like Stan, owned by Nine Entertainment Co. and Fairfax;

70 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

as well as non-traditional entrants to the market like Amazon Prime, and Optus Sport.

The latter signalled its arrival through acquiring the rights to the English Premier

League (EPL) football.

Australia’s growing enthusiasm for cooking shows is only surpassed by its love of sport telecasts. At the time where the 2010 final of MCA broke ratings records, the only broadcast of the 2005 Australian Open Men’s Final (Seale, 2012, p. 31) Thus it is not surprising that post-broadcast innovations are taking place in sport programming. Unlike food programming however, sport is considered so important to

Australian culture that the Federal Government has listed a number of sporting events that are protected under s.115 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992, which legislates that such events must be available free to the public. The emergence of Optus Sport has been one of the most substantial developments in Australian sport broadcasting. It was announced in 2015 that Optus Sport secured the broadcast and digital rights for the EPL beginning with the 2016-17 season (Hytner, 2015). Optus sub-licenced one match per round of the EPL to SBS for the duration of the deal (SBS, 2016). Unlike free-to-air or pay television provider Foxtel however, Optus did not have existing means of broadcasting, and therefore distributed coverage via a smartphone and tablet app. Optus’s actions angered audiences for two reasons: firstly, the deal restricted the

Optus Sport coverage to customers with contracts for Optus telecommunication services (Willoughby, 2016),20 and secondly, the streaming of coverage via the app was plagued by technical faults. Optus Sport presents an interesting early case study around how the post-broadcast era is evolving in Australia. It illustrates not only how

20 Optus Sport has since become available to non-Optus customers for a monthly subscription of $14.99 (Downes, 2019).

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media 71

dramatically Internet distributed television is changing industry and how audiences engage with media, but also the difficulties it can present for both producers and users.

In conjunction with the affordances and implications associated with a post- broadcast media environment, media producers are also taking advantage of more strategic approaches in blending genres in platforms. Strategic Impact Documentaries

(SIDs) are significant in this respect as they recognise that in order to effect social change, the documentary film itself is only one part of a cross-platform mediated and in-person effort (Nash & Corner, 2016, pp. 230-1). Considering the issues affecting the contemporary foodscape that Chapter 7 explores, SIDs and how they operate in a post-broadcast environment are important to understand.

War on Waste, the ABC’s local iteration of the BBC’s Hugh’s War on Waste, fronted by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall can be seen as a key example of a SID approach. It is a three-part series that originally aired in Australia in mid-2017, with a follow-up episode in December of that year. Based on its success, a second series then aired in 2018. The program clearly fit with the ABC’s remit of informing the public on issues “that shape their lives” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2019, p. 4), making the reduction of food waste and food-associated plastic waste a mainstream topic of conversation in Australia. As well as the television broadcast, which reached

2.4 metropolitan viewers, the series attracted more than 500 plays on ABC’s iView platform. War on Waste’s reach did not end there, however. Commissioning editor, factual at the ABC, Stephen Oliver explained the program as a “pan-ABC campaign”:

From the outset we envisaged this as a pan-ABC campaign and

worked with colleagues in news, radio and digital to create

complementary content, such as multiple radio shows across Australia,

the War on Waste podcast which hit number 1 on iTunes and the Our

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Focus website, which brought all that content together in one place and

has lots of information about how to reduce, reuse and recycle.

The story above illustrates how in a post-broadcast environment, media producers are taking a concerted effort to producing streamlined content across a number of platforms.

The hybridity of genre in relation to food media, particularly food programming is when one thinks of celebrity chef media empires, Jamie Oliver may be the first name that comes to mind. The 44-year-old Brit has published more than 20 cookbooks, fronted close to 40 television programs, has a significant presence on social media, opened restaurants, sold merchandise, as well as entered into long-term partnerships with supermarkets Sainsburys (UK) and Woolworths (AUS) where he not only appears in advertisements, but produces recipes, and sells Jamie Oliver branded products.

Although Oliver presents a comprehensive example of media convergence, he was not the first. Ashley et al. (2004) detail the work of Oliver’s compatriot Delia Smith who experienced the height of her success in the two decades, leading up to Oliver’s emergence in the late 1990s. Smith’s cookbook and television series Winter Collection led to a 200 per cent increase in cranberry sales (Rousseau, 2012, p. 59), and in 2001

‘Delia’ was added to the Collins English Dictionary (Ashley et al., 2004, p. 159; Gray,

2001). How Oliver, other celebrity chefs, and other culinary personalities continue to exploit the growing array of media affordances in the post-gourmet foodscape is a key interest of this research project.

Conclusion

After Chapter 2’s review of how changes in culinary culture have been examined, this chapter looked to the research around food media. Chapter 3 completed the analysis of the culinary environment that has led to the post-gourmet phase of

Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media 73

Australian food culture in its examination of the scholarship and cultural contexts of food media. Articulation of the key themes debates in food media occurred in two sections: the first looked at how food media was studied historically, illustrating that food media platforms—predominantly television—were examined in isolation, and that scholarship on food’s presence as a subject of digital media was growing.

The growth of digital food media served as a useful segue into arguing that analyses of food media needed to adopt a more fluid approach as media moves into the post-broadcast era where the nature of what constitutes television is much less stable than when James Beard and Julia Child presented cooking shows more than half a century ago. A brief case study on telecommunications company Optus’s entrance to the distribution of televisual content highlights some of the implications of the post- broadcast era. With this knowledge of how the contemporary food and mediascapes are evolving, it is time to ascertain the culinary beliefs and practices everyday households, as well as members of industry who contribute to shaping these culinary and media environments, in order to provide an account of post-gourmet culinary culture in Australia.

74 Chapter 3: Themes and Trends in the Development of Food Media

Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods

To identify how Australian food culture has evolved since MCA’s 2009 debut, this thesis questions more specifically how are changes in food media are shaping contemporary food discourses, and how do everyday households negotiate the contemporary culinary environment? Exploration of these questions was undertaken using mixed-method qualitative research including in-depth semi-structured interviews with households and members of industry, as well as textual analysis of documentaries and books that fall within what I refer to as the Food System Exposé genre. This chapter articulates why such an approach was taken and steps out the procedures of data collection and analysis used in this project. As well as establishing what this approach and methods have enabled this research to achieve, this chapter also demarcates the boundaries of what is realistically achievable considering the chosen approach. The limitations section that concludes this chapter acknowledges that this project responds to some, but not all, issues and trends relating to contemporary food culture and food media in Australia.

Approach: Selective Ethnographically-Informed Research Considering this research asks questions of how culinary culture and media has evolved with respect to the everyday lives of households, this research takes a qualitative approach using semi-structured in-depth interviews, as well as textual analysis. Although quantitative research is considered “more authentic, important and scientific” (Brennen, 2017, pp. 3–4), Silverman (2010, p. 10) states that methods should be chosen based on what questions are being asked. He cautions that quantitative approaches would not allow the study “of many interesting phenomena relating to what people actually do in their day-to-day lives” (Silverman, 2010, p. 10).

Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods 75

McKinney (in Silverman, 2010, p. 11) describes the usefulness of qualitative methods, saying they gave her the ability to answer questions she was interested in, which tended to be ‘how’ rather than ‘how many.’ Such a perspective is most appropriate in responding to my research questions. Knowing how many plates of smashed avocado on toast a café has sold in the last year is not as important as understanding the social and economic context around why the popularity of this dish has caused a stir in contemporary Australian culture, for example.21

Although the physical and temporal restrictions of attempting to engage with a sample of upwards of 10 households, as well as almost 10 industry participants during a fieldwork window of approximately four months precluded participant observation, a key part of ethnography as a method, I approached the data collection with an ethnographic mindset. Primarily, this meant striving to achieve an “understanding on what people believe and think, and how they live their daily lives” (Brennen, 2017, p.

166). Therefore, as often as possible, I engaged with participants in environments familiar to them, including their homes, workplaces, or local cafés. In some instances where that was not possible however, interviews were held in meeting rooms at QUT.

When it was possible to conduct research in participants’ homes, participants showed me cookbooks, videos, and cooking utensils, and in some cases I was invited to share a meal with the household. Industry respondents were similarly generous. Kerry Jones offered me a dinner of homemade Spanakopita and salad at the conclusion of our

21 Avocado on toast has become a key part of a debate about housing affordability in Australia. Bernard Salt, columnist for The Australian incited a generational scuffle between Baby Boomers and Millennials by writing, “I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five- grain toasted bread at $22 pop and more […] Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house” (Salt, 2016, para. 9).

76 Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods

interview, and Elie Moubarak had me conduct our interview at his restaurant Gerard’s

Bistro, where he invited me to share lunch.

In addition to the insight garnered from interacting with participants in their natural environments where possible, the depth of my interactions with interviewees and my engagement with the data gathered were enhanced by my long-term immersion in the subject area. Food culture and food media have been central to my academic interest since mid-2012. In that time, I have immersed myself in multiple aspects, as a consumer of media including news, social media, books, documentaries, and events. I have been able to both absorb, as well as contribute to public discourse on different aspects of food’s emergence as a cornerstone of contemporary Australian popular culture. I have published pieces on MasterChef and cultural omnivorousness in relation to food for The Conversation (Kirkwood, 2016; 2020a; 2020b; Kirkwood & Phillipov,

2015) as well as provided comment on food trends for The Sydney Morning Herald

(see Waters, 2017) and Brisbane Times (see Lynch, 2018).

Ethnography is concerned with providing “‘thick description’ of a culture or group” (Brennen, 2017, p. 168), which means not just examining the behaviours of a culture, but the context in which this occurs (Brennen, 2017, p. 168; Dawson, 2012).

Brennen (2017, p. 168) states that understanding “key historical, political, economic or social aspects of the group of culture being observed,” can be vital to establishing context for the researcher. Engaging with research participants and culinary culture has allowed me to articulate both the behaviours as well as the underlying cultural tensions and contradictions at play. The inextricably linked nature of food media and food culture, however, has led me to examine both in tandem and rather than examine one aspect of how Australian approaches to food have changed in the last decade, like grocery shopping, for instance. To balance the need to provide depth, and also account

Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods 77

for the diverse factors that shape contemporary Australian food culture and media engagement, the practice of selective ethnography influences this research. This is where the researcher studies the “particular activity that are most salient to their background and interests” (Ogbu, 1981, p. 11). Therefore, this research explores households, food media, the subset of food media that I introduce as Food System

Exposés, the production of food, as well as food service, and does so in relation to changes that have occurred in the decade since MCA debuted. My research approach is modelled in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Selective Ethnography Approach

The design of other research in the food field have also influenced this research.

This includes the work of Domaneschi (2012), Koch (2012), Counihan and de Solier

(2008, 2013a, 2013b). This thesis is also closely aligned with the approach taken in my preliminary study, which revealed the everyday foodie (Kirkwood, 2013, 2014)

This research continues the tradition of cultural studies research, which questions

“elitist assumptions in order to examine the everyday and the ordinary: those aspects of our lives that exert so powerful and unquestioned an influence on our existence that we take them for granted” (G.Turner, 1990, p. 2). To do so means using mixed-genre

78 Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods

research, which is “an elaboration of the ‘triangulation’ theory” (Nightingale, 1993, p.

158). Drawing on the insights of two different groups of interviewees, plus analysing pertinent and topical texts has provided multiple perspectives on the phenomena under investigation and ensure the comprehensiveness and rigour of the project’s findings

(Weerakkody, 2015). In some ways, this works to mitigate the limitation in which ethnographic research is normally triangulated with participant observation (Brennen,

2017). The following section outlines the procedures undertaken in the data collection and analysis where I conducted textual analysis as well as semi-structured in-depth interviews with everyday Australian households, as well as people who work in food media or food production/provision or service.

Methods

Interviews Semi-structured in-depth interviews form the majority of the data collected in this study. Interviews were conducted with 20 people from 13 households, all of which were audio-recorded. Households were one of the chosen units of analysis as “the household is one of the most significant institutions for feeding individuals and families” (Koch, 2012, p. 7). Although convenience samples are not representative of the population, meaning this research is not generalisable, the qualitative nature of this research means a convenience sample is suitable for this study (Weerakkody, 2015).

Weerakkody (2015) contends that convenience sampling tends to result in the recruitment of participants who are very alike. This was true in some respects as my sample had similar levels of education, and came from a narrow range of occupations, with many in managerial, marketing, IT, or engineering roles. While some of their livelihoods are similar, their ages, ethnic backgrounds, and upbringings present a diverse range of approaches to food and to life.

Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods 79

Like Koch’s (2012, p. 5) institutional ethnography approach, this research involves not only understanding audiences and consumers, but also how institutions like food corporations, supermarkets, restaurants, cafés, markets, social enterprise and media “shape experience in ways shoppers often cannot see.” Part of this insight was gained through textual analysis of FSE texts, but insight was also gathered through conducting semi-structured, in-depth interviews with eight members of industry. This part of the sample was more of a purposive example in that respondents needed to

“possess the specific characteristics or qualities required for the study” (Weerakkody,

2015, p. 99). Again, this does not mean that the findings gathered are generalisable or the sample representative, but they “provide specific and valuable insights” in response to the phenomenon I am examining (Weerakkody, 2015, p. 99). In their roles as food media personalities, chefs, market managers, restaurateurs, and entrepreneurs, they contribute to the shaping of contemporary Australian food culture and also can provide unique insight as they watch or help consumers/diners buy and eat food.

de Solier’s (2008, 2013a, 2013b) Australian-based study, which involved participant observation and in-depth interviews with 20 foodies, also provides the foundations for my research. The nature of my interviews was similar in that they were semi-structured. This more conversational style allowed for “individuals to focus on their particular interests and practices” (de Solier, 2013a, p. 12). Aside from food media use, I included other topics of discussion, such as household food practices like cooking, eating, and growing produce, as well as more public practices including shopping and dining out.

Ethical Considerations Spoken accounts from interview participants form the primary dataset for this research. An application for human research ethics clearance was approved by the

80 Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods

Office of Research Ethics and Integrity (OREI) at QUT in October 2015 (Approval number 1500000745). All participants read and signed an information and consent form that was returned to the researcher. A transcriber was engaged to help with the preparation of transcripts. After the researcher sought advice from the OREI, the transcriber signed a confidentiality agreement.

Participant Recruitment and Participation

20 people from 13 households and eight food industry practitioners participated in audio-recorded interviews for this research. In some instances, all members of the household attended the interview, but in some circumstances, only one or two members of the household contributed. Data collection with households occurred throughout 2016, with most of the interviews conducted in April and May. Like de

Solier (2013a, pp. 12–13) who used mainstream media as an element of her recruitment strategy through having food critic John Lethlean publish a story on her research in Epicure, a supplement in Melbourne newspaper The Age,22 I, too, found such exposure useful. Household participants were recruited using the volunteer sampling technique, primarily as a result of media exposure generated through a media release from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT Media, 2016).

Subsequently, I was invited for a radio interview at 612 ABC in Brisbane. In that interview I conveyed that I wanted to interview households who had at least one member who was keenly interested in food and cooking or other food and food media- related activities. Potential respondents contacted me via email and a time and place for our interview was organised. Five households invited me to their home, five others

22 de Solier (2013b, p. 12) also left flyers in “bookshops dedicated to food”, and was introduced to potential participants through her personal networks

Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods 81

chose to meet at a restaurant or café, and three chose to meet at a place of work.

Household respondents were given a $30 voucher from a grocery outlet of their choice, or their bill was paid (to the value of $30) if we met over a meal. Each interview was intended to last for approximately an hour, but depending on the number of participants from each household, actual interview times fluctuated from half an hour to more than an hour and a half. Pseudonyms have been assigned to this group of participants to protect their identity.

Industry participants came from a number of different fields of work. This sample of eight included an ex-MCA contestant, a restaurateur, a chef, a catering manager, a project manager responsible for the running of a market, two people with experience working in delis in Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, and the founder of a social food enterprise. These participants were recruited using the purposive sampling technique whereby chosen participants fit this study’s needs (Weerakkody, 2015, p.

99). In this case I included those who have gained knowledge and insight of how the contemporary culinary environment is constructed through experience in at least one aspect of the food or food media industries. Industry participants were recruited through my personal and professional networks. In agreeing to participate in this research, industry participants also gave permission for the use of their names and the organisations or businesses they were affiliated with. Interviews with these participants lasted between 45 minutes and an hour and a half. The following sections provides a summary of the household participants, as well as brief profiles of the industry participants. This information was gathered via our interview, and in the case of industry participants, via desk research as well.

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Interview Participants Household Participants Table 1 contains a breakdown of all household participants. Out of the total 30 members of the 13 households, 20 people participated with 10 unable to attend (or too young, see Table 1, Household B). Out of the 20 people who participated in the interviews, 14 were female. The participants varied greatly in age, with the youngest being 12-years-old, and the oldest being in their mid-fifties. Members of participating households who were unable to be part of the interviews extended the age range further, with the youngest being seven months and the oldest in their mid-sixties. The composition of participating households was varied and included single person households, couples without children, couples whose children had grown up and left home, and families with children. Although my sample included participants with

Chinese, Singaporean, Venezuelan, and Dutch heritage, it was not as ethnically diverse as de Solier’s (2013a) sample. Where our samples were similar however, was in terms of class. The majority of my sample was tertiary educated, with some undertaking postgraduate study, and many worked in white-collar jobs. I speculate that my methods of recruiting—a university press release and interview on a public service radio station—contributed to many participants either studying or working at a university.

Table 1. Household Participant Profiles

Household Name Age Gender Occupation A Molly 27 F Dental Assistant B Angie Not F Business specified Analyst, on Maternity Leave Elijah 33 M IT Tester Henry* 3 M N/A Ava* 7 F N/A months

Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods 83

Household Name Age Gender Occupation C Anna 40 F Stay-at-home parent Tony* 44 M GP Lucy* 7 F School Student Ethan* 5 M School Student D Max 41 M IT Professional Yvette 50 F Newly employed, role not specified Simon* 19 M Not specified Grant* 13 M School student E Brooke 25 F Engineer Hugo* 24 M Carpenter F Erin 36 F Information Management Officer Justin* 48 M Unemployed G Jackie 33 F Occupational Therapist H Sabrina 47 F Manager, Tertiary Scholarship Fund Anthony 50 M Industrial Advocate Grace 13 F School student Caleb 12 M School Student I Denise 54 F Research Manager J Leah 28 F Marketing Communications Professional Jeremy 29 M Digital Marketing Practitioner K Phoebe 28 F Marketing and Research professional

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Household Name Age Gender Occupation Nick 29 M Engineer L Claudia Late 50s F Genetic Counsellor and PhD Candidate Peter* Mid-60s M Engineer M Tina 34 F PhD Candidate

* denotes that household member did not participate in the interview.

Industry Participants Emma Dredge and Matthew Johnson – Dredge and Johnson had worked in food since the mid 1990s, moving to work in delis by the late ‘90s-early 2000s. They have worked in delis in Brisbane and on the Sunshine Coast, observing how gourmet food became increasingly popularised. Johnson is still in the deli business, currently working at Paddington Fine Foods, but after having children, Dredge has moved onto other pursuits.

Carlos Gatica – Sous Chef, King Arthur, New Farm – Having started working in kitchens at 17 and undertaken his culinary training in his native New Zealand, since moving to Australia, Gatica has worked in a selection of cafés in Brisbane. He has observed—and contributed to—the growing sophistication of café menus.

Nick Goding – Project Manager, Boundary St Markets, West End. Goding is responsible for getting the market running each week, handling logistics, curating the range of food stalls, and marketing the event. Before working on this project, Goding had a vintage clothing store in West End for more than a decade. His role provides him with unique insight as to what types of cuisines are growing in popularity, and which are on the way out.

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Kerry Jones – Catering Manager at a Queensland Correctional Centre. Jones’ current role working in corrections leaves her somewhat removed from the food habits of everyday households, but her wealth of experience in kitchens ranges from RSLs to working for Shell.

Alana Lowes – Food personality, The Flying Foodie for Virgin Australia, contestant on MCA (Series 3, 2011). Having trained as a journalist, Lowes had already begun to narrow her focus, reporting on lifestyle, travel, and food. But her breakthrough moment was as a contestant on MCA, where she placed third.

Elie Moubarak – Director, Moubment Group. Along with his siblings,

Moubarak owns a number of high-profile food and drink establishments in Brisbane.

These include Gerard’s Bistro, Gerard’s Charcuterie, Defiant Duck, Hatch & Co.,

Laruche, and The APO.23 The Moubaraks also established the West End cocktail bar

Lychee Lounge back in 1999.24 Moubarak noted that Lychee Lounge’s more casual approach to food was unusual at the time.

Thor Svensen – Founder, Sovereign Foods. Svensen had studied environmental science and had years of exposure to food-based social enterprises through his involvement with Food Connect, a Brisbane food co-operative. Organisations like

Food Connect however, deal in fresh produce, and Svensen established Sovereign

Foods, based on a desire to provide access to locally grown, and organic (where possible) grains, pulses, as well as other dry goods and other household products.

Sovereign Foods now operates from a warehouse in Moorooka and also sells its goods at markets like the Northey Street City Farm Organic Market in the North Brisbane

23 The APO reported it had been sold to new owners via its Facebook page on 6 July 2018. 24 Moubment group sold Lychee Lounge to Peter Bierton in September 2015. https://www.broadsheet.com.au/brisbane/west-end/bars/lychee-lounge

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suburb of Windsor, and the Davies Park Market held in the inner-city suburb West

End.

Interview Data Analysis Interviews were audio-recorded on both my phone and laptop to account for the potentiality of a device malfunctioning. After the interviews were conducted, they were transcribed with a portion of this task being undertaken by a transcriber (see

Ethical Considerations). I then read and re-read the transcripts and used NVivo to do an initial open coding of the interview data. From here, I was able to group these categories into themes, which formed the basis of each of the analysis chapters.

Although social interactions around food have been the subject of analysis previously

(see DeVault, 1991), the fact that I was able to categorise an extensive amount of data as relating to ‘home,’ ‘gender,’ ‘family,’ and ‘friends’ highlighted the continued importance of social interactions and considerations around food in post-gourmet

Australia and therefore this is the subject of the first analysis chapter. Food media was a key part of the conversations held with both samples. The discerning nature of household media engagement is therefore the focus of Chapter 6. The prominence of discussion around processed, junk, and fast food, health from households, as well as ethical and sustainable consumption practices being prominent in both the household and industry samples guided the designation of Chapter 7 as focusing on texts that address these issues, and Chapter 8 as analysing respondent beliefs and behaviours in this area.

Originally, this thesis was supposed to be about the everyday foodie. In the process of recruiting participants, I spoke about the everyday foodie category, outlining how it was different from foodies as they have previously been conceptualised and studied. This is clear in the release from QUT media (2016). An

Chapter 4: Research Approach and Methods 87

implication of utilising a volunteer sample is that such participants tend to be “younger, higher educated, of higher occupational status and intelligence…” (Weerakkody,

2015, p. 99). This was indeed true of this sample (see Table 1.). Many household participants exhibited views, behaviours and demographic characteristics more aligned with the foodies as examined by de Solier (2013a). The household sample did reshape my focus for this research to look at this most recent phase of Australian culinary culture and media.

Textual Analysis Textual analysis complements the interview data gathered from household and interview participants. Immersion in the food media and food culture field over the last seven years, combined with the analysis of the previously discussed interview data allowed me to identify a correlation between concerns and subsequent practices as articulated in these conversations with discourses that appear in a series of documentary films and books.

The examination of such texts therefore forms the basis for Chapter 7’s exploration of the ways in which popular culture has brought mainstream attention to the problematic nature of the industrial food system, and thus contributed to motivating consumers to re-think their culinary habits. These subsequent views and actions are the focus of Chapter 8. Through the textual analysis in Chapter 7, I argue that a distinct genre of texts comprised of documentaries and books—which I call Food System

Exposés—has been established. Two FSE documentaries—Super Size Me (2004) and

That Sugar Film (2014)—are used as structuring devices in the chapter as they are pivotal, not only in the development of the genre, but in the kinds of concerns around the industrial food system that they convey.

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I chose Super Size Me as it is a text that represents the beginning of the FSE genre in many ways. Although Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation was first published three years earlier and is another essential FSE text, Super Size Me’s reach and impact was profound. In the months following its release, the film had grossed more than 10 million USD, which at the time made it the third highest-grossing documentary

(Spurlock, 2005, p. 245). Not only did Spurlock’s documentary win the Best Director’s award at the Sundance Film Festival where it debuted (Spurlock, 2005, p. 246), it also received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature in 2005

(Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, n.d.). Australia was one of the more than 20 countries Spurlock visited on his press tour. He recounted that McDonald’s

Australia was distributing leaflets refuting the film’s claims in cinemas, and introduced new, health-oriented advertising in the wake of Super Size Me’s release (Spurlock,

2005).

A decade later, Damon Gameau’s That Sugar Film represents a key shift in the concerns around the industrial food system. While Spurlock (as well as Schlosser and others) went after fast-food, Gameau highlights to audiences that processed foods lurking in one’s fridge or pantry and carry labels that would make one assume they are healthy, are in fact laden with hidden sugars that contribute to a number of chronic illnesses and have fuelled the Type 2 Diabetes epidemic. In the context of this thesis,

That Sugar Film is also an important text because it is Australian. Unlike many FSEs and food histories that focus on the US or UK, there are a growing number of local texts being published/released. Most recently, Food Fighter, released in June 2018, follows OzHarvest CEO Ronni Kahn as she seeks to reduce food waste.

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Limitations

To answer these questions of ‘how’ Australian food culture and food media has changed in the eyes of ordinary households, and as observed by members of food and food media industries, I have sought to understand “respondents’ feelings, emotions, experiences and values” (Brennen, 2017, p. 29). Articulating and highlighting the complexities, contradictions, and nuances within these aspects of interview participants’ relationship with food media and food culture has meant that the data is focused on a small, non-representative sample. This research utilised a volunteer sample to recruit household participants and a purposive sample for the industry respondents. Weerakkody (2015, pp. 8–9) highlights that both approaches produce unrepresentative samples, but in the case of the purposive sample, these participants provided more specialist insight.

I have been careful to acknowledge that while I approached this project with an ethnographic mindset—therefore describing this research as ethnographically- informed—his study cannot achieve the same outcomes as ethnographic research where participant observation is central. As Brennan (2017, p. 166) states, such research “emphasiz[es] what people do rather than what they say they do”. In basing this research on what respondents recounted as their beliefs, actions, and rituals, it is important to be mindful of potential biases that may exist in these findings. Berger

(2016, pp. 206–207) points to five potential issues with interview data: respondents do not tell the truth, respondents’ accounts can be inaccurate, participants may not offer interesting information, they may say what they think the researcher wants to hear, and the transfer of meaning from participant to researcher may involve some misinterpretation.

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Conclusion

This thesis pursues mixed-method qualitative research, using semi-structured in- depth interviews and textual analysis. Although participant observation was not part of this project’s design, I approached the interviews with an ethnographic mindset. For interviews with households, this meant seeking rich stories to understand day-to-day food habits and the contexts in which households shopped, cooked, ate, and engaged with food media. Interviews with industry participants were designed to provide insight as to how they contribute to the construction of the culinary environment consumers and audiences engage with, and how this has changed over time.

Documentary films and non-fiction books are analysed in Chapter 7 and introduced as FSEs. I saw the opportunity to categorise these texts as a genre because the production of these critiques of the industrialised food system have proliferated in the last 10-15 years, much in the same way lifestyle-based food media had grown dramatically in the 10-15 years prior to that. My ongoing immersion in the culinary field had allowed me to recognise a link between interview respondents’ increased knowledge of the industrialised food system and growing interest in, and adoption of more sustainable and ethical food consumption practices. Analysing these texts therefore helps to establish the culinary climate in which consumers have subsequently sought out more mindful approaches to food. Additionally, the rapid proliferation of these texts represents another manifestation of post-gourmet food culture. This approach of combining interviews and textual analysis has allowed me to provide insight as to how post-gourmet food culture is emerging in Australia.

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Chapter 5: Social Food

Food touches everything important to people: it marks social

difference and strengthens social bonds. Common to all peoples, yet it

can signify very different things from table to table. (Counihan and Van

Esterik 2008, p. i)

“Heinz Beans: Some things never change.” This is a tagline from an advertising campaign pitched by Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and his wife Megan Calvet (Jessica

Paré) from “At the Codfish Ball,” a season five episode of Mad Men. The television spot they envisioned was a mother and son duo in a series of “one shot movies.” Draper explains the first being, “with a mother in the prehistoric caves serving beans to a shaggy little boy by the fire. Then a Greek woman, in a toga, with a little shepherd boy. Then Marie Antoinette to a little prince; Calamity Jane with a pioneer boy. All the way through the Gay Nineties, to today [1967] in a kitchen like yours [...] Well it goes past present day to the future into a little lunar kitchen with Earth off in the window, futuristic clothing, interesting bowls. The kid has just taken off his space helmet as he takes a warm bite.” Calvet continued, “When Don told me, I thought,

‘We’re all so busy and we rush around, and it will probably always be like that. But a mother and child and dinner, that’ll never change’.” At this point Draper reveals the tagline. Although a fictitious campaign idea for a canned food product that is likely the furthest thing from gourmet that one could imagine, the timeless link between food and family was central to the ad concept. And it is this overarching idea of food bringing people together that underpins this chapter. Regardless of the type of food that was discussed with participants, whether it was about fast-food or haute cuisine,

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whether the respondents were from households or industry, the social significance of the culinary experience was emphasised.

The social nature and value of food is well established. This chapter addresses how participants envisioned and enacted social interactions around food, particularly in an increasingly mediated foodscape where they are exposed to a competing number of culinary concerns. Respondents drew many diverse connections to social interactions around food. These ranged from where they liked to go out to dinner with their friends, to sourcing produce from neighbours and exploring new dining options in their local community, to attempts to assimilate into the ‘Australian’ way of life and were both in-person, as well as mediated.

Calling Australia Home

My fieldwork revealed many levels on which people were social in relation to food. Food shaped interactions with—perhaps most obviously—friends and family, but also with new people and new surroundings. Huntley (2008, p. 118) refers to a

“broader, well-worn story about the enriching influence of multiculturalism and migrants on how Australians cook and eat.” In the decades following World War II, the sentiment that immigration was “the antidote to tedious eating,” responsible for expanding Australians’ culinary horizons was so oft repeated that it “became a cliché”

(Symons, 2007, p. 260). Symons (1993, pp. 8–9) goes as far as to say this cliché is

“erroneous” and that the food industry is responsible for our diversified tastes. Such evidence can be seen in documentaries like Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry,

Marketing and the Creation of a Health Crisis. In 1953 Swanson TV Dinners were released with a television advertisement for the pre-packaged frozen meals showing different cuisines including German, Chinese, Italian, and Mexican. Clichés or misplaced generalisations aside however, the globalisation of cuisine occurring in

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Australia is still a relevant conversation even 75 years after the end of World War II as people, information, and culture continue to move around the globe.

Household respondent Jackie was born in Melbourne to Vietnamese parents. She spoke about being sent, along with her brother and sister, to Vietnamese school on

Saturdays. Although she lamented it at the time, she said she is now grateful for being able to read, write, and speak Vietnamese. But while her parents tried to conserve that part of their family’s heritage, school lunches were a different story. Jackie laughed when remembering how “Mum and Dad always wanted us to sort of fit into the

Australian culture.” Her parents viewed their children’s lunches as a way to help them assimilate into the Anglo-Australian way of life. Jackie recalled, “God bless them, but—so when we were going through school, they tried to give us like Vegemite sandwiches and peanut butter sandwiches and they would ask us, ‘What are the other kids eating? You know, we want you to be the same as them.’”

Although this practice affected Jackie and her siblings outside the physical space of the home, it can be seen as an attempt at what Hage (1997) calls home-building.

Viewing the home as an “affective construct,” he defines home-building as “the building of the feeling of being ‘at home’ (1997, p. 102). More specifically, there are four elements of home-building that Hage (1997, p. 103) refers to: security, familiarity, community, and a sense of possibility. Jackie’s parents sought to give their children a feeling of ‘community’ through packing Vegemite and peanut butter sandwiches. A sense of community being “a feeling of shared symbolic forms, shared morality, shared values and most importantly perhaps, shared language… the capacity to speak appropriately in a variety of recognisable specific situations.” In this case the “shared language” was lunch, and “speaking appropriately” was adhering to the cultural codes of what is ‘acceptable’ playground fare.

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The approach of Jackie’s parents was entirely reasonable considering the penchant young children have for harassing or bullying others who are different. But what her parents may not have been aware of is how attractive that difference can sometimes be. The Australian institution of the barbecue for instance is one way in which Thomas (2004, p. 60) found moments of “intercultural creation” occur. One of her respondents recounted marinating meat for their barbecue “the Vietnamese way with a lot of lemon grass, garlic, a dash of nuoc mam and pepper,” and attracting curiosity from Australians who wanted to know “what is that delicious smell?”

Thomas (2004, p. 60) observed that this is example is a way in which “one’s

Vietnameseness can be expressed within an Australian modality.”

Rather than pay thousands of dollars to board a plane and travel to experience exotic cuisines, Australians can achieve a globalised palate at home. Although having done a recent European holiday with his family, frequent interstate traveller Anthony commented that “you get more variety in Sydney than anywhere else.” And Jackie, who lists travel as another of her great passions alongside food, was so enthralled by trying paella in Spain that she devoted herself to perfecting it through scouring numerous recipes and participating in a cooking class when she returned home.

The multicultural food culture Australians now enjoy is on show every week in

Brisbane at sites like the Jan Powers Farmers Markets, Eat Street Northshore, and West

End’s Boundary Street Markets. The Jan Powers Farmers Markets are a space where local farmers sell produce weekly in the inner-city suburb of New Farm, but also at less regular intervals in the Northern Brisbane suburb of Mitchelton and Eastern

Bayside suburb of Manly. Meanwhile Eat Street Northshore based on the Brisbane

River in Hamilton has established itself as a popular dining and entertainment precinct with vendors offering a diverse range of cuisines including Filipino, Thai, Japanese,

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Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, French, Greek, Peruvian, and Brazilian. For people, like those in Thomas’s (2004) research who were captivated by the “delicious smell” of the lemon grass-marinated meat, who are seeking an exotic food experience, such events are an opportunity for culinary tourism without having to leave town. Nick

Goding, Project Manager of the Boundary Street Markets in the inner-city cultural hub of West End, spoke of wanting to offer “a broad mix of different food origins and styles…So it’s something a bit different for the punter.” The boom of Americana in

Brisbane at the moment is overwhelming, with a number of food outlets specialising in burgers, pulled pork, ribs, doughnuts, and other deep-fried, barbecued, grilled, or otherwise calorie-laden delicacies. They range from chains like Grill’d and Burger

Urge to more boutique outlets, like Ben’s Burgers in a laneway in Fortitude Valley and Miss Kay’s, which first opened in the Brisbane CBD, but now has four more outlets in outer suburbs. Pulled pork reached a point of saturation where chef Carlos

Gatica feels “pulled pork is so played out. It’s done.” He was told by a colleague while working at a Woolloongabba café, “when Coffee Club starts doing it, you know it’s time to stop.” 25 Similar to Gatica, Goding also claimed, “we’ve reached peak pulled pork.” Despite the fetishism for these American dishes that have saturated the Brisbane food scene of late, Goding ensures a rich and diverse mix of Romanian, Hungarian,

Turkish, Greek, Malaysian, Sri-Lankan, Brazilian, Spanish, Latin-Asian fusion, and

Venezuelan appear at the Boundary Street markets.

Events like farmers’ markets, Eat Street, and the Boundary Street Markets where these diverse mixes of stallholders offering exotic cuisines gather are opportunities for

Brisbanites to engage in the practices of omnivorousness and what Hage (1997) calls

25 The Coffee Club is a café and restaurant chain established in 1989 that operates under a franchise model. The chain has approximately 400 outlets across 9 countries (The Coffee Club, 2019)

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cosmo-multiculturalism. This is where “cosmopolitan identities are developed in isolation from migrant subjects (Hage, 1997, p.134), or as Duruz (2005, p.64) puts it, one “conduct[s] judicious ‘raids’ across the boundaries of ethnicity” in pursuit of

“taste.” There are clear parallels between the distinction-generating ability of omnivorousness and vying for cosmo-multicultural capital. Johnston and Baumann

(2015, p. 87) acknowledge that exoticism “is both a valued quality and a controversial concept.” Food is a way in which the spread of culture can be measured. In Sydney there is a tendency to measure an area’s multiculturalism based on availability of ethnic food in terms of the number of such restaurants and vendors (Hage, 1997, p.

118). In keeping with the demographic characteristics of foodies (see de Solier, 2008,

2013a), the one-upmanship in relation to which locality is home to the most diverse, and therefore rich, food scene is an urban concern in inner-city suburbs Glebe and

Newtown. Although competition to be home to the most diverse selection of cuisines may be interpreted as democratising, welcoming, and inclusive, a more problematic motivation is more likely. As established in the literature review, authenticity and exoticism are attributes of cuisine and culinary experiences that contemporary foodies valorise in a foodscape that shuns snobbery and conspicuous consumption (de Solier,

2013a, 2013b; Johnston & Baumann, 2015). But what has also been made clear is that omnivorousness is a continuation of a game that societal groups play in order to define what constitutes good taste (B. S. Turner & Edmunds, 2002). The competition between

Glebe and Newtown residents that Hage (1997, p. 119) details is more characteristic of competition than inclusivity:

Claims such as ‘We have five Thai restaurants or ‘We have an

African and a Burmese restaurant’ made by residents of Newtown are

challenges that have to be met by the residents of Glebe who have a

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whole array of strategic deployments available to them to dismiss the

Newtownian claims of multicultural culinary superiority—from

emphasis on higher quality to a highlighting of greater diversity.

The concept of cosmo-multiculturalism captures how this idea of difference is appropriated or manufactured for the purposes of creating distinction among the dominant class. Cosmo-multiculturalism is “touristic based multiculturalism”. And

Hage (1997, p. 99) argues that “the cosmo-multicultural subject conceives of ethnicity largely as an object of consumption”. Hage (1997, p. 119) describes “the product of forces which are far more linked to tourism and the international circulation of commodities than to the circulation of migrants.” The Brisbane events I’ve mentioned above have allowed the experience of international culinary tourism to occur locally.

Experiencing ethnic cuisine has been fetishised to such an extent in the case of the Eat

Street Markets that the markets themselves have become a tourist attraction. At the end of March 2017, the popularity of Brisbane’s Eat Street Markets led to relocation further east along the river in the inner-city suburb of Hamilton (Moore, 2017). The move allowed the Markets to increase its square-meterage from 8,500 to 10,200 square metres (Moore, 2017). As part of the announcement, one of the entrepreneurs behind the markets, Peter Hackworth (in Moore, 2017) said of the new site that, “There’s a lot of very new, innovative stuff happening and it is going to be more like a national tourist attraction.”

There is another way in which the pursuit of authentic, exotic cuisine that is accessible close to home is problematic. When migrants are part of multiculturalism, it could in some circumstances be perceived that the migrants are here to serve the exotic, but cosmopolitan culinary experience. For some food vendors, it is a vocation they undertake as they are not qualified in Australia to do the kind of work they did

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before arriving here. I asked Nick Goding of the Boundary Street Markets if he knew how any of his stallholders got into the food business. One story he recounted that of a stallholder who was a qualified engineer in Sri Lanka, but unable to work in such a capacity in Australia. This gentleman therefore turned to food to make a living. Of this man’s career switch Goding said, “They make amazing food, so he’s chose a good path. I’m quite happy that they’ve chosen that path because I really enjoy their food.”

This stallholder’s path may have been more of a necessity than choice, but it is a choice that migrants from other nations make too. In writing about the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia, Thomas’ (2004, p. 61) participant, Quyen echoed a similar vocational shift, stating that, “[a]lmost everyone can cook, thus when you are in a new country, if you can’t find a job, you can always open a restaurant. Foreigners can’t tell!”

Co-owner of Gerard’s Bistro, Elie Moubarak is also enthusiastic about using food as a gateway through which to enjoy and learn about cultures of faraway lands.

Having seen a Tunisian bakery in Melbourne recently he exclaimed, “Wow, how beautiful is that, you know? And why not learn about Tunisian food? Because that might trigger us to learn about Tunisian culture, religion, the country, you know.”

New Food Communities

A significant way in which globalisation and cultural fragmentation have altered the foodscape are the ways in which it has provided opportunities for communities to assemble when it otherwise would have been too difficult or expensive. Especially in relation to dietary concerns such as vegetarianism, veganism, raw diets, and avoidance of processed foods, virtual communities are vital ways in which some of my respondents were able to engage with a specific culinary interest.

For Erin, Facebook groups had been not only a source of information for her, but also positive reinforcement. In a meat-centric foodscape, vegetarian and vegan

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Facebook groups helped her avoid feelings of “you’re the only weirdo vegan in the world kind of thing.” She was part of vegan groups that ranged in proximity from the institution where she works, to city and state-wide groups, plus also national and international groups.

I don’t have that many friends in real life. I have friends. But I’m

not really a sociable person in terms of going out a lot with people. I

guess my husband and I go to music concerts and stuff like that more

than, more than going to restaurants with people or going to cafés.

Molly’s engagement with online communities could be more fleeting. Having experimented with a more plant-based diet, she was also eating mostly raw foods when we met. During the interview she detailed having participated in a challenge to eat no processed food for 60 days. Hashtags allowed her to only access the community when she felt that she needed encouragement, motivation, or ideas:

I did like to put hashtags of like, you know,

“30daypaleochallenge” [on pictures of her meals] and being able to

click on it and seeing what else comes up. You know, being able to

share that to other people that are doing the same thing […] You know,

you can’t go on eating the same thing and just having the same two or

three recipes… it can get a bit boring. So having the motivation of

seeing other people’s food was quite good.

For opinion leaders in the Brisbane food scene platforms like Instagram were particularly useful for getting noticed. Jackie had more than 1,600 followers and said that she received invitations to attend restaurant events for food bloggers. The relationships she has built with café owners, chefs, and restaurateurs will be examined later in this chapter. Notably, Jackie was also sought out from interstate to help test a

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food venture from Melbourne called Neighbour Flavour. Jackie said they found her on

Instagram and asked if she would be interested in part of their idea. She was taken aback by their request:

You know I’m pretty sure you want like a massive food blogger

or someone else to market your kind of thing that’s going on. They’re

like, “no, we just want an average person, an average everyday person

who does their cooking, who does their meals, you know. We want

people—we want people in the community who they can relate to as

well.” Yeah, which I find interesting.

Neighbour Flavour described itself as the “Uber of Food”.26 In a 7 News piece on the start-up, Adrian Brown said that Neighbour Flavour was about, “creating a community through food. Connecting people who love cooking with people that love awesome food, but don’t like cooking or don’t have the time.” The smartphone application, which was designed to connect home cooks with people nearby, is a wider-scale and mediatised version of interactions that have been occurring for generations. Technology helping bring communities together around food has already been happening more informally in Facebook groups. Max and Yvette who live about a 20-minute drive outside Samford find Facebook groups set up for people in their local area are a useful way to source produce:

I keep an eye on local groups around here and somebody will

say, “Oh I’ve got heaps of limes,” or something, for sale […] I think

the last time we did that we got three kilograms of limes and I made

four jars of lime pickles. I made some limoncello with limes instead

26 Uber Eats was introduced in Brisbane in October 2016 (Davies, 2016), less than six months after this interview took place.

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of lemons—that was pretty good—Um you know, not long ago there

was a late burst of strawberries on the market and they were cheap,

bought a heap of those, made jam.

These localised Facebook groups are useful in linking people nearby who want to buy or trade produce, but the mediatisation of these communities raise new issues in terms of food safety and the legality of such exchanges. It was an issue raised in the

7 News story about Neighbour Flavour as commercial kitchens have standards and legislation governing them that home cooks do not. When it comes to eggs from backyard hens, Yvette said that while she felt “you’d never be prosecuted for giving

[eggs to] your neighbour type-of-thing,” she was under the impression you were not even supposed to give backyard eggs away. Max said the laws had changed in recent years and speculated it had been after a salmonella outbreak or similar. While such exchanges have likely been occurring in the area for many years, the Facebook groups merely make these casual trades visible. As Max put it using his dry sense of humour:

Yeah there are a few underground communities on Facebook,

which sell produce that they probably aren’t legally allowed to, but look

people have been doing this for ages, it’s not like it’s killed anybody,

usually.

Earlier, Hage’s (1997) home building concept was used to explore the socially- oriented food practices of families like Jackie’s who were new to Australia. Beyond a multiculturalism context however, the “affective construct” of home building can be applied to people who move to a new area not necessarily outside of their cultural context, but to a new town or city where they need to establish a sense of familiarity and community. Jackie, Phoebe, Leah, and Jeremy cited online sources like Urban List and The Weekend Edition as being useful for locating new places to eat. Urban List is

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a lifestyle news website where readers can access news on Brisbane, Sydney,

Melbourne, Perth, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, and New Zealand. The

Weekend Edition performs a similar function, but focuses only on the Brisbane and

Gold Coast markets. Having moved to the Northern Brisbane suburb of Chermside with his partner Leah, Jeremy described how their approach to finding new dining spots had changed, comparing the suburbs with the inner-city, saying, “You hear about the places in the Valley and everything, whereas we search out the places, out, in the outer suburbs, because we want to find something new.” They found they had to be more proactive in looking for cafés, restaurants, and bars that were close to home now they lived outside of the “normal eatery hubs,” as Jeremy put it. In Brisbane, these hubs include the CBD and surrounding suburbs like Fortitude Valley, New Farm, and

West End. Leah stated that the development of online sources like Urban List and The

Weekend Edition had only been recent, and when they moved to the area two and a half years prior, they relied more on word-of-mouth. Jeremy recounted:

Our neighbour, he was kind of like, ‘oh have you checked out this

place or that?’ because he’d lived there for a while, he kind of had the

knowledge of what was local. Like ‘oh ok, got to try that place or this

one,’ yeah. Otherwise we would never have probably found them at that

point. But now, it’s pretty easy.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that using online sources as opposed to talking to neighbours is more useful in terms of fostering community and establishing themselves in Chermside, Leah and Jeremy enjoyed the autonomy that these websites gave them to explore their neighbourhood.

These online mechanisms were also important in helping the couple familiarise themselves with their suburban surroundings because the food pages in mainstream

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media like the Sunday Mail newspaper were not as relevant to them. One way that

Leah and Jeremy were exposed to local establishments online without having to conduct searches of lifestyle websites is through social media advertising, particularly on Facebook. Rather than find the advertising irritating, they found ads for Café Noma, a then new local café to pique their interest in the business, particularly as others in the community—in this instance other members of a gym Leah was attending at the time—were also talking about the ad, so she thought that their targeted Facebook campaign had been “a huge success” for the business. Although the impact of social media on food culture is explored at the end of Chapter 6 as a somewhat disruptive force, Jeremy and Leah’s account here illustrates how it can help create more vibrant food scenes in suburbs outside the inner-city.

Friendly Food

Some friends are brought together by sport, music or movies, for instance. But for a group of young professionals I interviewed, it was food that bound them. For couples Phoebe and Nick, and Leah and Jeremy, plus their extended friendship group, food is central to the time they spend together. Having met at university and gone on to varied careers, they still enjoy catching up over pizzas or share plates and a few beers or ciders, or hosting their friends for dinner parties. Both couples now have different everyday concerns from their university years. They are both paying mortgages, and Phoebe and Nick have undertaken extensive home renovations, but food and friends are still central parts of their lives. For everyday foodies, eating and drinking may be something to do when getting together. But for this particular group, their busy lives did not prevent their gatherings requiring an approach similar to the serious or productive leisure of foodies. This was not a burden for them, but a motivating factor. Cooking, eating, and matching food with beer is something they are

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all deeply interested in learning about, and their culinary crusades go as far as becoming competitive.

Their choice to pursue food in this way is reflective of a foodie’s approach, one which is embedded in the practice of serious or productive leisure. de Solier (2013a, p. 21) aptly summarised Stebbins’s definition of serious leisure, which are activities conducted outside the workplace that one “finds so substantial, interesting and fulfilling that they embark on a project of acquiring and expressing its special knowledge, skills, and experience.” The culinary activities of these two couples, whether the everyday preparation of meals or planned get togethers in some ways reflected the approach of de Solier’s (2013a) foodies, but were quite pragmatic in the vein of everyday foodies in others.

In differentiating hobbyists from amateurs, de Solier (2013a) cites Stebbins

(1992) who states that amateurs pursue activities that can be professionally practiced whereas hobbyists do not. For instance, Phoebe said if it was financially possible, she would quit her job and open either a café or a catering company, as cooking is her

“relaxation” and she has previously catered for parties and made desserts for a friend’s wedding. She has even pondered working a Thursday night or Saturday morning job in a food establishment:

I’m sure places don’t really want this, just some random who

wants to work three hours on a Thursday night just to get that

experience. But like, I would do that like if I had the opportunity to do

three hours on a Saturday morning at a busy café and then not do it until

the next week I would do it… Just because I really like it.

Having their friends over for a dinner party is seen as an occasion one must prepare for in order to impress the rest of the group. As Jeremy put it:

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there are a lot of people in our friendship circle who love to cook,

and, it’s a competitive friendship circle so, everyone is kind of like,

‘alright well, if we’re having those guys over for dinner we better try

and up the ante a bit, so you kind of go, ‘oh well, we have to do

something fancy.’

Other respondents from my previous research felt that programs like MCA added expectation when having people over. Hayley, for example, said that she felt a sense of obligation:

You sort of feel that if you have people over and you don’t do

something really nice like maybe you’re not caring for them properly

[…] Because everyone has an awareness [of food] now, everyone likes

MasterChef. Like when you have someone over you want it to be a bit

more special than your everyday… Which I think is a funny concept.

[…] I just think, you know, what – I don’t think there’s anything wrong

with the way we eat every day. Yeah. I think it’s good, it shows care of

people and I think you should do that, but I think, yeah, I think it’s funny

that we’ve sort of got into this mentality that unless you do something

really special, you’re not taking care of people, which I don’t think is

necessarily true.

Remembering Hayley’s feelings on entertaining as I spoke with Jeremy and

Leah, I asked if they ever felt pressured or obliged to prepare fancy meals for their friends. Jeremy said, “there’s definitely pressure,” but that it is more about his personal mastery of the dish. “I mean I can get frustrated with things when it doesn’t go my way. If I’m like, “this didn’t work,” I can get really, really frustrated.” He was not necessarily concerned about the reaction of Leah or his friends however:

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I don’t necessarily think it’s one [a pressure] where you’re like,

“Oh my God, if I stuff this up, like I’m going to feel really bad about

it,” yeah. You kind of go like, “So guys, uh yeah, we got takeaway chips

because that failed.”

For some gatherings however, the research and preparation time was extensive.

Jeremy explained the process he would undertake if another couple from their group of food-interested interested friends were coming over for dinner:

I’ve been known to start planning probably two or three weeks

ahead. Like start getting it going, getting an idea. So you know, three

weeks out I’m going, “Alright, what are we going to cook?” And get an

idea of the type of dish I’d like to cook, and then I’ll spend the week

after that going, “Alright, get a couple of recipes together,” and work

out what—roughly—dishes you’re going to actually create. So you’ve

kind of decided on the genre and everything by then, and the week out

from it going, “You need this much of this, and that,” and get the rest,

like the actual ingredients.

Although this may sound like the worst nightmare of someone like Hayley, Leah said it was only something that they do because their friends “appreciate cooking.”

Other times however, meticulously planned and prepared meals are not on the agenda at all with Leah saying that having a “barbie” is completely acceptable practice among their friendship group also. Even though Leah and Jeremy, along with their friendship group pursue food together, more casual gatherings are not frowned upon.

Even everyday food preparation was a considered and social affair in the days before Jeremy and Leah moved in together. They lived in separate share houses and

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Leah described the difference between the two households with Jeremy’s being

“family like” whereas in her house, everyone cooked their own meals, but were social after. In Jeremy’s household, “you wouldn’t start cooking ‘til about 7.30 by the time everyone got home from work. And dinner was like a group activity, rather than just getting it done before you do something else,” Leah recalled. She described the process as “very social.” Leah continued, “at Jeremy’s you go and have a glass of wine, you’d cook, you’d talk about what they were doing, you’d show techniques, you’d show off.”

Another way that this group’s approach to food is different to just getting together over a meal are their annual slow cooker nights. Leah said that this was a culinary event that the group prepared for. Jeremy told me of how the group would gather for one night during the winter for this occasion:

[We] will all go and prepare something in a slow cooker and we

all bring it to one person’s house and we watch it cook, and, we’ll have

a beer night of like trying all different beers, and, all, like, whatever […]

and like, you know, go through that, and we’re looking at that not just

as a reason to get drunk, but it’s like try different flavours of beers and

enjoying that, and then like, you get all the smells from the slow cooker

and then, it’s sit down to this incredibly huge feast, and you’re just like

‘holy cow, this is so good and this is great’, and kind of compare notes

and everything from that and get ideas of what to cook from there as

well. And, you know, I think we look forward to that every year.

It was interesting however that Jeremy would not invest as much time and effort into cooking when it was just for himself and Leah, as he does when other friends are involved. We discussed the example of hotdogs:

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Jeremy: That’d probably depend, so, if we’re going to have hotdogs in

the house, umm, so actually. If we cook hotdogs now, we’ll probably

like go and buy the hotdog buns, and just get the frankfurts, and, sauce,

and mustard, and be totally content with that. When I live in the share

house, and it was, like Tom and I, if we were cooking hotdogs, we did

go to the extra of like, we’d cook the bacon, and you know, onion, and

all that kind of extra things to go in it. But…

Leah: So if he’s cooking with me, I get the crap version, but if he’s…

Jeremy: No!

Leah: It’s true, if you went over to Tom’s house now, which you do

regularly, you would do that.

Jeremy: Yeah totally would.

Leah: You’d cook the fancy ones.

Jeremy: We’d go all out. Let’s add some sauerkraut to this or, like the

onion.

Leah: So you cook to who you’re cooking for.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Leah: So like me, I probably wouldn’t really appreciate it if… I would

but I wouldn’t, not as much as…

Leah described herself as a “practical” cook. Comparing her cooking style to

Jeremy, she said that he “will sit there and labour over something and make something amazing, whereas I kind of want to get the job done, so my cooking is much more practical, get it finished, whereas [Jeremy’s] is more, you know, get it perfect.” In

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relation to the hotdog example, it makes sense that the social context in which the meal is prepared will dictate whether Jeremy makes something simple or more elaborate.

Another aspect of serious leisure that participants undertook was wanting to better understand or develop rapport with chefs, restaurateurs and café owners. In describing how food amateurs view their professional counterparts, de Solier (2013a, p. 23) stated that amateurs “are strongly influenced by them [professionals]; they interact with and develop relationships with them, either in person or via media.” Nick described how enthralled Phoebe was when they ate at Fortitude Valley restaurant,

Longtime where their seats were looking into the kitchen:

Nick: Oh yeah, it’s the quietest Phoebe’s ever been when she was

sitting up, we were looking right into the kitchen. She was watching

what everyone was doing and the head chef’s doing this, and these guys

are doing that.

Phoebe: Yeah, I was part of the kitchen.

Nick: She was in there cookin.’

Phoebe: I posted a photo on Instagram saying I was basically in the

kitchen.

Another respondent, Jackie, has established a friendly reputation among café owners, chefs, and restaurateurs in Brisbane. Through frequenting a variety of venues and maintaining a prolific Instagram account, she has cemented herself as an opinion leader in the Brisbane food scene. Having such a standing has allowed her to have an impact on the food that is served in some of her favourite places. Along with her

CrossFit friends, Jackie is a regular Saturday morning diner at Corner Store Café in

Paddington. They call their regular table their “family table,” and their relationship with the staff there is such that they can give feedback on the food. “They’re willing

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to play around with ingredients and play around with flavours, and they’re highly receptive to feedback as well,” Jackie said.

Furthermore, Jackie emphasised the importance of everyone—the chefs, the staff and the owners—of an establishment loving what they do. For owners in particular she values when “they’re not just behind the scene managing the place or whatever. They’re actually in there doing it and serving you.” West End café Morning

After made a particularly good impression on Jackie. Although the café does a bustling brunch trade, Jackie said that the staff and owners made the time to make her feel welcome:

Like the staff, the owners, they come over, they greet you, and

you know, they’re going through the food menu with you, and if you

get—and if you don’t know what you want to order then they give you

recommendations, you get suggestions, you can chop and change things

on the menu you know, as long as you’re happy, as long as you feel

welcome, it’s sort of part of their concept I think as well, yeah, and so

that’s lovely, I like that, yeah. And they’re busy, they’re ridiculously

busy, it does look like they’re kind of rushing here and there, back and

forth but they actually give you time…

This emphasis on food being a social activity is something not lost on restaurateurs. Elie Moubarak spoke about his vision for Gerard’s Bistro as “refined,” but “relaxed or more comfortable.” As we conducted the interview over lunch at the

Bistro Moubarak said:

You can hear people talking and talking aloud and that’s I guess the

way we want it. We want people to come in. We want them to interact

with their other guests, their table. We want them to ask questions.

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And you know some of the times I’ll see Ben [the head chef] out here

discussing, or explaining food to the table, that’s the kind of feel and

aura we want in this place.

For couples Phoebe and Nick, and Leah and Jeremy, along with the rest of their friendship group, a place that encourages social interaction is important. As Leah said,

“We rarely go out as a couple, we always go out as friends, as a big group.” This meant,

Jeremy continued, that they tended to “gravitate towards bars, with bar food. So like that share platter food is probably a thing that we’d go for more.” I asked Phoebe and

Nick if they engaged in fine dining, Phoebe was quite direct in her answer: “I hate fine dining.” Aside from the cost of the exercise, Phoebe’s other reasons for disliking fine dining were based around the social experience:

And I would much prefer to go to a place where you can share the

food and the waiters and stuff are just lots more casual and you can have

a good time and you can speak above a whisper and have a nice time

compared to somewhere that’s too snooty really.

When it comes to cafés, Carlos Gatica, head chef at King Arthur, a café in

Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley is of the firm opinion that café owners should be driven by a sense of community rather than profit alone:

I think if you’re going to open a café, the reasons for doing it

have to have a broader impact on the community for the positive.

Because a café really is serving the community. Cafés are small, they

open in suburbs because it’s cheaper to run, you know […] But is it

going to be a hub for people to come and spend time you know, to

engage with their neighbours and so forth.

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I asked Moubarak about where he saw, or hoped to see, the future of Brisbane’s food scene. He believed that fast-food and chain restaurants were going to have less power in the marketplace and envisions a scene of “more really interesting, community driven dining experiences.” Such a prediction for the future of Brisbane food is emblematic of three key factors. A shift towards local, individualised and community- centric eating practices is not only a more social approach to eating that Gatica sees as necessary for our well-being, but also more sustainable, as explored in Chapter 8.

It also reflects the process of cultural fragmentation that has become increasingly prevalent in contemporary food culture. Rosewarne (in Lambert & Brook,

2017) neatly summarised why a move away from chain restaurants and their offerings was more likely, and in doing so captured the cultural fragmentation element:

Our hyper-individualism—illustrated well with our laundry list of

dairy-free, gluten-free, paleo, superfood-fortified personalised food

demands—means that buffet style venues and mass-production fast

food chains can’t adequately meet our changing needs the way more

niche venues can.

The proliferation or fragmentation in tastes that Rosewarne refers to illustrates why a return to local and social consumption practices from decades earlier, as

Moubarak pondered, may be more relevant to food-loving Brisbanites in the future.

When talking about mediated food interactions, mainly on social media platforms, respondents described generally positive and helpful experiences, such as swapping culinary information or produce. Rousseau (2016, p. 45) points out, however, that while social media has the ability to bring people together, she asserts that this also has the potential to produce “fractious and fractured communities that ultimately obstruct productive conversations about how best to care for ourselves, for

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our families, and for the planet.” In other words, social media can become another source of food confusion.

Food and Family

Food media can play an important role in developing one’s food knowledge. As

Curtis (in Kirkwood 2013, p.59), a respondent from my previous research, stated that without food television, “you’d be stuck cooking the same things your mum and dad taught you in high school. You’d just be doing the same thing every day.” While media can contribute to audience members’ ongoing learning, many respondents trace their original inspiration or love of food back to a family member. In some instances this was an enjoyable shared hobby, but for others it was a more pragmatic introduction to the kitchen.

Phoebe and I were talking about reality cooking shows and had seriously considered applying for My Kitchen Rules. When I asked Phoebe who would be her teammate it was not her partner Nick, nor one of her other food-obsessed friends, but her Dad. Phoebe’s father was a stay at home parent while she and her brother were growing up. This meant that he became the household’s primary cook, but it was something that he enjoyed and in turn shared with Phoebe. It is a mutual interest they share to this day. When she returns to her hometown to visit her family, or when he visits her in Brisbane, “we’re always cooking together,” Phoebe said. Referring to her father as her “food influence,” she recalled a special present she prepared for him: “A couple of years after leaving home I actually designed a cookbook out of his recipes and got it printed and stuff and then gave it to him for Christmas.”

Much like an everyday foodie, the shared culinary experiences between Phoebe and her father were not always strictly about learning new dishes and engaging in the

“serious leisure” as defined by Stebbins (1982, 1992) and engaged in by foodies as

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examined by de Solier (2015) and Johnston and Baumann (Kane, 2002, p. 317). This also means Phoebe’s food memories with her Dad are not centred on the pursuit of what may be considered highbrow or omnivorously coveted lowbrow cuisine. In fact, one of her fondest food memories with her father takes place at the very middlebrow

McDonald’s. When her brother moved out of town and her mum stayed with him temporarily until he was settled, Phoebe and her Dad had a special ritual:

Every Thursday me and Dad would actually go to McDonald’s

together and always try the new chicken burger […] We would never

get takeaway. We would sit there and we would enjoy our chicken

burger and we would see this as like an experience […] And even

though that seems really weird and I would like—we would never, we

never really go to McDonald’s at all, or any fast food takeaway place

like that, but I will always have a really, really special memory of me

and my Dad at McDonald’s.

The genuine story Phoebe shared is one that likely would excite fast food marketers. As established in the literature review, McDonald’s advertising previously sought to establish itself as a “neighborly mother substitute” (Kane, 2002, p. 317) or as an entity to ensure mothers took a break from cooking. But marketers are keen to target the whole family. Mennell, Murcott and van Otterloo (1992, p. 84) note that,

“Even a family visit to McDonald’s is promoted as offering the experience of ‘a sense of occasion.’” Familiar with the tropes of fast-food advertising that centre around promoting family time as important to their brand, Phoebe said, “They could make an ad about it probably. Like special daddy-daughter McDonald’s time.” Armstrong

(2017) reported that McDonald’s in the UK had to withdraw an advertisement that clumsily attempted to exploit the family theme. It released an advertisement depicting

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a mother and son together soon after the boy’s father passed away and when the son went to take a bite from a Filet-o-Fish burger, the mother says, “That was your dad’s favourite too.” In the documentary Feeding Frenzy: The Food Industry, Marketing and the Creation of a Health Crisis, Jhally, Nestle, and Bradley explain how and why marketers of fast and processed food try to draw connections between their products and social occasions:

Jhally: So food marketing doesn’t just sell food. It tries to

connect food to all the important aspects of people’s lives. From family

dinners around a table to having a good time with friends, to love and

emotional intimacy, even to the idea of what good parenting means.

Nestle: We respond to these advertisements in a very emotional

way. That is absolutely under the radar of critical thinking. And that’s

just exactly how we’re supposed to.

Bradley: And so tapping into these emotions is a really powerful

way to sell product for the food industry. It’s also a really easy way to

get around products that may not have a whole lot of attributes that you

can spin a story around. So if it’s a fast food meal, talking about the

happy times with your family is a very convenient way of misleading

people about how good the product actually is.

Phoebe’s visits to McDonald’s with her father echoes sentiments emblematic of both foodies as well as everyday foodies. The fact that she consumed fast food on a weekly basis is a practice an everyday foodie would see as unproblematic. As Melanie, a participant in my previous research said, “I love fine dining, but if you offered me up Sizzler on a Sunday, I’m right there. McDonald’s—there’s a special place in my heart for McDonald’s” (Kirkwood, 2013, p. 60). But Phoebe’s framing of these

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McDonald’s expeditions as social experiences positions Phoebe more in the realm of a foodie. Although foodies would likely not have seen McDonald’s as an ‘acceptable’ place for a culinary experience, the emphasis Phoebe put on this weekly ritual as an

“experience” reflects the practices of de Solier’s (2013b, p. 16) foodies who seek

“cultural experiences and knowledge, rather than material things.” Her emphasis on the “experience” however is not a quest to seek authentic and exotic culinary experiences in response to anxieties around excessive conspicuous consumption, but the social enjoyment and memory of spending time with her father. Phoebe’s emphasis on sharing the experience with her Dad, and sense of defensiveness overeating fast food when she said, “we never really go to McDonald’s at all, or any fast food takeaway place like that,” is also a statement aligned with the attitudes of a foodie.

Although they do not want to be seen as snobs, foodies “maintain a symbolic boundary between worthy and unworthy food” (Johnston & Baumann, 2015, p. 173). Johnston and Baumann (2015, p. 173) recorded that “almost all foodies reported a strong aversion to chain restaurants and fast-food.” This finding is similar in Australia where foodies viewed processed or convenience foods to be “unacceptable” (de Solier,

2013a, p. 133).

Sabrina and her daughter Grace laughed as they recounted a middlebrow family food story. They contemplated doing a dinner party based on the television program about the Duggar family from Arkansas, 19 Kids and Counting and detailed to me what the main course would have been: A Tater Tot Casserole, which they saw on the program and Grace researched the recipe for:

It’s just ground turkey mince and tomato sauce and you mix that

together, and you put it in the bottom of the tray. And underneath that

you actually put a layer of cheese and tomato sauce. So cheese and

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tomato sauce, ground turkey mince and tomato sauce, and then tater

tots, which are like—what they are, like potato gems. And then cheese

and tomato sauce. And then you stick it in the oven, and it’d come out

and all the kid would be there and they’re like ‘this is what we made.’

Although 19 Kids and Counting was not a food show, but rather just a reality program, Sabrina’s family, even her nieces enjoyed the show together and engaged with the food presented on the show, but in a more jovial, joking way. Sabrina said the proposed dinner party would have been “just for a laugh. That’s something different to see how other people—how revolting that would be.” Again, this echoes the sentiments of an everyday foodie, specifically around the diverse viewing strategies they adopt, and practices of vicarious consumption.

When I established the everyday foodie concept (Kirkwood, 2013), I discussed how some engaged with food programs for the purposes of education, but others watched more to be entertained, or as “vicarious experts” (see Ouellette & Hay, 2008).

Here, Sabrina’s family sought another level of engagement with the food on 19 Kids and Counting as they found the vulgarity of the food consumed by the Duggar family amusing. Therefore, their engagement with this program can be understood as entertainment since McKee (2012) cites vulgarity as one of the key elements of entertainment. This story can also be viewed in another way that relates to the practices of everyday foodies. Through watching the show and researching the Tater Tot

Casserole they are watching the show as vicarious experts who take “pleasure in judging others and seeing one’s own self-fashioning skills valorized [sic]” (Ouellette

& Hay, 2008, p. 117). When I originally wrote about everyday foodies and vicarious consumption (Kirkwood, 2014), it was in the sense that engaging with popular culture allowed everyday foodie audiences to engage with gourmet food culture that they

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otherwise would not have been able to personally consume. Sabrina and her family have put a twist on this with their proposed 19 Kids and Counting exercise. Although they contemplated actually consuming the infamous Tater Tot Casserole, they would be consuming the lifestyle of a family in the American South and doing so in the knowledge that this was, as Sabrina stated, “to see how revolting that would be,” and no doubt would have giggled their way through the meal as they did when telling me the story.

Kerry Jones, a Catering Manager at a Queensland corrections facility spoke about inmates and how their families shaped their food preferences. Like Phoebe’s story about sitting down to eat McDonald’s once a week with her father, Jones articulates that it is the practice of sharing food, of being with family and creating memories that shapes one’s nostalgic favourites around food, not necessarily the perceived quality of whatever was eaten. She summarised one of the requests she had received over the food service from inmates. “Miss, you’re doing a great job, but we’re not used to this Angel Bay burger, this hundred grams of real meat. We want those

Black and Gold brand because that’s what we grew up with.” The inmate who requested this had been in care all his life and, according to Jones, his “fondest memories” of childhood were based around the Black and Gold products. Jones recognised the hardship these men faced before they were incarcerated and reinforced the principle of family and food, regardless of what that food may be:

And eating is the most basic, it’s the most giving, you’re breaking

bread with someone, it’s emotionally—it’s beautiful, it’s the nucleus of

our family where we grew up, we came together, we’ve got fond

memories of different things, even though you and I might think it’s

strange, but fond memory of a Black and Gold hamburger puck—

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because that’s what they look like when they’re cooked—that’s his

memory. That’s a little bit of who he is. And food is who we are, you

know. Memories of roast dinners and puddings and, like all made from

scratch, is as kids, fabulous.

Drawing parallels to her grown up children, Jones thought about when one of her daughters returned from London, and how she enthusiastically offered to cook for her, expecting a request that would take full advantage of Jones’ culinary skills. The request however was somewhat underwhelming:

Oh my God, Mum. I’m so wanting you to get those Sanitarium

sausages out of the can, make mash potato, peas, and a homemade gravy

[…] And I want a big jar of Vegemite.

Pondering her daughter’s last request, Jones said that would definitely have been a reflection of the girls’ childhood: “of course that would’ve been me as a mother scraping Vegemite on toast and, “here’s yours, here’s yours,” and while I was working my 60 to 80 hours a week and coming back to kids, that’s what I was sometimes doing.”

Although Jones came to this research as a food industry expert with a wealth of professional experience, plus extensive knowledge of food, cooking, chefs and restaurants, there was still an everydayness in the foods that she would serve her family when she was a single mother working long hours. This somewhat aligns Jones with the definition of everyday foodies because although she already possesses the skills and knowledge an everyday foodie may strive to integrate into their lifestyle, the pragmatic need to work in order to support her family were time constraints—one of the everyday factors that impact everyday foodies. This led her to serving the

Sanitarium sausages and Vegemite on toast. Ironically it was these foods that provided

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comfort for her daughter after being so far away from home an act that demonstrates, in social contexts like family, that it is the interaction and nostalgia that is most important, not the supposed quality or elaborateness of the food itself. While these provide many real and fond memories for people, food marketers seize upon the themes of family and friends in order to ascribe meaning to otherwise mundane or unattractive products.

Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Household Food Preparation

An interesting undercurrent of the analysis in this chapter—particularly in relation to friendship and family interactions around food—is the gender dynamics at play. For example, an interesting aspect of Phoebe’s story is that it is her father as opposed to her mother with whom she shares a passion for food and cooking. In my sample, gender dynamics were most evident in discussions around friends and family.

Others have noted, however, the way in which gender roles around food help bridge across races and cultures. Counihan (1998, p. 1) notes “the clear significance of food- centered activities and meanings to the constitution of gender relations and identities across cultures.” Duruz (2005) found one such manifestation of this in the actions of her participant Alice, an Anglo-Australian living in Newtown who recounted many culinary exchanges of recipes, skills, and insight on where to purchase certain ingredients with her Indonesian friend Stella. Having met in church, Alice’s

“positioning in ‘traditional’ feminine networks, with recipes passed between mothers, daughters, and neighbors” (Duruz, 2005, p. 66), provide a basis for her cross-cultural exchange with Stella.

In my sample many men play a significant role in their household’s cooking and/or spoke of a male role model in relation to food. This may be a consequence of my participant recruitment strategy where I sought out people who self-identified as

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being interested in food and cooking. The fact these men were enthusiastic to speak about their culinary pursuits, however, still pushes back against the stereotypical view of the domestic kitchen being a female domain. The more traditional view of household and food work falling to women is acknowledged by scholars like Warde

(1996, p. 175-6) who note the time strain on women who both work and assume household responsibilities. Interestingly, two of the men I interviewed who spoke at length about their love of food and cooking began cooking for much more pragmatic reasons. For Max, the eldest of three brothers, cooking was a life skill that his mother encouraged him and his siblings to master. “Being able to at least cook a basic meal,” alongside operating a washing machine and being able to sew a button, were things

Max’s mother wanted them to be capable of when they left home. While he claims that both of his other brothers can cook “reasonably well” and that his middle brother is into putting on roasts and barbecues, Max believes he has pursued cooking to the greatest extent. What he was encouraged to learn as a boy in his early teens has become an enjoyable activity for him throughout his adult life. Max claims to get a “fair bit of enjoyment out of creating something because it was a very creative process cooking.”

He spoke more about experimenting and being flexible or creative in the kitchen:

There are some people who will religiously follow a recipe and

say, “okay, follow every single step, I’ll get my thing.” And yeah you

probably will, but it doesn’t take much more to like change it a little bit

and then you’ll get something new. Or maybe you don’t have all the

ingredients in the recipe so then you’ve just got to think about, “okay,

well if I’m missing this particular ingredient here, what else is sort of

like it that I can chuck in there?” And you’ll still end up with something

that tastes pretty close to what you were aiming for, but you can adapt.

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Anthony was much blunter about his need to take up cooking. As one of six children and raised by his father, he claims the required approach was, “fend for yourself first or there was nothing.”

Claudia was similar to Phoebe in that her father played a significant role in developing their love of food and cooking. She spoke about her father who “was always interested in food,” and remembered that, “as a kid and we used to cook really exotic dinners, you know for those days like we’d have people around and have beef stroganoff and that would be really exotic.” He enjoyed cooking so much that he hosted dinner parties until well into his late 80s.

Elijah is a husband and father in my sample who is the primary cook in his household and also enjoys watching his children, particularly two-year-old Henry, learn about and enjoy food. His wife Angie is quite open about preferring eating over cooking and unless something is extremely quick and easy to make, she does not want to go through the process of “mixing and everything.” This is why, Angie says, “Elijah is trained up to be quite a good cook because I really am not into too much cooking. I love [eating] my food.”

Yvette was like Angie in that she thoroughly enjoys eating, but does not otherwise like engaging in the cooking process. She laments when her husband Max is not home and the cooking responsibilities fall to her, “Because sometimes he’s not home and I have to cook. It’s terrible. I complain bitterly.” Max, conversely, is deeply interested in food and cooking. He enjoys experimenting with different cuisines and dishes, catering for family Christmases and seeking out exotic ingredients. His interest is such that he played an active role in the design of their home’s kitchen. Angie and

Yvette’s dislike of cooking, and open rejection of it is in stark contrast to discourses that position cooking as a woman’s responsibility.

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Some families did however conform to more traditionally-imagined household structures. Although a nuclear family like Angie and Elijah, in Anna and Tony’s household Anna is the primary cook. Anna is also vegetarian, while Tony and their children, Ethan and Lucy all eat meat. Despite not eating the meat components of the meal and not being able to know if the meat is cooked well, Anna persists in preparing differing meals for her and her family. Although Tony is the adult meat-eater of the household, Anna claims he does not like to cook, but “might turn something on the barbecue occasionally.” She says it is a precarious task preparing dinner for her family:

It’s very awkward because, you know, trying to cater to

everyone’s tastes and likes and dislikes and, and also sometimes my

husband works late too so… and the children, particularly when they

were younger, would be eating really early so… meals at different

times, yeah used to drive me nuts.

Brooke and Hugo do not have children like Anna and Tony, but Brooke is like Anna in that she is the household’s primary cook. Instead of catering for likes and dislikes, Brooke goes to great efforts to ensure they eat healthy meals. Part of this is because the couple are gym enthusiasts, but more importantly, diet is an important part of managing Hugo’s Cystic Fibrosis.

Brooke explained that the condition meant Hugo needed to eat a lot of food and it needed to be healthy, saying that the consequences when he ate poorly were “scary.”

In other households cooking is a shared responsibility. Leah and Jeremy, normally prepare dinner “tag-team” style. “So, I’ll start something while he goes and has a shower and then he’ll come out and continue and then I’ll go and have a shower,”

Leah said. She made one exception though: when Jeremy wanted to do something

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“fancy.” This is in contrast to their friends Phoebe in Nick, where Phoebe is the primary cook and Nick has two dishes that he likes to cook: Carbonara and stir fry.

Phoebe considers the kitchen her domain and Nick claims she can get “a bit cranky” when she is preparing multiple meals at once and he is in the kitchen. Phoebe spoke of when Nick decided to make choc-chip biscuits while she was making dinner and lunches: “And a couple of times I had to like… just calm the hell down, because he was in my space.” When Nick added, “I kept asking where things were,” Phoebe replied, “Oh yeah, that killed me”.

These kitchen dynamics are similar to times when Jeremy is making something

“fancy” and Leah withdraws from their usual tag-team arrangement. Jeremy sounds somewhat like Phoebe in such circumstances: “I can get pushy, like in the kitchen I can end up being a bit, just leave me alone, this is my place to play.” I posited that he was “in the zone”, but Jeremy said his mood was prompted more by an air of uncertainty:

Well not so much that. I think, like it’s my cooking style at that

point, especially if I’m going like, flying by the, you know seat of my

pants, whereas like I don’t actually know what I’m doing. Until I can

give any direction or help here until I know, so, I’m a hindrance, you

know.

Conclusion

Despite many of the changes that have occurred in relation to both food culture and food media in the decade since MCA’s debut, and the nearly 30 years since the publication of Marjorie DeVault’s (1991) seminal text Feeding the Family, some discourses like those around care as expressed by Brooke, and catering to individual tastes in the household as articulated by Anna, still endure. Interestingly however, the

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responses as to who was the most prolific cook in a household were a split between male and female, including the two households of Angie and Elijah, and Max and

Yvette, where women actively avoided cooking and the men were enthusiastic cooks.

This finding somewhat challenged traditional discourses around food preparation in the home. Another way in which social food practices were also insular from changes that have been occurring in the wider foodscape, was in relation to culinary capital.

The shared ritual between family, as was discussed by Phoebe for example, in her weekly McDonald’s trips with her father ignored their objective knowledge about food and was more about the time they spent together. Considering Phoebe and her father’s long-term shared interest in cooking, their fast-food trips show how much more important the social aspect of the ritual was than the food itself.

Social interactions around food stretch much further to encompass cultural flows. Home building was a particularly useful way of conceptualising food’s role in establishing connections between people and cultures, and was evident particularly in

Jackie’s case, where her parents saw Vegemite and peanut butter sandwiches as a way to help their children fit in at school. From a mediated standpoint, the affordances of digital and social media are creating new opportunities to facilitate community and familiarity. The wider affordances and implications of digital food media are examined in the next chapter. But here, respondents spoke about the emergence of location- focused lifestyle websites like Urban List and The Weekend Edition, as well as local

Facebook groups where locals trade produce. Although it appears that the Neighbour

Flavour app did not reach fruition, the concept illustrates the potential digital media holds for fostering food-based social connections.

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Chapter 6: Everyday Food Media Engagement in the Post-

Broadcast Era

The section titled ‘New Food Communities,’ as presented in the previous chapter, provided insight into social connections around food that were formed with the help of social media platforms. The use of digital and social media to foster connections around sourcing local produce or meals, learning about specific food interests, or locating restaurants—as was explored in that section—are just some examples of how media is embedded in the culinary activities of everyday households.

This chapter focuses on more kinds of food media use. Specifically, it examines the dynamic between digital and traditional food media, seeking to understand how and why users choose to use specific platforms, or a combination of platforms, in their engagement with food media. Examining how digital platforms have influenced audience engagement with food media is important, as traditional culinary texts like food television and cookbooks have remained stalwarts of the media industry despite ongoing disruptions to the viability of print and television more broadly. This chapter presents a preliminary insight as to how the affordances of digital media are changing media use patterns.

Sturken and Thomas (2004, p. 1) state that “technological development is one of the primary sites through which we can chart the desires and concerns of a given social context and preoccupations of particular moments in history.” Chapter 2 charted some of the key cultural flows in relation to food, while Chapter 3 traced how food media has changed. This chapter analyses contemporary food media use in light of the developments and tensions discussed in these previous chapters. At the same time as programs like MCA have propelled food to become a mainstream cultural

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phenomenon, technology has become increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life. For example, research participant and season 3 MCA contestant Alana Lowes remarked,

“there weren’t a lot of people using Instagram […] and none of us had Instagram accounts even,” when she was a contestant on the reality television program in 2011.

Today, as well as being able to follow their favourite MCA contestants on social media, consumers have access to a seemingly endless range of choice with regards to which media platforms they engage with (Madianou & Miller, 2012; 2013). This combination of circumstances prompt new questions around how audiences use food media, particularly the influence digital media can have on shaping food practices and what digital media’s rise means for more traditional platforms.

This chapter examines how everyday Australian households’ use of traditional and newer forms of food media has become interwoven. It is important to analyse digital media’s impact on food media as it is not only a current lifestyle trend, but food media has the capacity to inform the crucial everyday activity of eating. Digital media’s effects on its users is being debated, in both scholarly and popular circles, as were the effects of media like television, video games, and comics previously (Cooper,

2015 for example; Oppenheimer, 2014; see Sparks, 2015). Analysing digital media’s use in relation to food will show that—as with its predecessors—digital media’s presence will neither be entirely revolutionary or liberating, nor will it be entirely intrusive. Rather, users will negotiate the incessant Instagramming of food, and the confusion caused by the vast amount of contradictory culinary information available via digital platforms. At the same time, audiences will learn recipes from around the world without leaving their homes, master new cooking skills, or be entertained by their favourite celebrity chefs through the writing, photographs, and videos published online or via apps. And just as television did not render radio irrelevant, digital

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resources have not completely usurped television and print. As the participants’ responses show, sometimes a magazine is better than a tablet, sometimes cookbooks are the inspiration to then seek out something new online.

This chapter draws upon the theories of the domestication of technology, polymedia, and serious leisure in analysing households’ food media use to understand circumstances in which digital and traditional food media can complement one another, or others where one is more useful on its own. After introducing the theories of domestication, polymedia, and serious leisure, which guide this analysis, the media practices of participating households will be examined. Although media convergence has led to a break down in media platform hierarchies (H. Jenkins, 2006), the traditional platforms of food television, cookbooks and food writing, as well as the

Internet, provide discrete starting points for each section of the audience analysis from which convergence’s influence will be teased out. Some of the consequences of digital food media engagement on platforms like Instagram will be examined from an industry standpoint to provide these observers’ insight on how the integration of digital media is reshaping everyday culinary practices. Through participants’ accounts of their media use, as well industry’s reaction, the analysis in this chapter charts digital media’s integration into food media use, and how this impacts engagement with media and culinary practices more broadly.

The changing foodscape: domestication, polymedia and serious leisure

As established in Chapter 2, the processes of globalisation, cultural fragmentation, and media convergence have driven a re-articulation of what constitutes culinary capital. Chaney (2004, p. 47) contends that the distinction between dominant and subcultural groups has dissipated as the “so-called dominant culture has fragmented into a plurality of lifestyle sensibilities and preferences.” The reality, in

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food culture at least, is that there has been a fragmentation in tastes, and a level of democratisation in the field that has been spurred on by food television as it makes high food culture more accessible to viewers (Adema, 2000). Greater exposure to food culture has been afforded to ordinary households as digital media technologies have been integrated into everyday practices. In a reflection of Madianou and Miller’s

(2012; 2013) concept of polymedia, food media is now found across multiple platforms, and users choose how and when to engage with these platforms to fulfil specific culinary purposes. The ability to access this abundance of content in a flexible manner means that pursuing food as a lifestyle using Stebbins’s (1982; 1992) serious leisure approach is no longer restricted to the middle class, but is also open to the wider population (see de Solier, 2013a). This chapter illustrates some of the ways in which everyday households take advantage of the affordances of both traditional and digital media in following their culinary interests.

Digital technology’s gradual integration into ordinary culinary routines is representative of the process of domestication where the once new and strange become an unremarkable part of the everyday (Baym, 2015). Berker, Hartmann, Punie and

Ward (2006, p. 4) state domestication is “particularly useful” in “tackling the tricky question of how practices in everyday life are related to grander social processes and structures.” Domestication is a more nuanced view on technology’s intersection with everyday life than the theories of technological determinism and the social construction of technology. These theories posit that technologies or people, respectively, are the primary agents of change in relation to new media (Baym, 2015).

Domestication is an extension of social shaping theory, which sees both technology and society as causal agents, but domestication focuses on how technologies transcend

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newness and peculiarity to become everyday “objects embedded deeply in the practices of everyday life” (Baym, 2015, p. 52).

Madianou and Miller’s (2012, 2013) concept of polymedia is particularly useful to analyse the domestication of technology and the increased choice of available platforms. Polymedia describes a breakdown in media platform hierarchies that has occurred as a result of media convergence. This means audience engagement with new media, plus the study of this engagement, must view “new media as an environment of affordances,” rather than as discrete platforms (Madianou & Miller, 2013, p. 170).

This polymedia environment is also extremely flexible in that “media can be embedded in one another and all media form contexts for the others” (Baym, 2015, p. 19). What happens in a polymedia environment, then, is users choose certain platforms instead of others to achieve a specific purpose. In Madianou and Miller’s (2013, p. 172) research, for example, users chose to communicate with family members using certain platforms and not others as a method of emotional management.

A key aspect of the popularisation of food as a lifestyle identity, is the concerted approach to shopping, cooking, and eating that households take. de Solier (2013a) found Australian foodies adopt a culinary-centric serious leisure approach. Instead of consuming for style or status, de Solier (2013a, pp. 13–14) argued that foodies take a

“productive and professional approach” towards the “consumption and production of food and food media.” Someone going out for dinner casually, as de Solier (2013a, p.

78) explains, would see their dining companions as the priority, with the food acting as a vehicle for socialising. In a serious leisure context, in contrast, the qualities of the food are as important as the company (de Solier, 2013a, p. 79). Using a serious leisure approach, diners would research restaurants, consult reviews of restaurants by

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professional critics, and perhaps publish their own review online after dining out.

Serious leisure is defined more broadly by Elkington and Stebbins (2014, p. 4) as:

[T]he systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist or volunteer

activity sufficiently substantial, interesting and fulfilling for the

participant to find a (leisure) career there acquiring and expressing a

combination of its special skills, knowledge and experience.

In examining the food media practices of households, it will become clear that digital technologies largely an unremarkable aspect of food media use, and that users are discerning in choosing between traditional or digital food media, or some combination of the two.

Food on the Screen

The growing diversity in viewing platforms, food program formats, and genres means there are more ways in which audiences can engage with food culture: from minute-long recipe videos published by BuzzFeed, or BOSH! for example, to traditional stand-and-stir programs like Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals, to food-centric documentaries like Food Inc., and feature films like Julie and Julia. These texts are accessible on smartphones, tablets, computers or televisions and we can watch them, in many cases, on-demand.

Such fragmentation means that traditional broadcast television no longer appears to be the hegemonic force in food media that it once was. Television-dominated histories or analyses of food media, as told by Collins (2009), de Solier (2005; 2008),

Lewis (2008b; 2011), Bonner (2000; 2003; 2005), and others, take food television’s story to the end of the 2000s. Developments that emerged toward the end of the decade have accelerated in the 2010s into what could be described as a post-broadcast age (G.

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Turner, 2016). In the 1980s it was cable television that created the first wave of audience fragmentation. In the 2000s and into the 2010s, however, free-to-air multi- channels, web-based catch up television, and streaming services like Netflix and Stan are redefining what audiences have understood or recognised for half a century to constitute television (G. Turner, 2016). Max, Yvette, and their children did not have a television at home. Max recalled watching Gabriel Gaté and Peter Russell-Clarke in an era before reality cooking competitions were on air, but claims to have not watched commercial television since 1997 and switched off from even the public service channels in 1999. The absence of television in their home is an exception to the norm, however, where Australians spend on average just over two and a half hours each day watching television live or on playback (G. Turner, 2016). Max and Yvette said they may watch some programs on ABC iView but streaming was frustrating as the content took a long time to load. This family’s situation could again be considered out of the ordinary, however, as they lived approximately 45 minutes northwest of Brisbane in an area where Max described the “three and a half to four megabits a second” Internet speeds as “pretty crap” compared with the “gigabit a second” speeds he could access at his job in IT at a Brisbane university.

Traditional broadcast television schedules are losing relevance because potential audiences are not invested in knowing when programs are on. Unless they are stripped at a consistent time throughout the week, one-off cooking shows are lost in amongst television schedules. Twenty-eight-year-old Phoebe explained that an advertisement for a cooking show featuring MKR judge Manu Feildel, called Manu’s France caught her attention. She missed the program however, because she did not know when it as on. Phoebe compared this one-off program with MKR, stating that scheduling means

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she misses shows she wants to watch if they are not like reality programs that are broadcast throughout the week:

Like I would’ve liked to have watched some of that Manu show,

but um, I just don’t—I don’t really know when shows like that are on.

Like My Kitchen Rules, it’s so easy because it’s always on so you can

always watch it. Whereas like if I don’t particularly like follow a show,

or even if I do, I will never know whether it’s on a Wednesday or a

Thursday or a whatever, so if it’s a show like that [a one-off program]

there’s no chance that I’ll ever be able to keep up with it…

Even for people who do engage regularly with the week-nightly reality cooking shows, it is done at a time of their choosing. Jackie, a 33-year-old Occupational

Therapist, claims to not have watched television in years and when she wants to watch cooking shows, she will stream them:

I haven’t watched TV probably for the last—I just don’t have

time—probably the last five, six years. No TV at all. I think the TV

shows or things that I watch if I want to watch something is probably—

I just stream it on my laptop. And it’s mainly cooking shows. That’s it.

Despite her claims to have not watched television in several years, it is clear she is still invested in programs that achieved prominence via traditional broadcast television. This was evident in Jackie’s citing of the Seven Network’s MKR as her most frequently streamed show, followed by programs featuring Poh Ling Yeow.

Yeow’s breakthrough came on Season 1 of Network Ten’s MCA in 2009 and she has since had programs on the ABC and SBS.

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The ordinariness with which Jackie described streaming is representative of the domestication of streaming technologies and appears to play a role in the perceived decline of traditional engagement with broadcast television. The fact Jackie could claim to not watch television while still engaging with television content through a different platform shows how ordinary online streaming has become. Television as it was traditionally viewed—a box in one’s living room where programs could only be viewed at the times scheduled by the broadcasters—is being challenged through online avenues to accessing this content. Jackie’s scenario illustrates how digital media is changing how audiences think of, and engage with, more traditional platforms.

Even though the ways in which audiences engage with food media is changing, food and lifestyle programming more broadly remain some of the most enduring televisual genres. Its longevity and versatility, plus the ease of syndication (see de

Solier, 2008), mean it was a natural choice for SBS to launch The Food Network

(Channel 33) as one of its free-to-air multi channels in November 2015.27 It screened a number of programs from its American equivalent of The Food Network from the

United States, a cable channel established in 1993, and marked a step away from SBS’s traditional food programming that featured celebrity chefs such as Luke Nguyen, Rick

Stein, Maeve O’Meara, Adam Liaw, Ainsley Harriott, Peter Kuruvita, Poh Ling Yeow,

Kylie Kwong, and Rachel Khoo. Respondents’ discussion of their use of food media revealed they disliked the reality and competition driven nature of Channel 33’s programming, preferring the aforementioned line up of SBS television chefs who are

27 Since conducting this fieldwork, SBS’s agreement with Scripps Network Interactive (now part of Discovery) to broadcast Food Network content expired on 17 November 2018 (Tutty, 2018). SBS Food Network was rebranded to SBS Food and returned to content from celebrity chefs more traditionally aligned with the broadcaster including “Adam Liaw, Poh Ling Yeow, Shane Delia, Peter Kuruvita, Luke Nguyen, Jamie Oliver and Kylie Kwong” (Tutty, 2018, para. 3). Subsequently, the 7 Network acquired the rights to Food Network content, launching 7Food Network on 1 December 2018 (Mediaweek, 2018).

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invested in travel and culture. These preferences reinforce the dynamic between high and low food culture that de Solier (2008) had similarly observed among the foodies she examined, as was introduced in Chapter 2.

The fact that some of my respondents had not watched or not heard of SBS’s

The Food Network contributes to arguments around the declining relevance of traditional broadcast television. At the home of twenty-somethings Phoebe and Nick for instance, they had not heard of Channel 33 and said they could not receive SBS on their television. In contrast, Anthony saw Channel 33 as staple viewing. He displayed many traits reflective of de Solier’s (2008) foodies’ tastes in television, even though he embraced the reality show-driven Channel 33. For instance, his claim to enjoy the program Giada at Home, which was broadcast on Channel 33 because it was not a show “pushing product down your throat,” reflects the disdain for using food media as a vehicle for celebrity chefs to generate publicity and make money as was expressed by de Solier’s (2008) sample.

Claudia described the quality of programming on Channel 33 as “pretty disappointing,” and reported that her favourite food shows featured chefs like Luke

Nguyen, Matthew Evans, and “anything on SBS.” Despite thinking SBS “could’ve done more” with Channel 33 in terms of broadcasting programs other than the reality- dominated syndication from the United States, she still watched some of its reality- based programs when working from home, finding them “just endlessly entertaining.”

She explained:

There’s no flavours or no basics, and you watch them stumbling

around putting this whole mishmash of stuff together and it’s quite

entertaining for that reason, but yeah, I just think they could’ve done

more with that.

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In analysing how the capabilities of digital media have reshaped audience engagement with television content, it is clear that the ways in which de Solier (2005) and Collins (2009) described food television’s ascent are no longer the norm. The fact multiple respondents referred to television channels or specific programs illustrate that television is still a relevant medium for those seeking to engage with food media and culture. It is now impossible to ignore the influence digital media has had on how we use televisual content. Despite the democratisation of food culture that has occurred through the proliferation of food-related media, a tension in relation to high or low culture food television as examined by de Solier (2008) persists.

Food on the Page

Audiences demonstrated that they were very specific in choosing which food media texts and platforms they would engage with, and in which context. It became clear that digital could not entirely replace print, despite the former’s more advanced capabilities. Respondents exhibited behaviour similar to Madianou and Miller’s (2013, p. 178) participants, who exercised “emotional management” in choosing whether to use a public or private platform to communicate with family, or use text, voice, or video. Instantaneous access to information from around the globe and convenient methods of storing vast amounts of information on computers, tablets, phones, and hard drives may be helpful and useful, but participants did not always see this as desirable in the context of engaging with food media. Phoebe articulated the different contexts in which she would use traditional instead of digital media: it was dependent on whether she was leisure-oriented or task-oriented. This distinction became apparent during our discussion of Gourmet Traveller, a magazine that is also available via an app.

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I will never read Gourmet Traveller magazine online. I just

don’t—like I like flicking through the pages, sticking down pages, stuff

like that. I like having it out on the bench, so I don’t really like online

[…] when I look online, I’m looking for something like specific, like

I’m looking for a recipe. Um… and I already might have in mind like I

am searching for… soufflé, so show me that recipe and there it is […]

whereas with magazines it’s actually, it’s more of an experience so I’m

not going into it looking for something specifically. I’m going into the

magazine looking for a bit of a, like it’s relaxing, but it’s inspiring and

so I’ll only get inspired if I’m not specifically like looking for

something. Like whereas I think when I go online I think yeah, I’ve got

a path that I want to follow, I need to get information.

The specificity with which Phoebe would insist upon reading a printed magazine instead of reading via an iPad app is Phoebe’s negotiation of the polymedia environment. She manages which media affordances she does or does not want to take advantage of. This also illustrates that print media are not irrelevant, as they offer an experiential element to audiences that online media do not. Although Madianou and

Miller’s (2012; 2013) participants would manage their choice of media platform based on the status of the relationship with the family member or friend they were communicating with, Phoebe’s media choice was driven by the kind of culinary experience she wanted at that time. So while digital media may offer some more technologically advanced capabilities, the disconnected and more tactile nature of print is seen as superior when audiences are looking for an opportunity to relax.

Max, who keeps a collection of cookbooks, complemented his use of these texts through turning to online sources to extend his cooking options. Using cookbooks

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“more for inspiration,” he finds it easier to “flick through” these rather than casually browse recipes on the Internet. While the cookbooks may “trigger a thought” for him, the Internet is more useful when he is “looking for something specific.” For instance:

So you go, ‘okay well I want to cook an Afghani dish,’ or

something. So I’ll go look up Afghani recipes. Or you might say, ‘I’ve

got a heap of coriander, I don’t just want to do curry again, what can I

do?’ So you go and look for coriander stuff [recipes]. But you’re

actually searching for something then, rather than browsing for

inspiration.

This practice is reflective of domestication as Max speaks about his use of the

Internet to find recipes as an unremarkable practice (see Baym, 2015, p. 52). The affordances search engines and websites provide allow users to quickly and easily broaden their “circuit of cultural technologies” (Ouellette & Hay, 2008, p. 117). This combining of traditional and digital media shows how the domestication of technology has furthered the democratisation of food culture. It does so through allowing users to experiment and discover new tastes without the financial investment required with purchasing a cookbook or going to a restaurant, for example.

Just as recipe searches take advantage of using cookbooks and the Internet in tandem, the cooking show-cookbook combination is still relevant too. Hannah, a participant in my earlier research on MCA (see Kirkwood, 2013, p. 63), cited the complementary nature of the television show-cookbook combination of Jamie’s 30

Minute Meals and Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals as helpful in replicating Jamie Oliver’s dishes. She appreciated that the television iteration of the cookbook recipes provided audio visual demonstrations of the dishes that appeared in the books:

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So I find it’s easier to follow the recipe [for Jamie’s 30 Minute

Meals and Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals] once I’ve seen the episode and

then also once I’ve seen the episode I know exactly what something

looks like through the process of cooking it, so it makes it easier.

Anna, a vegetarian, found that visuals can be important in assisting the cooking process. She recalled a time when images or a video accompanying a coq au vin recipe in a cookbook would have been especially useful to her. Cooking for her meat-eating husband earlier in her marriage, Anna attempted the classic French chicken dish. The recipe she was using did not have images and called for the use of “chicken pieces.”

Without a visual, and having been vegetarian since she was 12-years-old, Anna bought stir-fry chicken strips rather than chicken pieces on the bone that were required to make coq au vin correctly.

The aid of instructional videos has become more pervasive through the use of on-demand video platforms like YouTube. In planning for group dinner parties or trying to master a particular skill, Jeremy and Leah call upon a variety of food media in the course of their research, including YouTube videos. YouTube videos were most useful for technique-driven aspects of cooking, when they want to understand—as

Leah says— “how does this actually work?” They have turned to YouTube to learn about rolling dumplings, making pork buns, as well as pasta.

This section has shown the subtleties that shape how digital media has impacted audience use of print media. Notably, digital media in the form of written recipes on websites and videos are considered as complementary to, not replacements for, print media like cookbooks and magazines. As Phoebe articulated, elements of traditional media such as print can be seen as a source of relaxation, whereas digital media can sometimes feel intrusive.

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Food on the Web

The proliferation in platforms and formats of food media can be both democratising and empowering, but also another example of commoditising food expertise. In examining Jamie Oliver’s early use of Twitter, Rousseau (2012) noted how clear it was that Oliver “realized very fast how lucrative this new technology could be for growing his already-considerable fan base.” Digital media can be inclusive in that it increases the participation of everyday people like Irish mum Anna

Saccone, to create and share their own food media. Saccone’s YouTube videos were cited by 13-year-old Grace as one of her favourite things to watch. The web is not an entirely democratic platform, however. While there is indeed an ease of access when publishing via platforms like YouTube or WordPress, the Internet can be viewed as having simply provided another channel for well-established celebrity chefs, like

Jamie Oliver, to further extend their media empires. Trading on their globally- recognised names, and able to publish on these platforms with glossy, professional production standards, they have instant access to an audience of millions. Two respondents in my research, Anna and Max, kept blogs, but in comparison to mainstream food personalities, have a miniscule fraction of their audience. Jackie, who is arguably the most prolific Instagrammer interviewed as part of the household sample with a following of just over 1,600 people; the everyday person’s following pales in comparison to Jamie Oliver’s 5.8 million followers. When I asked Anna how many followers or subscribers she has to her blog, which specialises in desserts, has, she joked: “Not a huge number. I’m very boutique.” She went into specifics about how many followers she had for the blog’s content, which she publishes across many platforms:

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So on Facebook I’ve got… I think 175, something like that. On

Twitter it’s like 400 but… it’s pretty meaningless though because you

can follow so many people it doesn’t really matter. Instagram I’ve got

about 500 and… email subscribers, I’ve got about 40.

Neither Max nor Anna claimed to strive for fame like Jamie Oliver has achieved, however. Rather, these were projects they worked on at their own leisure and for personal reasons. Max was rather flippant about the maintenance of his blog. When I asked him about keeping a blog, his response was, “Yeah, sort of, yeah,” he laughed.

Its purpose, he said, was to share recipes he had developed that were easy to make and economical. Max said he did not specifically set out to develop recipes for the blog, but if he cooked something that he found to be “really tasty” and if he remembered how he made the dish, he would add it to the blog. It was also a space for him to share some of his grandmother’s recipes that captured his Dutch ancestry. Anna’s approach to blogging was more aligned with Stebbins’ (1982; 1992; Elkington & Stebbins,

2014) concept of serious leisure. She invested time, money, and effort in acquiring knowledge, experimenting with recipes, and honing her skills in photography. Her blog was borne out of a dual interest in cooking—particularly baking—as well as photography. It was a hobby Anna took up when she was “at home with two small children and needed some sort of creative outlet.” For pictures of the desserts and cocktails posted on her blog, Anna makes the dish herself, and then uses a DSLR camera to shoot her creation, styling the pictures in a way that would look at home in the pages of a glossy magazine. Anna explained:

Well I’ve always been interested in photography and I got a

proper DSLR camera before Lucy was born [...] to take pictures of the

baby. So I mean that’s certainly worth having a half decent camera I

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haven’t spent a huge amount of money on props and stuff like that…

More recently I’ve been splurging on um some other bits and pieces,

but that’s because I’m trying to develop my skills broader in

photography, it’s not just for the food stuff.

Molly’s participation in a 30-day Paleo challenge was a variation on serious leisure on Instagram. As part of the challenge, the 27-year-old dental assistant posted everything she ate on Instagram. Unlike Anna’s investment in a DSLR camera and props, Molly did not say whether she aimed to “style” these dishes or make them aesthetically pleasing. Her purpose appeared to be one of pragmatics rather than aesthetics in that she was looking to be a member of the community participating in the challenge in that she was “able to share that [food photos] to other people that are doing the same thing.” It also helped her maintain her commitment to the challenge:

You can’t go on eating the same thing and just having the same

two or three recipes… It can get a bit boring. So having the motivation

of seeing other people’s food was quite good.

Although Molly’s account may be considered more representative of project- based leisure as it was a short-term commitment (Elkington & Stebbins, 2014, p. 4), her participation in the Paleo challenge was part of a wider commitment to a healthier and wholesome lifestyle. The use of food in this way is more aligned with my concept of the “everyday foodie” whereby an interest in food occurs alongside other everyday concerns (see Kirkwood, 2013, 2014). Anna’s photography efforts in maintaining her blog, however, typify a more straightforward practice of serious leisure in that it was a fulfilling hobby through which she was focused on acquiring skills and knowledge.

This style is more akin to the serious leisure of foodies as examined by de Solier (2010,

2013a, 2013b). Like one of de Solier’s (2010, p. 166) case studies, a foodie named

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Rob who pursued molecular gastronomy, Anna engages in a similar process of

“research, experimentation and knowledge production” as professionals. The “greater individual freedom, empowerment and choice” (Ouellette & Hay, 2008) afforded to audiences through the conditions of modernity encourages the pursuit of serious leisure, as illustrated through these participants’ accounts. Digital media is a key tool enabling this engagement with culinary culture.

Food on the Web: Consequences as Observed by Industry

While it could be argued that social media is another domain in which a struggle for distinction continues, this was one aspect of potential discussions around social media that respondents shied away from. The sharing of one’s culinary experiences on social media is a shopwindow for conspicuous consumption. Food is ubiquitous on a platform like Instagram. Taking advantage of the ability to be able to create, edit, and share photos and videos, social media networks based on rich visual material like

Instagram and Snapchat, are “popular means of documenting everyday life”

(Highfield, 2016, p. 74). Although a common practice, posting food photos on platforms like Instagram was not spoken about freely. Matt reflected the opinions of people who are frustrated by the practice:

And we get those people all the time too. I walked out to a

table yesterday or the day before, oh no hang on it must have been

last week, and they were all there with their phones clicking on our

breakfasts. Like really? Like that’s still a thing? It’s unbelievable.

The importance of Instagram to members in industry cannot be discounted, however. Former MCA contestant and current food content writer for airline Virgin

Australia Alana Lowes claimed that using social media, like Instagram was so significant in driving diners to restaurants and cafés that constructing an Instagram-

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friendly environment should in some respects be part of one’s education if they are aspiring to be in hospitality.

If regular diners sought such a photography-friendly dining environment, it would likely be viewed as narcissistic, but it is a somewhat legitimate requirement for a food and travel writer whose job, in part, is to post content to social media. But even she finds the expectation that she be constantly connected and sharing food pictures sometimes burdensome:

Sometimes I find—and for me I think the biggest—and I don’t

want to call it an annoyance because it’s something that is part of what

has come out of MasterChef and it’s part of you know, the world now,

is social media. So I, sometimes I’m just like I’m sick of feeling like I

have to take a photo of every dish that I eat because just in case I might

need to use that at some stage to promote something or to do this or to

do that like. So sometimes going and eating a meal, I just have to kind

of block any thought out of it, I may be needing to use this information

for work, yeah, do you understand what I mean? […] it’s just nice to

not have to think about “has this table got the right lighting for me to be

able to take a photo?”

In his capacity as a chef at a New Farm café, Carlos Gatica sees Instagram as a potentially destructive force in his industry and for his colleagues. Gatica reflected upon the use of Instagram among members of industry as a way of watching what other chefs or establishments were serving. His reflections showed how elements of homogenisation or McDonaldization that is visible in relation to key segments of the industrialised food system such as fast-food outlets and supermarkets had permeated the café scene. As he pointed out:

Chapter 6: Everyday Food Media Engagement in the Post-Broadcast Era 147

But in other cafés I’ve worked with, they will watch what other

cafés are doing on Instagram and they will follow that so they can

see where the trends are. Personally I don’t like that. I think it’s better

that we think for ourselves you know […] but yeah it is [cafés

copying one another] and that’s why you’re seeing a lot of cafés,

when you—I guess if you follow cafés on Instagram, you might as

well be looking at the same picture.

For chefs, who does and does not get mass recognition is even more destructive.

Carlos laments that colleagues invest energy into what those outside the industry think of what their dish looks like, while other colleagues whose dishes may look pretty on

Instagram, but may not live up to industry standards and yet garner a level of undeserved fame:

Everyone’s a critic [on social media]. And that’s not

necessarily a positive thing either, you know. I’ve seen, I’ve worked

with dudes that put their stuff on Instagram and you can see it

shatters them if someone doesn’t like it, and it’s like, “man, it doesn’t

matter,” it’s an opinion, it has no weight. But at the same time, you

may not necessarily be a good chef, but you take a good photo and

then people think you’re amazing and then you get a reputation for

something you haven’t earned.

Lowes also highlighted how Instagram drives diners:

And if you’ve got an Instagramable dish then like that’s

something that can send a photo viral, but you know there’s these

crazy people who will line up, and line up, and line up because

they’ve seen it shared thousands of times on social media and so they

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just have to go and have it, and they’ll line up for an hour to eat dim

sum or like an hour to buy a rainbow cake or something like that,

whatever the latest trend is.

An example of this phenomenon became apparent during my conversation with

Jackie. She strongly recommended I visit a particular café in the Brisbane CBD, saying, “It’s like, the best, hands down,” but she followed this by saying she had not yet been there. Her opinion of this café was based upon the number of photos she had seen as well as the cafés Instagram following:

I have not even tried it, I’ve seen a thousand photos and I

follow them [on Instagram], and all my friends have been, and they

sent me heaps and heaps of photos, but it’s like the best coffee in

Brisbane […] you know it’s good when it’s a really small place and

they have like 30 thousand followers, from like all over Australia.

And it’s like one place in Brisbane, and Brisbane is so tiny and small

you know? And there’s—that’s how famous they are for their coffee.

Similarly, Emma and Matt who both have experience working in cafés and delis around Brisbane, recalled giving in to the hype surrounding new culinary trends:

You know what though, we used to fall for that kind of stuff

[food trends]. Like looking at that $15 milkshake place, they looked

incredible, absolutely incredible. And people would line up for two

hours. There’s no way in the world I’d line up for any place now,

whereas maybe 15 years ago we would’ve lined up for breakfast

somewhere or something.

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Emma and Matt’s exchange continued, with the conversation extending to the logistics of making a freakshake and the reasons why people purchase and photograph them, rather than make them at home:

Emma: I see those milkshakes and I’m actually in my head

thinking how they’ve made it. And it wouldn’t be that hard. But I did

look at it and think, “oh, that’s probably about $15 worth of

ingredients, if not more.”

Researcher: And you’ve made one and you’ve got like a litre

and a half of milk left over.

Matt: But, but, but don’t you just think those milkshakes are

just made for Facebook foodies. Like it’s, “look what I’ve got! This

is my experience right now” [sarcastically].

Interestingly, the pursuit of culinary experience was seen as de Solier’s (2013b) foodies as a good and moral one where the culinary capital came with the acquisition of cultural knowledge and experiences. In the instance of photographing and posting one’s breakfast or freakshake the need to broadcast one’s experience is a form of conspicuous consumption that is readily frowned upon, and the fanfare attached to the consumption of something that would be relatively easy to create at home, demonstrates the added social status that is prioritised over the actual consumption of the meal or dessert.

Conclusion

Embracing digital media in relation to food has not meant throwing out cookbooks or the end of food television. In fact, both channels are still important in

Australia’s culinary landscape. What it means rather, is that the advent of digital media

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and the processes of media convergence have played a role in reinventing or complementing some of the traditional ways of engaging with food media.

The fact that many respondents spoke about their use of food media via digital platforms as a normal part of their everyday lives indicates that processes of domestication are well underway, where technologies transition from being strange new entities to unremarkable and mundane. As Jackie’s love of MKR highlighted, audiences still engage with television, but via on-demand streaming on a digital device rather than sitting at a television. The accounts of Max, Anna, Jeremy, and Hannah in relation to cookbooks, and their use of these along with Internet recipes, cooking shows, photos, and YouTube videos, illustrated that new technologies complement rather than replace traditional media. In a polymedia environment where there is an abundance of platforms to choose from, there are nuances in our engagement with food media. This was evident in that Phoebe’s choice to read the printed Gourmet Traveller instead of the digital version was based on what platform best suited her purpose: in this case, for experiential rather than the emotional reasons outlined by Madianou and

Miller (2012; 2013). In some circumstances traditional methods of accessing food information were most useful, enjoyable or therapeutic. But in others digital, or new, media made cooking easier, or led them to new food information and experiences. The practices analysed in this chapter are a preliminary insight into how and why audiences have incorporated digital food media into their everyday practices. Digital media has not entirely disrupted how users engage with media, but has instead given audiences another range of tools to utilise alongside traditional platforms. Online platforms have also opened new opportunities for users to pursue food using Stebbins’ (1982; 1992) serious leisure approach, as was evident in Anna’s blogging practices. Although digital platforms may seem to offer a range of more advanced capabilities, this analysis

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illustrated that households still routinely engaged with traditional media—namely cookbooks and food television. The co-existence of digital and traditional food media, and the persistence of print and television in the culinary genre reveal two things.

Firstly, that audiences are discerning in their media use, and secondly, that digital media has the power to reshape, but not take over, how audiences engage with media, thereby reflecting a domestication of these technologies.

Future research on developments in, and uses of, food media should consider how audiences and consumers adapt to new ways in which digital media is used in everyday culinary practices. Despite digital media becoming further interwoven in everyday practices, this chapter indicates that examining how and why traditional culinary texts like cookbooks and cooking shows remain popular, would add to the discussions around polymedia that were started here in relation to food. Another angle from which to approach the intersection of food and digital media would be from the perspective of industry and how the production of food media as well as the promotion of food, and food businesses, have been altered by the increasingly embedded nature of digital technology in everyday life.

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Chapter 7: Big Food

On a tour of famous confectioner Willy Wonka’s factory in Roald Dahl’s novel

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), Mr Wonka shows the group of young competition winners and their parents an invention he calls “my latest, my greatest, my most fascinating invention! It’s a chewing-gum meal!” This chewing-gum, he proclaims, would revolutionise shopping, cooking, and eating by essentially rendering these processes obsolete and giving the chewer the tastes and experiences of a three- course meal.

When I start selling this gum in the shops it will change

everything! It will be the end of all kitchens and all cooking! There’ll

be no knives and forks at mealtimes! No plates! No washing up! No

rubbish! No mess! Just a little strip of Wonka’s magic chewing-gum –

and that’s all you’ll ever need at breakfast, lunch, and supper!

The chewing-gum-obsessed Violet Beauregard greedily snatched up a stick of

Mr Wonka’s invention and started to chew. Enthusiastically talking the other children and their parents through the tastes and sensations she was experiencing, everything seemed okay until Violet’s meal progressed to the dessert when the blueberry pie and cream course caused her to turn “a brilliant, purplish-blue, the colour of blueberry juice!” Her body also swelled until she was round like the shape of a blueberry with her little head, and arms and legs sticking out.

More than half a century later, Mr Wonka’s vision and the disastrous outcome for Violet Beauregard can be read as a kind of metaphor for the rewards both industry and consumers hoped the contemporary industrialised food system would deliver, and the impact this system has had. Today, Wonka’s proclamation that shopping and

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cooking would become redundant is in some ways more likely to make one cringe than excite them. And Beauregard’s dramatic inflation into a human-sized blueberry can be read as a representation for the rapidly increasing obesity rates and rates of obesity- related diseases like Type 2 Diabetes in nations where processed and fast food is readily available.

This chapter examines “Big Food.” Defined by Stuckler and Nestle (2012) as

“multinational food and beverage companies with huge and concentrated market power.” Specifically, this chapter examines how Big Food’s influence on everyday households’ diets is being critiqued in popular media. Documentary films and books that uncover for viewers the processes that bring the array of perfect packaged foods to supermarket shelves, cheap meat to their plates, and keeps seasonal fruits and vegetables available year-round, form the focus of analysis in this chapter. In a thesis about contemporary Australian food culture, these texts represent an important marker in bringing information about food production to public consciousness and remoulding the attitudes and behaviours of everyday consumers. Although these texts may at first appear to be everyday or banal, Contois (2020, xiii) reminds us that these are important cultural artefacts through which significant changes in society can be documented and theorised. I argue in this chapter that these texts are another distinct development in contemporary food culture. To date, much of the research—including my own— regarding food’s role in popular culture has related to the lifestyling and changing class values in food media and culture (see for example de Solier 2008; 2013a; 2013b;

Gallegos 2005; Kirkwood 2014; Lewis 2008).

Other scholars have also noticed the growth in production of food documentaries, analysing and reflecting upon their impact and significance (Bell,

Hollows, & Jones, 2017; Flowers & Swan, 2011; Lindenfeld, 2010; 2011; Lindenfeld

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& Parasecoli, 2018; Pilgeram & Meeuf, 2015; Singer, 2011; Smaill, 2014) or locavore literature (Phillipov, 2017). This chapter recognises these texts as part of the same genre, introducing the Food System Exposé (FSE) genre. I use this term to group such texts to acknowledge inherent thematical consistencies including interrogation of Big

Food’s rhetoric around personal responsibility, Big Food’s involvement with government food policy, Big Food’s co-optation of science, the emergence of obesogenic environments, the food safety issues that arise because of industrial food processes, and the manipulating nature of food labelling and how it impacts food literacy. The analysis in this chapter takes a text-focused approach in highlighting how prevalent the aforementioned discourses have become in mainstream popular culture.

Unpacking these discourses is complemented with some participant insight as to how issues explored in these texts affects everyday household eating habits.

Journalist and author Katie Couric was narrator and executive producer on the

2014 FSE documentary Fed Up. At the beginning of the documentary, Couric cites the pervasiveness of obesity as an issue she reported on over the course of her now 40- year career as a rationale for the documentary. In the opening minutes of Fed Up,

Couric narrates as clips of news reports on obesity, as well as fitness videos, and advertisements for health foods appear on-screen:

It started out as a small story. I had no idea I’d be talking about

weight gain and obesity my entire career. We’ve been covering the

problem and solutions for over 30 years. In that time, entire industries

have ignited over the weight problem. First came the magazines, then

the talk shows, and now our epidemic is entertainment on network

television [clips from The Biggest Loser appear on-screen]. How is this

still an issue, much less, a worldwide epidemic? We get new solutions

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every day. Everything in the grocery store is made with less fat and

fewer calories, and yet our kids keep getting bigger and sicker. It makes

no sense.

Couric’s words here capture the two points pertinent to this chapter: firstly, the media’s significance as a conduit and repository of concerns around the food system; a place where these concerns coalesce. And secondly, the media are recognising that processed foods designed to address problems like obesity, are likely exacerbating the problem, but Big Food’s promotion of these products adds another layer of complexity for shoppers who are trying to negotiate the choices at the supermarket.

Existing Conceptualisations

This chapter does not claim that texts that critique elements of the food system or corporations are new. Indeed, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the dangers associated with meat packing, and made the industry safer. Then in 1962

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring raised concerns about the pesticide DDT (see Ankeny

& Bray, 2018).

Lewis and Potter (2011) point to consumption studies, political theory, and geography as three key fields where scholars have made approaches to understanding the complexity of ethical consumption. In relation to the mapping of food production processes, they highlight the work of geographers in documenting the movement of produce and its transformation into food products. They cite arguments of scholars such as Cook and Crang (1996) whose argument lies at the centre of one of the key tensions in this thesis. They state that consumer-centric approaches have the effect of doubly fetishizing products, meaning that geographic information is withheld from consumers in some circumstances, meanwhile in others it is used as a way to create a sense of distinction between products (Cook & Crang, 1996, p. 132). More recently,

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Goodman, Johnston, and Cairns (2017) examine mediated foodscapes through the lens of mediated biopolitics. They argue that although Big Food and Big Media are pervasive and make interventions in the foodscape, this helps to illuminate “sites of contestation within contemporary food struggles,” rather than blindly lead consumers

(Goodman, Johnston & Cairns, 2017, p. 165). Some such interventions from the food and media industries are examined by Lewis and Phillipov (2016) as well as Phillipov and Kirkwood (2018b) who analyse the ways in which supermarkets and food brands have used celebrity chefs and television shows to soften the discourses around processed food production, calling upon connotations of homemade recipes or incorporation native ingredients.

The Big Food label draws deliberate comparisons between the actions of these companies and that of tobacco companies—commonly referred to as Big Tobacco. As

Thomson (2009, p. 2) along with Brownell and Warner (2009, p. 261) point out, mainstream media have drawn attention to the comparison with tactics like Fortune magazine’s February 10, 2003 cover that depicted a hot chip propped in an ashtray with smoke emanating from its end. Big Food are drawing from the same “playbook”

Big Tobacco companies have used since the 1950s (Brownell & Warner, 2009; Nestle,

2018). Key tactics both Big Tobacco and Big Food used was a public relations campaign combined with a co-optation of science in order to keep the link between health risks and their products ambiguous. Big Tobacco, under the guidance of public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, released “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” in January 1954 to push back against research that highlighted tobacco smoking’s health risks and assuage public concern on the issue. A little more than 20 years later,

The Sugar Association published a media release titled, “Scientists Dispel Sugar

Fears.” This release publicised the findings of a white paper Sugar in the Diet of Man,

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edited by a Harvard academic whose department received funding from Big Food corporations including General Foods, Carnation, Coca Cola, and Kellogg (Taubes &

Kearns Couzens, 2012). These tactics are part of a suite of approaches, which Marion

Nestle (2018, p. 14) outlines:

Cast doubt on the science, fund research to produce desired

results, offer gifts and consulting arrangements, use front groups,

promote self-regulation, promote personal responsibility as the

fundamental issue, use the courts to challenge critics and unfavorable

regulations.

These tactics—particularly those around personal responsibility and self- regulation—are a key site of investigation of FSE texts and will be explored further in this chapter.

Related scholarship has established two other genres which the food system exposé genre fits in between. Food System Exposés could be considered a sub-genre of what Nash and Corner term Strategic Impact Documentaries (SIDs), described as

“hybrid communications products” (Nash & Corner, 2016, p. 230). Strategic Impact

Documentaries incorporate aspects of transmedia storytelling to prompt social change

(Nash & Corner, 2016). Social change is considered more than a by-product of viewers engaging with a documentary, with the film considered one part of a plan that is conducted across multiple platforms (Nash & Corner, 2016, pp. 230–231) At a more niche level, Bell, Hollows, and Jones (2017) coined a category called Campaigning

Culinary Documentaries (CCDs). They could be positioned then as a sub-genre of

FSEs. While documentary films and lifestyle documentary series are the focus of SIDs and CCDs, respectively, books are included in the conceptualisation of FSEs as they have agenda-setting potential (see Fuhlhage, Shaw, Holman, & Lee, 2017). Therefore,

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they are significant in the ways FSE texts and actors take advantage of the affordances of media convergence in working across different media in spreading the discourse around the realities of industrialised food systems. This is somewhat reflective of the transmedia nature of SIDs.

Bell, Hollows, and Jones (2017) established CCDs, a category that at first glance would appear to encompass the texts I seek to analyse in this chapter. What their analysis is concerned with however, is a niche selection of lifestyle-documentary hybrids that were shown on television and emerged in the mid-2000s. The texts they consider— Jamie’s School Dinners, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, Hugh’s Chicken Run,

Chickens… Hugh… and Tesco, Too, Jimmy and the Giant Supermarket, and The

People’s Supermarket—could well be considered FSEs, but CCDs as defined by Bell,

Hollows, and Jones (2017) are defined by a narrower set of narrative and personality conventions.

Derived from a familiar lifestyle show format, CCDs rely on the makeover of ordinary people, driven by a “special and inspirational figure” (Bell et al., 2017, p.

180), who in the case of CCDs is usually a celebrity chef or other food personality.

What differentiates the CCD from the slew of other lifestyle programs is that the makeover of ordinary people is part of a wider effort from the food personality to enforce positive social change. In the case of the four-part miniseries, Jamie’s School

Dinners for instance, Jamie Oliver was depicted attempting to reform the school lunches at Kidbroke School in the UK, but his overall goal was to pressure the British

Government to spend more money on school lunches through his “Feed Me Better” campaign. Feed Me Better was a discrete campaign with a clear goal. Although CCDs like Jamie’s School Dinners do critique the food system, FSEs do not necessarily adopt

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the lifestyle show-like-makeover narrative of FSEs, instead drawing upon a more expansive set of experts and personalities, as well as narrative conventions.

Nash and Corner (2016) envisioned the Strategic Impact Documentary (SID) as a new approach to documentary-making that acknowledges that in order to produce social change, documentaries must function as part of a wider strategic communication plan. Food System Exposés draw on SID’s use of transmedia storytelling principles.

Transmedia storytelling involves a cohesive story being told across multiple platforms including for example, films, videogames, books, television programs (H. Jenkins,

2003). These individual texts both contribute to the story being told across multiple platforms but at the same time are “self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption” (H. Jenkins, 2003).

The Texts

Two key FSE texts scaffold this chapter. The first is Morgan Spurlock’s Super

Size Me (2004) and the second is Damon Gameau’s That Sugar Film (2014). These documentaries were chosen because they represent different phases of FSE texts.

While Super Size Me critiqued fast-food, which is easily recognisable as “junk,”

Gameau’s documentary actively sought to avoid “junk food” like chips, soft drink, and lollies, and investigate the foods engineered to contain “less fat and fewer calories,” as

Couric pointed to in Fed Up, as problematic for their high sugar content. In each case, there are a number of other documentaries and books that corroborate Spurlock and

Gameau’s respective arguments. The insights of these texts are incorporated into this analysis. Furthermore, in the case of Super Size Me, documentaries that were produced as rebuttal to Spurlock’s arguments, particularly Tom Naughton’s documentary Fat

Head (2009) are also included in the analysis. Appendix 1 provides a more comprehensive list of FSE texts.

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The Beginning: Super Size Me

Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 film Super Size Me was a catalysing moment for the

FSE genre. Although other significant texts were released years prior, such as Eric

Schlosser’s 2001 book Fast Food Nation, Super Size Me gained worldwide attention and today functions as a kid of shorthand for referring to the genre as a whole. Released at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Super Size Me won the directing award for documentary, as it also did at the 2004 Edinburgh International Film Festival

(Spurlock, 2005, p. 309), was nominated for an Academy Award, and had worldwide box office takings of more than $22.2 million (Nash Information Services, n.d.). Super

Size Me premiered at Sundance in January of 2004 and by early March McDonald’s announced that it was phasing out the supersizing option from their menu by the end of the year (AP, 2004). The corporation maintained however, that such a move was not in response to the documentary. In 2005, Spurlock released a book tie-in Don’t Eat this Book: Fast Food and the Super Sizing of America. Five years following Super Size

Me, comedian Tom Naughton’s film Fat Head (2009) sought to challenge many of the claims made in Super Size Me and emphasise a personal responsibility approach to fast-food. More recently, Spurlock made Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken in which he again functioned as a type of guinea pig, this time taking viewers behind the scenes to show what is involved in producing fast food through establishing his own chicken shop. YouTube Red was due to release Super Size Me 2 after purchasing the rights in

September 2017. Three months later however, when Spurlock publicly admitted acts of sexual misconduct in the wake of the #MeToo movement, YouTube Red decided not to distribute the film (Morabito, 2017).

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Spurlock’s premise for Super Size Me was a court case where two teenage girls attempted to sue McDonald’s for making them obese.28 Robert Sweet—the judge in the case—said if the plaintiffs could prove that McDonald’s intended for consumers to eat their food for every meal of every day and that such actions would be

“unreasonably dangerous” then the fast-food corporation would have a case to answer.

To test this, Spurlock put himself on a McDonald’s diet for 30 days whereby he could only consume food and beverages sold at McDonald’s, he had to try everything on the menu at least once, and he had to oblige when asked if he wanted to supersize his meal, but could only supersize his meal if asked. Prior, during, and after undertaking his experiment, Spurlock consulted with a team of medical professionals including a general practitioner (GP), gastroenterologist, cardiologist, and a dietician. At the commencement of his 30-day experiment, Spurlock weighed 185.5lbs at 11 per cent body fat; by the end he weighed 210lbs at 18 per cent body fat.

In Fat Head, Tom Naughton attempted to frame Spurlock’s targeting of

McDonald’s as a cash grab. He cited Spurlock’s use of John F. Banzhaf III in the film.

Banzhaf is a lawyer and professor of law at George Washington University who established Action on Smoking & Health, and had been involved in the legal pursuit of tobacco. Naughton neglected to mention that Spurlock was conducting the experiment in light of Judge Sweet’s ruling in the Pelham and Bradley case mentioned above. Despite Sweet dismissing the teenagers’ case against McDonald’s, Spurlock

(2005, p. 57) claimed that the judge had provided a “step-by-step map” for the teenagers’ lawyer, Samuel Hirsch, to submit an amended case.

28 Spurlock explains how litigious the US is. Even one of his respondents in a Vox pop shown in Super Size Me—a French lady—commented that “Americans sue for everything”. While important in the US context, it is not integral to this analysis.

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Beyond this, the targeting of high-profile companies has been a tenet of consumerist activism for decades (Klein, 2000; see Lewis & Potter, 2011, p. 6). As the multinational brands have sought to be “intimately entangled with our culture and identities,” “the more vulnerable these companies [have] become” (Klein, 2000, p.

335). Political activism around consumerism gains more traction when the public recognises that their purchases or favourite brands are connected to unethical behaviours. Food manufacturer Nestlé has—like McDonald’s—been the target of consumerist activism campaigns. Most recently, in 2010, Greenpeace launched a campaign that targeted Nestlé’s Kit Kat brand in order to criticise the food manufacturer’s use of palm oil Sinar Mas. The Indonesian company had attracted criticism for deforestation and peatland clearing, thereby contributing to orangutan habitat degradation and climate change in their production of palm oil. Although

Nestlé claimed to only use 0.7 per cent of the world’s palm oil supply (Ionescu-Somers

& Enders, 2012, para. 3), Nestlé’s standing as the largest food manufacturer in the world and its ubiquitous Kit Kat brand ensured the campaign generated a ferocious response (see Ionescu-Somers & Enders, 2012). Spurlock (2005, p. 59) acknowledged that he could have made his film about any of the high-profile fast food chains, but he chose McDonald’s for similar reasons as to why I chose the fast food giant as the starting point in Chapter 2: for its longevity, ubiquity, and influence. Aside from the fact he mentions being motivated by Pelman and Bradley’s case against McDonald’s at the beginning of the film, he provided the following justification of his choice:

These companies [Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC, White Castle]

don’t stand for the entire industry the way McDonald’s does, nor do

they have the influence over the industry that the Arches have.

Whatever McDonald’s does, their competitors follow suit, from jumbo

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sizes to value meals to Chicken McNuggets. I picked the company that

I truly believed could change the way the entire industry functions… if

they wanted to (Spurlock, 2005, pp. 59–60).

A key point of Super Size Me was its pushback on Big Food’s emphasis of personal responsibility and choice. This has come to be one of the hallmark features of FSEs. Even in texts that do highlight the role industry plays in presenting unhealthy choices to consumers, personal responsibility rhetoric still sometimes surfaces. In the

1986 documentary, The Sugar Trap, John Rubenstein’s statement at the film’s conclusion does not call for industry change or a review of government policy, but rather still leaves it up to the consumer:

But finally, it is up to you, the individual consumer to evaluate

the evidence and make a choice in the supermarket based on what is

best for the health of your family.

Kelly D. Brownell, an academic and one of the authors of Food Fight: The Inside

Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and what we can do about it appeared in Super Size Me, speaking about what he calls a “toxic” environment. The toxic environment, he states, is comprised of two elements: “constant access to cheap fat-laden foods,” and an increasing reliance on cars and other motorised transport. This combination Brownell states, “almost guarantees that we become sick.” In the documentary, Spurlock claims that as a New Yorker, he walks almost everywhere and makes approximately 20,000 steps per day. But to more accurately replicate the activity of an average American, after talking to Mark Fenton, the editor of Walking

Magazine who told him the average American walked 1.5 miles per day, Spurlock limited his walking to a much more sedentary—by his existing standards— 5,000 steps

(2.5 miles/4.02 kilometres) per day (Spurlock, 2005, p. 48). This was a challenge for

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Spurlock who was shown in the film catching a cab to keep his steps down, but he reported walking more than three miles a day no matter how hard he tried to limit it

(Spurlock, 2005, p. 48).

Walking from one McDonald’s to another, however, would not force him to create too much of a dent in his step quota. As Spurlock pointed out, at the time of filming there were 83 McDonald’s outlets in Manhattan. This equated to four outlets per square mile.

The toxic environment Brownell refers to, is a colloquialism for what is referred to in academic literature as an obesogenic environment. In Fed Up (2014) Senator Tom

Harkin said, “The deck is just stacked against being healthy.” Other conceptualisations of undesirable food environments include “food deserts” and “food swamps.” Living and working in such close proximity to fast food is not a condition confined to big cities as shown with Spurlock working and living amongst a sea of fast-food outlets in

New York. The idea of “food deserts” has been used since the early 1990s to describe urban areas that lack affordable access to healthy food (Cummins & Macintyre, 2002;

Walker, Keane, & Burke, 2010). More recently, Rose et al. (2009, p. 15) have argued that the metaphor of “food swamps” rather than “food deserts” is more appropriate in

“high-income countries” where “over-consumption” of low-value, energy dense foods presents more of a problem than “under-nutrition.” Indeed, the prevalence of nearby fast-food or processed food choices “swamp out” any healthier offerings (Rose et al.,

2009, p. 15). This kind of environment is a prevalent theme in FSEs examined in this chapter.

Naughton’s Fat Head was perhaps the most high-profile text produced in response to Super Size Me. In 2004 however, Soso Whaley went on a ‘McDiet’ of her own, making the documentary Mickey D’s and Me. Like Naughton, Whaley was able

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to lose weight on the diet, shedding 18lbs (8.16kg). Like Naughton, Whaley kept her calories to approximately 2,000 per day and she exercised regularly. In 2009 comedian

Tom Naughton made Fat Head, a film designed as a response to Super Size Me.

Naughton’s approach to the film, which involved him similarly undertaking a fast food diet like Spurlock did, staunchly advocated personal responsibility and personal choice. He referred to this as approach as having “a functioning brain.” Throughout the film, Naughton makes many sarcastic jabs at Super Size Me. He is shown standing outside fast-food outlets to see “if anyone would drag me inside and make me in their food.” In perhaps the most overt refutation of the toxic environment argument, when he places an order at McDonald’s for a pack of five Chicken Selects and medium Coke, the worker asks, “would you like some fries with that?” Responding “no thank you,”

Naughton then turns around to where his camera is positioned and says, “Do you see how easy that was? ‘Do you want some fries with that?’ ‘No thank you.’”

A common thread between Naughton and Whaley’s approaches is their emphasis on personal responsibility. They both made conscious choices to limit their calorie intake while on their McDiets, and exercised regularly. Naughton went as far as to eat some of the burgers and breakfast muffins without buns, or to eat only half of a burger.

Both Naughton and Whaley generally avoided the fries and soft drinks. Although their actions show that it is possible to eat responsibly at fast food chains, their approaches do not mimic how many people would intend to eat at such outlets. How many people are likely to eat only half a burger or throw out the bun? Spurlock’s approach, which intentionally limited his exercise and placed no calorie restrictions on his food intake took specific steps designed to more closely align with how an average consumer would consume fast food. This is especially true in an environment that is geared to influence consumers to eat fast food, more frequently, and in bigger portion sizes.

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While texts like Fat Head and Mickey D’s and Me illustrate consumers’ ability to exercise personal choice/responsibility, another FSE documentary shows how pragmatic factors such as money can make negotiating food environments more difficult. In Food Inc. the Gonzales family are shown struggling with whether to purchase cheap fast food items or buy healthy food at a grocery store. Maria Andrea

Gonzales, a wife and mother of two daughters claims that previously her family did not realise that eating fast food was bad for their health. But even with this knowledge, it is still an unattainable ideal when the family is caught in a cycle of limited finances and poor health. The family is shown walking through the produce section of a supermarket and Gonzales’s youngest daughter asks to buy pears. After her older daughter weighs a pear to see how many they could get for a pound, the older sister says “We’re not getting it. You’d only get like two or three.” The family’s precarious finances are exacerbated as Maria’s husband is diabetic and she worries that his shaking and the potential to go blind would leave him not able to work. He states 50 pills costs approximately 130 USD, but Maria adds that the 130 USD medication is only one out of two medications he needs. The family feels as though they are torn between paying for the medication or paying to buy healthier foods that are more expensive than chips, soda, and hamburgers, which they can afford in greater quantities.

The idea of upsizing, or supersizing is not unique to McDonald’s and is one way in which food manufacturers and outlets engage in value-adding. Pollan (2006, p. 95) defines value-adding simply as “complicat[ing] your product.” In Super Size Me former Surgeon General David Satcher said we’re making everything cheap and easy by “supersizing everything.” Professor of Nutrition at New York University, Lisa

Young who appeared in the documentary, pointed to 7-Eleven’s Double Gulp, which

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contains 64oz/half a gallon/1.9L of soft drink and she claimed that car makers made cupholders in their vehicles larger to accommodate these Double Gulp-type cups. For

McDonald’s, the idea of introducing larger sizes came from a member of the board of directors, David Wallerstein, who noticed during his time as president of a movie theatre company that consumers would see buying two small bags of popcorn gluttonous, but buying one big box was socially acceptable (Love, 1995, pp. 296–297;

Pollan, 2006, pp. 105–106). A common assertion about portion sizes in the US is that

US sizing tends to usurp those offered elsewhere in the world. Selling bigger portions, rather than multiple smaller portions was the key to taking advantage of the fact that

“Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic” (Pollan, 2006, p. 106). This sentiment was echoed by a Vox pop participant on Super Size Me who said the “small” servings in the US were equal to the “large” offerings in her native France. Value- adding comes not only in the form of upsizing or supersizing, however. The analysis of That Sugar Film later in this chapter, examines other methods of value-adding that

Big Food adopts in order to induce consumers to eat more. Despite the fact, as Pollan

(2006, p. 94) says, that humans only can only eat about 1,500lbs (680kgs) over the course of the year, this natural limit is no boundary for Big Food, just a challenge to overcome. Whether the companies convince consumers to spend more for this food, or induce them to eat more, their goal is to push consumption beyond comfortable limits.

A Different Bad Guy: That Sugar Film

Damon Gameau’s documentary That Sugar Film followed a similar narrative to

Super Size Me in that Gameau was to eat processed supermarket foods that contained hidden sugar for 60 days. Gameau did not eat products like lollies or ice cream that are traditionally recognised as junk food. Rather he ate processed supermarket foods,

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many of which are regularly promoted as, or thought of, as a healthy. On his first shop during the experiment, Gameau purchased flavoured yoghurt, flavoured milk, juice, poppers (juice boxes), Up&Go (breakfast substitute drink), baked beans, canned soup, muesli bars, pasta sauce, apricot slice, breakfast cereal, iced tea, jam, and sultanas.

What was perhaps most surprising is that some of these products, like baked beans, canned soup, and pasta sauce, would not necessarily come to mind when thinking of sweet foods. This revelation reinforces arguments that Big Food contribute to the creation of an obesogenic environment. While proponents of personal responsibility would counter that package labelling helps consumers make informed choices, one has to have the time to read these labels. Furthermore, they need to have a certain amount of food literacy in order to interpret the labels. Phoebe, a 28-year-old marketing and research professional in the pharmaceutical industry, claimed it was through That Sugar Film that she learned about how ingredients are listed in descending order of prominence in the product. As doctor and psychiatrist Martin

Blinder on The Sugar Trap put it: “I don’t think people purchase ketchup because they want sugar. But the food industry has discovered that they can sell more ketchup if they spike it with sugar. And so inadvertently, you are making greater purchases of sugar despite your own intentions.” (5.30-5.50 of pt2). The identification of high sugar levels in savoury food and condiments in FSEs like The Sugar Trap and That Sugar

Film marks an important distinction between these texts and FSEs like Super Size Me whereby the two former texts reveal risks associated with foods not considered “junk.”

Although not examining the impacts of sugar specifically, Joanna Blythaman’s

(2006, p. 104) Swallow This: Serving up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets uncovered food processing techniques designed to make processed foods look and taste certain ways, and extend shelf-life, for example. This analysis likewise looked

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beyond “the most clearly processed, most industrialised offerings,” but also considered the processing and treating of less obviously factory-touched foods like “washed salads, smoothies, yogurt, cheese, cereal bars, butchered meat, fresh fish, bread, fruit juice, [and] prepared vegetables” (Blythman, 2015, p. 2). This emerging theme in FSEs shows that consumers’ best intentions to seek out healthy food may be thwarted with

Blythman (2015, p. 2) claiming even the most savvy consumers “would need to be a desert island hermit” to avoid these seemingly healthy offerings.

Like Spurlock, Gameau sought the guidance of a range of medical professionals at every stage of his sugar experiment. Although his overall caloric intake remained roughly the same as his pre-experiment diet, Gameau added 8.5kgs to his 76kg start weight during the course of his 60-day experiment, equating to a seven per cent body fat increase. This outcome exposes the flaws of Big Food’s rhetoric which states that maintaining a healthy weight is a case of “energy balance” whereby calories out, must be greater than calories in. This simplistic perspective is refuted in both Fed Up and

That Sugar Film. In Fed Up Dr Robert Lustig states that a calorie burned, is a calorie burned, but the form in which calories are consumed means the human body processes them differently. Comparing 160 calories of almonds to 160 calories of soft drink,

Lustig explains that the almonds contain fibre, which means they are absorbed by the body over time and do not cause a blood sugar spike. Without the fibre however, soft drink causes a “sugar rush” that the liver cannot handle and therefore “has no choice, but to turn it into fat.” Gameau similarly demonstrates the benefits of fibre in That

Sugar Film using four apples and a juicer. He says that if he were to and try and eat all four apples, he would only likely make it through two of them before the fibre would help him feel full. He then put all four apples through a juicer to produce almost one full glass of juice. Gameau refers to an apple as “this perfect little packet,” which

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contains “all the nutrients, the fibre—that tells us when we’re full, and just the right amount of sugar.” But in juicing the fruit, its sugars are extracted, “and then we throw everything else away.” This is a condensed version of Michael Pollan’s explanation of corn in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

These explanations of food processing highlight the consequences of value- adding that was established in relation to fast food in Super Size Me. Through processing and marketing, Big Food can manipulate simple commodities in many different ways in order to maximise their profits. Therefore, while the abundance of different packages of food at the supermarket suggest give us “a cornucopia of variety and choice,” they are actually an “illusion of diversity” (Pollan in Kenner, 2008). An insight into how Big Food achieves this illusion is shown in the BBC’s 2010 three- part series, The Foods That Make Billions. The series is not an FSE in that it did not seek to expose these products as detrimental to consumer health, animals, or the environment, but it provided invaluable insight as to how and why food corporations sought to add value to their products. The three case studies of bottled water, breakfast cereal, and flavoured yoghurt, illustrate how simple commodity products—in this case water, grain, and milk—can be manipulated and marketed to consumers and adapted to prevailing food trends or concerns.

It is becoming increasingly clear that such manipulation and marketing is undertaken to benefit the food company, not necessarily the consumer. In the 2014 documentary Fed Up, which looked more specifically at the growth of obesity and metabolic illness in young people as well as the links between government and Big

Food, it is the consequences of such value-adding and the promotion of these products that becomes clear. The stories of four American teenagers and their families are interwoven into the film. Fifteen-year-old Brady Kluge, 12-year-old Maggie

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Valentine, 13-year-old Wesley Randall, and 14-year-old Joe Lopez are shown exercising, trying to eat healthily, and visiting doctors in their struggle against obesity and its related afflictions. Both Maggie’s mother Carole, and Wesley’s mother Andrea are shown talking through some of the foods they buy for their children. After becoming disillusioned with doctors’ advice—which included telling Maggie to join

Weight Watchers, something Maggie was not old enough for—Carole felt the family had the “tools” to help Maggie themselves. In pulling boxes of food out of the cupboard she said she looked for labels that said, “reduced fat” and that indicated the product “has got more fibre it in, it’s made with more wholegrains.” She goes on to say that she looks at the fat content on cereals, which is normally pretty low. Therefore, she describes cereal as “a good go-to for pretty much any meal replacement”. Andrea is shown in her kitchen talking to son Wesley who opens a packet of Special K chips.

Talking to camera about the dietary changes the household has made, Andrea said that in addition to eating more fruit and vegetables and reducing starch and bread intake that she buys healthier versions of snacks, for instance, Andrea buys “lean” Hot

Pockets instead of the “regular” variety.

In That Sugar Film Damon Gameau prepares a breakfast of Just Right cereal, with yoghurt and juice. In serving the cereal, he looks at its sugar content, which is 12 grams (3 teaspoons) of sugar per serve. Jokingly asserting that he is a “growing boy,”

Gameau puts two and a half serves of cereal in his bowl which equates to 30 grams

(7.5 teaspoons) of sugar, just in the cereal.

Two things are evident when comparing the label reading occurring in the

Valentine and Randall households in Food Inc. with Gameau’s interpretation of a cereal box nutrition panel. The first is a change in mainstream culinary understanding where fat was once singled out as problematic, but sugar is now widely identified as a

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harmful component of processed foods. The second notable point is the Valentine and

Randall families’ use of claims made on packaging of processed foods to reinforce their thinking that the processed foods they had purchased were healthier. These households placed faith placed in labels such as “lean,” “more wholegrains,” and

“reduced fat,” labels which can be described as health halos. Health halos refer to claims made on products that can lead consumers to believe products are more nutritionally beneficial than they actually are (Chandon & Wansink, 2007). As evident in Fed Up, Carole Valentine believed cereal to be a healthy meal replacement for her daughter because of its low fat content, when Gameau showed the opposite because of some breakfast cereals’ high sugar content. Health halos add another layer of complexity to shopping, cooking, and eating, meaning consumers need a higher level of food literacy to wade through health claims.

The difficulty in discerning the sometimes misleading health claims on food packages was not lost on participants in this research. Brooke was acutely aware of the impact of the marketing of processed food after embarking on a plan to eat healthier.

At first, she relied on the advice of others, adopting a meal plan from someone else who trained at the same CrossFit Box. With an allowance of 120 grams of meat with broccoli and beans, she described it as “very restricted.” Adhering to the plan’s call to have eggs every morning for breakfast led Brooke to develop an egg allergy. Knowing this plan “wrecked her stomach,” she took more control of her eating, but became wary of packaged food. Although she did not reference texts analysed in this chapter, she found online searches of fitness websites, blogs, and even PhD theses to be helpful, and her findings reiterate some of the tropes around processed foods explored in texts like That Sugar Film. For example, Brooke no longer snacks on Weight Watchers bars, protein bars, or sugar free chocolate or biscuits. She learned that these products may

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not have sugar in them per se, but another kind of sweetener. Without having researched food, Brooke conceded, “the whole healthy marketing of things definitely would’ve roped me in.” Now however, she describes those kinds of foods as

“gimmicky.”

Need for a Local Perspective

It might seem absurd to spend the last part of this chapter arguing for more

Australian FSEs after devoting a great deal of this chapter to analysing That Sugar

Film. But much like Murray’s (2013) assessment of food television, in the emerging

FSE genre, US and UK perspectives are still most prominent. In 2018 however,

Australian documentary Food Fighter, featuring Oz Harvest founder Ronni Kahn, 29 also made an important contribution in exploring issues of food waste. Food Fighter and That Sugar Film are only two Australian texts that exist amongst a swathe of US and UK publications and productions. Aside from the two aforementioned feature- length productions, Australian investigative journalism program Four Corners from the ABC has been most instrumental in highlighting issues in the Australian food system. It was a 2011 Four Corners episode entitled “A Bloody Business” that brought the poor treatment of live cattle exported to Indonesia to public knowledge. In 2015, another episode “Slaving Away” exposed the exploitation of migrant workers who packed Australian fresh produce. Most recently, a May 2018 episode “Tipping the

Scales” looked at the impact of sugar consumption on Australians’ health and Big

Sugar’s influence on government and professional bodies whose mission is supposedly looking after public health. Another ABC documentary and current affairs series

29 Oz Harvest is an Australian food rescue charity that was established in 2004. Its core practice is to take surplus food donated by commercial entities and distribute it to charities who support in-need members of the community.

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Foreign Correspondent aired an episode in July 2012 called “Globesity,” which highlighted how the infiltration of junk food, processed food and sugary soft drinks into Mexico, China, Brazil, and India was fuelling obesity crises in these emerging economies. As Marion Nestle said in the episode, “we’ve [the West] exported obesity.”

While informative and incorporating many elements of FSEs, being a traditional such pieces lack the mainstream approach and widespread appeal generated by a SID-esque approach.

Examining these texts provides insight as to how the industrialised food system works and the consequences it has. What is notable here—and something I noted in the literature review about food research more broadly—is that it largely lacks an

Australian perspective. That Sugar Film was refreshing (or scary) in that the products and brands in the documentary are not only familiar to Australian audiences from having seen them on television, in the movies, or on the Internet, or while on holiday, they are brands local audiences recognise from their weekly grocery shops and have in their fridges and pantries.

Even with this Australian perspective however, sometimes the stories of more prolific markets take precedence. In That Sugar Film Gameau explains how sugar came to prominence in the food system, and during the film, flies to the “capital of convenience,” the US, to continue learning about sugar. Notably, he learns about the

Sugar Association in the US and its concerted Public Relations and lobbying effort to ensure the science around sugar’s impact on health remained ambiguous. It did so through commissioning a study Sugar in the Diet of Man and distributing it widely with a press release titled Scientists Dispel Sugar Fears. Sugar in the Diet of Man was used by the US Government in determining food standards that were released in the

1970s. Gameau stated these tactics saw sugar “exonerated and the rest of the world

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followed suit.” So while this story is based in a US context, Gameau infers it had consequences for countries like Australia. Such industry interference has been responsible for complicating consumers’ approach to eating for decades.

While many food system exposés point to High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) as a sweetener in many processed foods, it is not commonly used in Australia. Like sugar and other sweeteners in Australia, Pollan (see Sweet, 2010) highlighted how pervasive, and sometimes hidden, HFCS is in the US:

Read the food labels in your kitchen and you’ll find that HFCS

has insinuated itself into every corner of the pantry: not just into our

soft drinks and snack foods, where you would expect to find it, but into

the ketchup and mustard, the breads and cereals, the relishes and

crackers, the hotdogs and hams.

It is important to encourage the production of locally-produced and locally- focused texts. Although there are important messages that Australian audiences can glean from international texts (Bray, Johns, & Kilburn, 2011; KPMG & Synovate,

2007; Lewis & Potter, 2011), there are more Australia-specific issues that require attention. Where That Sugar Film does provide important local insight is the impact of the industrialised food system on Australia’s Indigenous population, particularly those living in rural and remote communities. Gameau visits Amata, an Indigenous community in South Australia. John Tregenza, an Aboriginal Community

Development Worker claimed that when he first came to Amata in 1973, the community only relied on the local store for 10 per cent of their food, but 30 years later, reliance on the store was almost absolute. Gameau states that in 2007 the community of less than 200 people drank 40,000 litres of soft drink and that just over the state border, the Northern Territory was Coca-Cola’s highest selling region per-

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capita in the world. Tregenza took Gameau to a cemetery where he was shown the graves of young people who have died from illnesses like Type 2 Diabetes as a result of their diet.

While it is prudent to be vigilant about the food one buys and eats, these concerns are sometimes misplaced. Thor Svensen, operator of Sovereign Foods thinks some of these concerns go as far as being racist:

[Some shoppers think] certain countries are dirtier than others.

That Asian countries in general will produce worse quality organics,

whereas their organic certification is much higher than somewhere like

America. America actually has some of the lowest organic certification

in the world. But it’s okay, it’s America. We identify culturally with

them. So you know, they’re white people, easy.

He also referred to a case in the US where spinach was grown downstream from a piggery and caused a salmonella outbreak. In Australia meanwhile, four people died and at least 17 people were affected by a Listeria outbreak in March 2018 caused by rockmelon grown in Southwest New South Wales. Such instances show that superficial impressions can sometimes distort the reality of food systems.

Like the need to further highlight Indigenous needs and issues in relation to food mentioned earlier, there are further issues that are distinct to the Australian context.

These relate to the pressures brought upon farmers by both the environment and Big

Food. The impact of climate change and drought affect the ability of Australian farmers to produce food and make a living. The Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture states that drought “is an enduring, regular feature of the Australian landscape,” and seeks to prioritise management of natural resources as well as the readying of farming communities for this eventuality, even in non-drought periods

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(Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment 2019, p.3). Meanwhile, Big

Food, namely supermarkets Woolworths and Coles also put pressure on farmers through restrictive contractual agreements (see Knox, 2015), and through unsustainable promotional tactics. Most notably, the “milk wars” which began on 26

January 2011, when Coles reduced the price of its private label milk to 1 AUD per litre. With Woolworths following suit, farmers were ultimately the impacted parties.

The milk wars forced New South Wales dairy farmer Mike Blacklock into retirement.

He stated that supermarket practices forced farmers to forego the quality of equipment, feed, fertiliser, and to reduce personnel, meaning they were operating just above breaking point (Knox, 2015, p. 97). While Knox (2015), Phillipov (2017), and

Phillipov and Loyer (2019) have provided consumers evidence of the milk wars, the latter two works are scholarly. Exploration of these supply chain issues as well as the environmental factors of drought and climate change in the Australian agricultural context in popular cultural texts could further bolster knowledge for local audiences.

Conclusion

Analysis of two documentaries, Super Size Me (2004) and That Sugar Film

(2014) has achieved two things: it has established the FSE genre, as well as a shift in the last 15 years within this genre from documentaries and books critiquing foods overtly identifiable as junk food, to seemingly healthy foods that have still been through elements of processing. Texts examined in this chapter show how the FSE genre sits between SIDs and CCDs. I argue that SIDs account for the proliferation of food-centric FSEs while also encompassing the substantial contribution of books in this field. At the same time FSE texts can also be considered a more wide-ranging version of CCDs, which includes texts beyond those that rely on narrative conventions of lifestyle programs.

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As well as contributing to conceptualisations of genre around a quickly growing field of culinary texts, analysing the FSE genre’s increased focus on processed foods promoted or assumed to be healthy reveals another layer of complexity in the contemporary culinary environment. Health halos were shown to mislead consumers—as was evident in the Valentine and Randall households in Fed Up.

Although mothers Carole and Andrea were making a concerted effort to investigate better choices for their children, Gameau’s That Sugar Film showed that their concern may have been mistakenly placed on fat rather than sugar content. Research participant

Brooke’s long-term interest and extensive research into a healthier approach to eating had led her away from “gimmicky” foods, but even her earlier attempts to improve her eating led to an egg allergy because she relied on advice from someone else. And while information is available to consumers on packaged food products’ nutrition panels, research participant, Phoebe said it was not until watching That Sugar Film that she learned that ingredients were listed with the most prevalent ingredients first. That point is not clearly signalled to consumers. Just like everyday foodies who are interested in gourmet food do not necessarily have the time, money, or confidence to pursue this interest, consumers trying to make healthy choices may be similarly hindered when wading through the amount of nutritional information available on food products and via the media.

Whether fat, sugar, or another macronutrient or ingredient is at the heart of health issues is a matter for nutrition science. This chapter explored how contemporary concerns around food are mediated, and how this influences everyday culinary behaviours. And while this chapter focused primarily on health concerns, the following chapter broadens its scope to reveal everyday culinary concerns extend beyond health,

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with participants articulating a mindfulness in relation to how the food system explored in this chapter affects animals, the environment, and farmers, too.

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Chapter 8: Winning Friends with Salad: The Rise of Ethical and

Sustainable Consumption

The title of this chapter, “Winning Friends with Salad” comes from the 1995 episode of The Simpsons called “Lisa the Vegetarian” (3F03). Despite this episode being almost 25 years old, its story arc is analogous to how alternative approaches to food have pushed past periods of ridicule to become accepted parts of everyday food culture. In “Lisa the Vegetarian”, after visiting a petting zoo, the Simpson family’s middle-child Lisa becomes vegetarian and embarks on a crusade to dissuade her family and community from eating meat. Lisa faces problems at home where her father,

Homer plans a BBBQ.30 When Lisa questions her father on the need to serve meat

Homer retorts, “But all normal people love meat. If I went to a Barbecue and there was no meat I would say, ‘Yo, Goober, where’s the meat?’ I’m trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don’t win friends with salad”. Homer and older brother Bart start a conga line in the living room chanting “you don’t win friends with salad” with even mother Marge joining in. Lisa’s views are shunned at school too where Principal

Skinner sees Lisa as an “agitator,” she is called “Mrs Potato head” in the playground, and her teacher Miss Hoover shows the class a Meat Council propaganda film starring

Troy McClure and a young boy named Jimmy who asks, “Ah, Mr McClure, I have a crazy friend who says it’s wrong to eat meat. Is he crazy?” McClure responds, “Don’t kid yourself, Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he’d eat you and everyone you care about.” Little Jimmy realises the error of his ways, stating,“Wow, Mr McClure, I was a Grade A moron to ever question eating meat.”

30 The extra ‘B’ stands for ‘BYOBB,’ the extra ‘B’ in BYOBB is a typo.

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After destroying Homer’s “Pig de Resistance” at the BBBQ and fighting with him in the aftermath, Lisa goes to the Kwik-E-Mart, where shop owner Apu takes her to a secret garden on the roof of the shop to meet fellow vegetarians Paul McCartney and his now late wife, Linda. Lisa discovers that Apu is in fact vegan, and exclaims,

“Then you must think I’m a monster” for only being vegetarian, Apu replies: “Yes indeed I do think that. But I learned long ago Lisa to tolerate others rather than forcing my beliefs on them. You know you can influence people without badgering them always.” Apu’s sentiment proves to be an eye-opening moment for Lisa who reconciles with Homer who gives her a “veggie-back” (as opposed to a piggy-back) home. Most poignantly, Apu’s advice to “influence people without badgering them always,” has rung true in contemporary food culture.

While this episode of The Simpsons focuses on opinions of vegetarianism, it is a growing reality in contemporary Australian food culture that a less combative approach has made vegetarianism, veganism, and a host of other ethical and sustainable food consumption choices increasingly desirable to everyday consumers.

As illustrated in the previous chapter, the last 10 to 15 years has seen a dramatic increase in the range of critiques of the industrial food system emerge in popular culture. A more text-focused approach was taken in Chapter 7 in establishing the FSE genre, which in turn highlighted Big Food’s problematic approaches to food production and promotion methods. The analysis in Chapter 7 focused primarily on how Big Food utilises value-adding in order to generate great profits and provide customers with seemingly cheap food, but at the expense of consumer health. Other costs involved with processed supermarket food and fast food are adverse effects on animals, the environment, farmers, and food industry workers. With FSEs providing greater insight as to how food is produced and these costs that accompany it,

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consumers are now using this knowledge in the marketplace. In-part, a reason the previous chapter was text-based, and this chapter is driven more by respondents’ insights is that concerns regarding the food system were expressed primarily in terms of actions they took in response to what FSEs/FSE-associated discourses taught them.

Texts used in the previous chapter are still called upon at certain points where appropriate.

Through focusing on analysis of empirical evidence gathered in this investigation of contemporary Australian food culture, an ethical turn in the way both households and certain members of industry approach the sourcing and consumption of food is evident. The ways in which Australians are addressing issues of food ethics and sustainable consumption appear to be divided into two main categories: rethinking and changing approaches to the consumption of meat and animal products, and a range of other attitudes and behaviours focused on reducing waste, and supporting local businesses and farmers. These practices are engaged in as a form of resistance to the excess, mindlessness, and greed perpetuated by the industrialised food system.

Definitions and Contestations

It is acknowledged in the literature that defining ethical consumption is a complex and difficult task (Bray, Johns & Kilburn 2011, p. 597). Indeed, Lewis and

Potter (2011, p. 4) claim that ethical consumption “is not a clearly defined set of practices, but is rather a convenient catch-all phrase for a range of tendencies within contemporary consumer culture today.” Gofton’s (1996, p. 120) conceptualisation of food ethics is similarly broad. She defines food ethics as “comprising those aspects of food which bear on moral principles, which relate to human character and are involved in moral duty and obligation to the community” (Gofton, 1996, p. 120). There are a number of varying opinions on and approaches to ethical consumption. As Bray,

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Johns, and Kilburn (2011, p. 597) highlight, what constitutes ethical consumption can be subjective, and in some instances, contradictory. The various kinds of ethical concerns exhibited by consumers can be categorised as moral, planet health, welfare, financial and matters-of-issues (KPMG & Synovate, 2007, p. 2). de Solier’s (2013a, p. 108) definition of ethical consumption captures the outward facing nature of the aforementioned categories. She states that “ethical consumption refers more specifically to altruistic consumption decisions that place the interests of others before those of the self” (de Solier, 2013a, p. 108). Shaw and Newholm (2002) explore the ways in which consumers can address their consumption through downshifting, adopting a voluntary simplicity approach, or maintaining their consumption, but utilising more sustainable alternatives.

It is also important to consider where this desire to consume more ethically comes from. Lewis and Potter (2011, p. 7) cite an “increased focus on within popular media culture on the impacts and risks of capitalist modernity,” as an important factor in the popularisation of ethical and sustainable approaches to consumption. They cite a number of texts as examples of these critiques with three FSEs—Fast Food Nation,

The Ethics of What we Eat, and Stuffed and Starved—among them. Lifestyle television shows have also exhibited a more ethical slant, which is significant considering such programming is normally geared to promoting consumption (Lewis, 2008c, p. 230)

de Solier’s (2013a) distinction that ethical consumption involves putting others’ interests before one’s own is useful in the context of this thesis in demarcating the concerns of this chapter from those explored in the chapter previous. Food System

Exposés do address environmental concerns, the analysis of FSE texts in Chapter 7 however, focused more on personal politics of consumption and how FSE texts could help shape consumption in terms of consumers’ health. For the most part, this chapter

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is more outward looking, showing how consumers deploy information they have learned through engagement with food media for the benefit of others, whether it is for the environment, animals, food industry workers, farmers, or small business owners.

The analysis does revert to discussions of personal health at points in this chapter, but does so from the perspective of examining the labour consumers need to exercise in order to understand information on packaging, questioning whether this is ethical on the part of Big Food, and whether Big Food corporations are co-opting shifts towards more mindful consumption practices through greenwashing and health halos.

Johnston (2017, p. 3) says the binary of alternative or non-alternative food carries significant limitations. Similarly, consumers cannot be labelled ethical or not ethical as different foods incorporate ethical aspects to varying degrees. Johnston

(2017, p. 3) considers the difficulty to be ethical on a day-to-day basis, “imagine the challenge faced by a consumer rushing to pick up groceries, stay within budget, and discern which product labels reflect sustainable, socially just business practices.” This challenge captures the sentiment of my work on everyday foodies that considers the time constraints, among others, as limiting how much labour can be devoted to food practices. Even those who have significant expertise in the field, cannot eat “perfectly” all the time. Although Blythman (2015) is talking about food processing in the following quote, the “family of issues” (see Goodman, Dupuis, & Goodman, 2012;

Johnston, 2017) that face consumers when trying to eat ethically and sustainably, can be perceived as similarly overwhelming and not achievable, thus requiring a more pragmatic approach:

In short, I have absolutely no intention of becoming a food

neurotic, or living in splendid isolation as a Trappist monk. Like most

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of us, I am not always in control of what I eat, so I have to settle for the

best option in the circumstances.

Doing this job [being an investigative food journalist] would be

impossible if I was a purist, someone who took the attitude that my body

is a temple that can never be sullied by processed food in any shape or

form. I do not beat myself up if I can’t meet my highest aspirations for

eating good food on a daily basis (Blythman, 2015, p. 15).

Throughout this chapter, respondents reveal the kinds of practices they prioritise, similar to everyday foodies’ prioritising engagement with different facets of culinary culture as their day-to-day commitments allowed.

Applications in Food Culture

Harrington, Collis, and Dedehayir (2018) point out in their analysis of the mainstreaming of vegan culture, that eschewing an activist stance, downplaying labels like “vegan,” and embracing monikers like “plant-based” have aided in making this once alternative food movement more mainstream. In a way, this stance mirrors the advice Apu gave Lisa in The Simpsons of influencing people “without badgering them always.” Harrington, Collis, and Dedehayir (2018) combined textual analysis with views gathered from diners at vegetarian and vegan restaurants to establish this perspective. The empirical work conducted in my investigation of Australian food culture, combined with textual analysis of more environmentally-focused FSEs in this chapter serves to reinforce Harrington, Collis, and Dedehayir’s (2018) arguments around veganism. This chapter seeks to build upon these arguments too, showing that this phenomenon observed with veganism is also applicable to other ethical and sustainable consumption practices such as vegetarianism, reducetarianism, and other non-meat related practices such as growing vegetables, composting, sourcing food

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locally, and reducing food and food packaging waste. de Solier’s (2013a, p. 99) idea that consumers are governed by a “morality of quality” was somewhat apparent.

Household respondents in this research, while seeking out better quality, higher- welfare food, did not necessarily equate this with a desire to emulate professional chefs as de Solier’s study of foodies revealed, but in recognition of the industrialised food system’s flaws and a desire to care for animals, the environment, and small business.

Although many of the ethical and sustainable practices channel approaches from

“simpler times,” this chapter will illustrate that such practices are bound up in middle- class values and taste, accessible to those with the necessary culinary and financial capital. As Littler (2011, p. 27) points out, a common criticism of ethical consumption is that it functions as a “panacea for middle-class guilt.” It can be argued that this is another example of the middle-class co-opting these practices, similar to Johnston and

Baumann’s (2015) observation of foodies’ enjoyment of working-class foods like burgers and hotdogs. But at a time where critiques of corporate practices are becoming ubiquitous in mainstream media, it is not surprising that consumers are embracing a turn away from these institutions. The pervasiveness of the industrialised food system resulted in ethical/sustainable practices being shunted to the edges of food culture, but they are experiencing a revival due to greater questions being asked of supermarket practices and supermarket food.

Similar accusations of co-optation are levelled at corporations who adopt environmentally-oriented labelling or marketing. Lewis and Potter (2011, p. 7) state that “marketers and advertisers have been quick to jump on the green bandwagon.”

Such claims are evidenced in Food Inc. for example, where Gary Hirshberg, CEO of

Stonyfield Farm, an organic yoghurt producer, is shown at The Natural Products Expo in Anaheim, California. He states that organics is growing “over 20 per cent annually”

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making it “one of the fastest-growing segments in the food industry.” Big Food conglomerate Groupe Danone bought Stonyfield. Walking around the Natural

Products Expo, Hirshberg points at various booths:

See this is the interesting thing. A little company like this [Stacy’s]

is now Kraft, but you don’t have any idea that it’s Kraft. This is now

Pepsi… This is Colgate now. That’s now Kellogg’s […] These large

companies don’t grow organically. They grow by acquisition. Coke,

Pepsi, Kellogg’s, General Mills—all of them are running, not

walking—into the organic food business.

Representatives of Big Food cite consumer demand as a driver for their corporations to become more involved with organics. Tony Airoso, Wal-Mart’s Chief

Dairy Purchaser is shown on Food Inc. saying stocking organic brands is “a pretty easy decision” when “it’s clear the customer wants it.” Although the enthusiasm of

Wal-Mart and the other corporations Hirshberg pointed out at the Natural Products

Expo is arguably motivated by profit potential rather than genuine care for the environment, the fact that consumer demand can influence Big Food to stock ethical and sustainable brands is heartening. Former MCA contestant, Alana Lowes wants to see a day “where there is no choice with eggs [for example], you just have free-range eggs.” She believes supermarkets and food retailers have the power to further the reach of ethical and sustainable foods, saying such products and produce should be consumers’ only option, “because if they don’t offer it, we can’t buy it. If they don’t offer the bad stuff, we can’t buy it.” Although ethical and sustainable food is not the dominant force in supermarkets yet, other organisations in Brisbane like Food

Connect, Sovereign Foods, and Northey Street Markets are providing ethical and sustainable options for consumers.

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Interestingly, returning to Hirshberg’s comment that organics is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the food industry, Guthman (2018) asserts however, that such claims are somewhat distorted due to the fact that growth in organics has been driven by value-adding rather than true growth in the practice of organic farming in the US. This point would likely be deemed irrelevant to someone like Hirshberg, who as the CEO of a yoghurt company, is part of the distortion Guthman pointed out. What this scenario highlights however—regardless of geographical context—is the potential for greenwashing as pointed out by Lewis and Potter (2011) earlier. This is not to say

Hirshberg and companies like his are guilty of such practices. Hirshberg understood that Walmart’s decision to pursue organics was economically, not morally motivated, but believed that having big businesses like Wal-Mart involved with companies like his that specialise in organics was a good thing. He explained:

When I run into my old environmental friends, many are initially

horrified by the kinds of company that I’m keeping these days. But

when I then go on to explain what the impact of one purchase order

from Walmart is, in terms of [reducing] not pounds, but tons of

pesticide, tons of herbicide, tons of chemical fertiliser, the discussion…

We get away from the emotion, we get down to the facts (Hirsberg in

Kenner, 2008).

At the same time having Big Food involved in organics means that not only is there an overstatement in the growth of organics as Guthman (2003) explores, value- adding could come with environmentally adverse implications later in the supply chain in terms of the storage, transportation, and plastics waste associated with these products.

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Depending on what is added to organic produce during processing could also lead to potential negative health impacts. As explored in Chapter 7, excess sugar consumption—specifically sugar added to products that are perceived as “healthy”— is a key concern in contemporary food culture. Continuing with the Stonyfield Organic example: the company’s 5.3oz (150g) tub of Stonyfield Organic Whole Milk Greek

Vanilla Bean yoghurt contains 12g of sugar, which is the equivalent of three teaspoons.

This is half of the WHO’s recommended daily sugar intake of six teaspoons (24-25g).

Looking at the ingredients list, “Organic Cane Sugar” is the second listed ingredient after “Cultured Pasteurized Organic Whole Milk.” There is the potential for the word

“organic” that is prominent on the Stonyfield label, along with imagery of a farm, to create a somewhat misleading health halo over the product. Although the 12g of sugar is printed on the label, it is in much smaller print than the word “organic” and the idyllic imagery on the packaging. Reading and deciphering the ingredients and nutrition panel on a product does not add a great deal of time when buying one product, but imagine repeating the process on 10 or more items during one shopping trip.

Considering that in my research on everyday foodies, time constraints was cited as one of the reasons households cannot devote more time to food, this time needed to interpret labels on food packaging could be seen as a barrier to consumers efficacy in purchasing healthy food. Furthermore, understanding nutrition labels on food packaging requires what Soederberg Miller (2016) refers to as Nutrition Label

Literacy.

Not only is Nutrition Label Literacy increasingly important, but so too is food literacy more broadly. Food literacy is defined as “a collection of inter-related knowledge, skills and behaviours required to plan, manage, select, prepare and eat food to meet needs and determine intake” (Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014, p. 54). Although food

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culture may be gravitating towards more ethical and sustainable practices, consumers must have a clear understanding of these practices and how they can be implemented into their everyday lives in order to take full advantage of them.

There is a tendency for labels like “organic” to be read as a heuristic for

“healthy.” As illustrated with the Stonyfield Organic example above, relying on these signs can be misleading. It is not necessarily misleading on the producer’s part, if they have used organic produce, or omitted meat and other animal products from their goods, then using these labels is fair play. But as moves towards ethical and sustainable products become more mainstream, food literacy in terms of adequate knowledge of what these signs and symbols mean becomes even more important. When talking to

Thor Svensen from Sovereign Foods, he said that he eats organic in order to care for the land, specifically to protect soil quality. Svensen said that organic growers take great pride in their soil. He explained:

All the growers I’ve got to have the chance to visit, they’ve been really

proud, and the first thing they always show me is their soil. They’re

really proud of it. Because with a good functioning soil they’ve got—

the plants almost become a symptom of good soil rather than the

product.

Svensen’s understanding of why organics are an important part of ethical and sustainable food production is due to his background in studying environmental science, as well as his many years of lived experience working in buyers’ groups and founding Sovereign Foods. While it is unrealistic to expect everyday consumers to have an in-depth working knowledge of environmental science in order to select their groceries, the mainstreaming of knowledge about the environmental benefits of

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organic farming and other sustainable growing methods can help consumers make well-informed decisions.

Health halos are similarly applied to “vegetarian” and “vegan” food. Being aware of this is important considering the proliferation of meat-free and animal- product-free options now available in fast-food settings. Recently, chains in Australia like Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Capers, Grill’d, and Hungry Jack’s, have introduced vegan ranges. Vegetarian and vegan stalls are also increasing in popularity at markets. Nick

Goding, the project manager for West End’s Boundary Street Markets acknowledged the vegan label attracting a health halo:

I think you can put vegan on a donut and to some uneducated

person—as in I don’t say that in a critical way of that person—but

that somehow gives that donut a health quality, by calling it vegan,

which it doesn’t [have].

While acknowledging that vegan donuts could not be classed a health food, he claimed, “but they’re delicious,” and “non-vegans enjoy them just as much.” This phenomenon reflects a shift in vegan culture, which is marked by a move away from activist tropes and focuses on food that tastes good, but just happens to be vegan

(Harrington, Collis, Dedehayir, 2018). Veganism has become so popular in Brisbane that there are now shops specialising in vegan products like The Green Edge, and the

Brisbane Vegan Markets held twice a month. Harrington, Collis, and Dedehayir.

(2018) examined veganism’s growing popularity, finding that it is repositioning itself within the foodscape, shedding the activist connotations associated with the word

“vegan” and embracing labels like “plant-based.” As veganism moves further towards the mainstream, more consumers are beginning to see how vegan food is not lacking in flavour, but can indeed enhance a meal, with one of Harrington, Collis, and

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Dedehayir’s et al.’s (2018) respondents saying they would actually prefer a vegan dessert over one containing dairy.

The previous chapter analysed media-based critiques of the industrialised food system and gave insight as to how everyday Australians negotiate the omnipresent junk food and processed supermarket food this system produces. In the wake of these highly publicised concerns about the ongoing viability of the industrialised food system infiltrating mainstream consciousness, ethical and sustainable consumption approaches are becoming increasingly accepted and embraced in mainstream culinary culture.

Lindenfeld (2010) claimed that in texts like Food Inc. the critique was focused more on consumer health and safety concerns, with environmental factors being relegated to the periphery. In recent years FSEs have been focused on the consequences of eating meat and animal products. Texts like Cowspiracy and What the Health while highlighting the environmental consequences of industrial agriculture and meat consumption—such as industrial agriculture producing more methane than all transportation—do so in order to illustrate cooperation between environmental and health organisations and agribusiness.

Evolving approaches to Meat and Animal Products

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan (2006) illustrates that the emergence of commodity corn had made the price of raising cattle cheaper, thereby making meat cheaper for consumers. Never mind the fact that cattle’s natural diet is grass. Even farmed salmon is “being bred to tolerate grain” (Pollan, 2006, p. 67). Despite meat’s subsequent cheapness, a number of participants did not let this reconfigure their conceptualisation of what constitutes a meal. Denise for instance, recognised the

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resource-intense nature of meat production, as well as the potential for vegetables to offer many interesting meal choices:

No, no, I like eating meat, but I think it’s a combination of things.

I think—well it’s terrible that our meals are around meat, which is so

hard to produce, to feed one cow, all the carbon imprint is number one

[…] So a barbecue I enjoy, but I don’t need that every day. I think that

we should change that. I think also you have more diversity of way[s]

to eat using vegetables than meat. You can prepare it more diverse[ly]

and I like that.

Bacon and eggs is a staple breakfast dish. Going out to a café for breakfast no longer needs to always be a bacon and eggs affair, however. Chef at King Arthur café in New Farm, Carlos Gatica pointed out that the greater number of chefs working in cafés now meant diners had access to more creativity and variety when choosing their breakfast or brunch. This includes more interesting vegetarian and vegan options.

While meat still features on menus, Gatica said he was relishing the opportunity to work at King Arthur, which takes a sustainable approach to food. Many King Arthur diners “will happily order a vegetarian dish on there, and they don’t add bacon,” Gatica said. The café’s sustainable outlook means their approach to that once breakfast staple, bacon, is quite different to other establishments. At previous jobs, Gatica was disturbed by the amount of consumption—and waste—of bacon. He recounted:

[W]e were ordering in excess of 200 kilos of bacon a month. That

is a lot of bacon, especially when you can look and see how much

you’re throwing away when a person orders excess and then doesn’t eat

it. So that’s—you’re wasting an animal.

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He emphasised that “if” animals are consumed for food, a “responsible” approach was needed “because it’s a life at the end of the day.” In comparison to that previous job, at King Arthur bacon is “not a staple.” Gatica estimated that the café orders “probably 50 kilos of bacon a month,” which comes as a side that they cut themselves. In describing this process of sourcing and serving bacon he said, “we actually manage the portion ourselves.” This idea of “managing” meat consumption at the café aligns with his calls for more responsible consumption of meat. It begins to unpick the embedded idea of bacon being served at breakfast, and pushes back against excessive or mindless consumption in this respect.

Household respondent Molly cited caring for all forms of life as a reason why she had significantly reduced her meat consumption. She said that she did not buy meat to cook at home, but if she was dining out, like at weekly dinners at her mother’s house, she still consumed meat in those circumstances. A growing interest in Buddhism had led Molly to question why human life was considered more important than any other creature’s. She questioned, “why should an animal have to die for us to be fed when we can eat and get by on fruit and vegetables? It’s sort of where I’m at.”

Bray, Johns, and Kilburn’s (2011, p. 597) claim that motivations for consuming ethically are “subjective and complicated by circumstances” is especially apparent when looking at the different reasons consumers choose to reduce or eliminate animal products in their diet. Anna, now 40, was 12 years old when she became vegetarian.

She joked that it “might have been to avoid my mother’s cooking,” but went on to cite

“empathy for animals” as to why she stopped eating meat. Her husband and two children however, all eat meat, and despite being vegetarian, Anna still cooks meals containing meat for them. Although Anna has had some difficulties with cooking meat—one such instance was explained in Chapter 6—normally catering for her

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vegetarianism alongside her family’s omnivorous diet only involves slight alterations to preparing dinner. If the rest of the family is having meat with salad or vegetables,

Anna substitutes “beans or some extra roasted vegetables with some chickpeas or tofu or something like that” for the meat. Cooking something like a stir-fry however, requires a slightly different approach:

you know typically they cook the meat first and then add all the

vegetables and stuff like that, whereas I don’t do that. So I’ll do like a

vegetable stir fry and cook the meat separately.

While Anna’s re-negotiation of cooking is not necessarily based on one of the four factors that define everyday foodies, it still exemplifies how the practicalities of everyday life interferes with or alters one’s shopping, cooking, or eating.

Thirty-six-year-old Erin’s motivations for becoming vegetarian—and then vegan—illustrated the most integration of a care for animals into her lifestyle and approach to eating. Before FSE documentaries like Cowspiracy and books like

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals Erin was a 22-year-old working at the

Environmental Protection Agency. She noted that she was working in an environment where there was “a higher percentage of vegetarians,” and “environmentally aware” people, but that it was a presentation from a speaker visiting from the US that was the catalyst for her switch to vegetarianism. She recalled that the speaker detailed not only the environmental impacts of eating meat, but the cruelty to animals—especially veal calves. Erin remembered walking out of the talk and “just going ‘wow, I don’t think I want to eat meat anymore’, and I didn’t”. At the time, Erin said it had not crossed her mind that veganism was an option. She thought, “My bit’s done. I’ve done enough.”

Through following animal rescue organisations and shelters on Facebook however,

Erin said she saw information about aspects of dairy and egg farming that upset her:

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I started seeing more things about dairy cows in particular and

umm, having their calves taken away from them and what happens to

the calves, and what’s done to dairy cows…Also seeing about the egg

industry and the fact that, you know, of, of all the baby chicks born half

of them are male, and so, since the males don't lay eggs, they just kill

them all straight away.

So, in January 2015, Erin became vegan on her birthday. Unlike other respondents, Erin did not mention any personal benefits to adopting a vegan lifestyle.

She reported that omitting dairy from her diet was a “shock to the system,” and realised that in trying to give up dairy, that she “was really, kind of, quite addicted to cheese.”

Luckily, it was an “addiction” Erin was able to break. After stocking up on vegan cheeses, she found that “after two weeks the cravings for dairy just kind of went away.”

It appeared that part of the reason Erin had not realised that veganism was an accessible option is because there was not an extensive range of alternatives to plug the gaps left behind by dairy and eggs.

I think it was more difficult than it is now, you know, there, there

was no good vegetarian chicken, available, chicken substitute. You

could, you could get some basic, like, vegetarian sausages and, textured

vegetable protein, which is soy to make like a bolognaise but, there was

no good vegan cheese So, it honestly didn't even really cross my mind

to go vegan…

In less than five years however, there has been a dramatic growth in plant-based alternatives. As noted earlier in the discussion about health halos, mainstream fast- food outlets including Domino’s Pizza and Hungry Jack’s have introduced vegan options, signalling the increasing accessibility of vegan alternatives. Harrington, Collis

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and Dedehayir (2018) point to fast food vegan ranges as well as the growth of nut milk companies and significant business interest in “alternative proteins” ventures.

Claudia was similarly staunch in her beliefs, being vehemently opposed to factory farming. Unlike Erin however, Claudia’s beliefs were not manifested in omitting meat, dairy and eggs from her diet, but consuming higher welfare meat and animal products. Questions have been raised however, as to whether attaching the labels “ethical” and “higher-welfare” is a valid practice in the first place. Most recently, Arcari (2018) critiqued the conception of the ethical use of animals for food.

Through the continual naturalisation of the killing, consumption, and commodification of animals, she contends the mainstreaming of ethical meat “can thus be understood a reinforcing human domination of food animals, despite, or indeed because of, their animal-friendly claims” (Arcari, 2018, p. 169). Claudia said that “it’s important to me that animals are treated well,” that she has kept animals throughout her life, and that she “has always loved them.” Currently she keeps 11 chickens on her property, but has aspirations to move to northern New South Wales with her husband and live on a larger block of land so they can cultivate a mini-farm. She imagined having some black pigs, and “maybe a couple of little Angus and just grow our own beef and know where it’s come from.” Earlier in our conversation, Claudia had discussed how she would go about the slaughter of these animals when the time came:

[G]ive them a lovely life and [then] say “adiós, guys,” but do it in

a gentle way. You know, you can get a mobile butcher to come to your

place. There’s no stress of having to take them to the abattoir so just

happy life and then a quick death and everything stays on the property,

so I would like to do that.

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Her current consumption however, entails refraining from purchasing supermarket eggs, only gathering them from her chickens. She also claims to only buys grass-fed beef, and pastured pork. Claudia noted that she is “lucky” to be in a position to live on an acreage where she can keep chickens. At the same time however, Claudia acknowledged that her desire to consume more sustainably produced meat meant that it was more expensive and therefore consumed less frequently in her household. She said, “but the thing is when you eat less of it, then you sort of appreciate it more so maybe you know, once a fortnight we’ll have a piece of steak, but it’s a beautiful piece of steak and it’s grass fed.”

In keeping with her desire to eat meat, but in an ethical way, Claudia had also attended a nose-to-tail cooking class at The Golden Pig in Newstead. In this class she learned how to butcher a pig and create eight dishes using all parts of the animal. Nose- to-tail cooking is considered a less wasteful approach to eating meat as it utilises all parts of the animal, not just the choice cuts. Although nose-to-tail cooking was popularised by Fergus Henderson who, alongside his St John restaurant in London, published Nose to Tail Eating: A British Kind of Cooking in 1999, which went on to be published as The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail in the US (Brien, 2010), it was not until

2009 that the concept became part of the everyday cooking vernacular in Australia.

Series one MCA contestant Chris Badenoch became known for his affinity for nose- to-tail cooking on the show. He then went on to publish a cookbook based on the approach called The Entire Beast, and operated Josie Bones with fellow contestant

Julia Jenkins between December 2010 and February 2014, which was a bar that specialised in nose-to-tail dishes (Crafty Pint, 2010; Ho, 2011; J. Jenkins, 2014).

Although nose-to-tail cooking and other approaches Claudia mentioned, like eating grass-fed beef and pasture pork can reduce waste and ensure a better quality of

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life for animals before they are slaughtered, these practices—according to Arcari’s argument—reinforces human domination over animals. Arcari (2018) highlights in her analysis of the promotional material of producers of ethical meat that they refer to the cuts of meat rather than animals. Vileisis (2008) points out that this practice was implemented because urban consumers could not cope with envisioning their food as once part of a living creature.

Claudia’s household circumstances arguably place her in a privileged position more closely aligned to that of de Solier’s (2013a) foodies rather than the everyday foodies I have previously investigated (Kirkwood, 2013, 2014). Unlike Anna who is vegetarian and cooks for her omnivorous husband and two children, balancing their needs and tastes, Claudia’s children have left home. Although Claudia and her husband ate meat less often in order to be able to choose more ethical meat options, her budget only needs to cater for two people Additionally, these practices highlight class distinctions. Although such ethical practices tend to look to the past, and thus one might assume these practices are cheaper, the intervention of the industrial food system has made meat cheap—if it is grain, not grass-fed—and consumers rely on supermarkets to cut and portion the meat. Therefore, eating grass-fed or pasture meat and butchering a whole carcass at home is expensive, and butchery skills are not widespread. As the butchery skills required to break down a whole animal are not necessarily mainstream, Claudia undertook a cooking class at Newstead’s Golden Pig, as explained earlier. The class she undertook runs for six hours and costs $200.31

31 Claudia did not say how much she paid for her class. This is the price listed on the Golden Pig website for the Nose to Tail Day class that will be held on 2 September, 2018. The description of this class matches the details from Claudia’s interview. http://www.goldenpig.com.au/school.php?showme=4

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For consumers who rely on the supermarket, in many instances labelling on packaging has become a key cultural text in shaping consumption. Just as monikers such as ‘vegan’, ‘vegetarian’, and ‘organic’ can cast health halos, labelling indicating that a product is higher-welfare or free-range can have a similar effect where Parker,

Carey, and Scrinis (2018) have conducted significant analysis of how higher welfare claims on food have become increasingly common in the marketplace and who has driven such action. In lieu of comprehensive government action to implement and enforce higher standards around welfare for food animals,32 supermarkets have been allowed to assume power in the area of free-range/higher-welfare animal products, namely pork/ham, chicken, and eggs in response to consumer concern (Parker, Carey,

& Scrinis, 2018). Coles in particular has assumed market leader status in this area, selling no-added hormone beef since 2011, sow stall-free pork since 2014, and RSPCA

Approved chicken since 2014, for instance (Coles Supermarkets Australia, n.d.-b).

Although Arcari (2018) calls for humans to reconsider how we think of the consumption of animals, free range and higher welfare labelling are still incremental steps in industry and consumers alike being more mindful of their consumption and moving toward less environmentally harmful consumption practices. An increasingly popular higher welfare labelling scheme is that of RSPCA approved chicken. Since

2014, all Coles and Woolworths-branded chicken has been RSPCA approved (Parker,

Carey & Scrinis, 2018). Some argue however, that this is not enough. The Australian

Chicken Growers Council described the supermarkets’ transition to RSPCA approved chicken as a “hollow marketing tactic” (Australian Food News, 2014). This claim

32 On 26 April 2018 the Australian Consumer Law (Free Range Egg Labelling) Information Standard 2017 came into effect, setting clear requirements for the labelling of free range eggs. Among other requirements, this standard requires that egg-laying hens have “meaningful and regular access to an outdoor range during daylight hours across the laying cycle.

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however, was made in terms of claims that farmers would not being adequately compensated for changes they were required to make, when there was “no scientific basis for the claims that this change is providing enhanced animal welfare” (Australian

Food News, 2014). Parker, Carey, and Scrinis (2018) state that the RSPCA approved standard is only a minor improvement for the birds. The efficacy of the RSPCA approved standard was questioned in a review of meal kits Chinese-Australian celebrity chef, cookbook author and restaurateur Kylie Kwong released in collaboration with Woolworths called “Cooking with Kylie Kwong” in 2015. Kwong’s reputation has been built on championing ethical and sustainable approaches to food including the use of organic and biodynamic produce (see Phillipov, 2017, p. 136).

Kwong’s meal kits contained Marine Stewardship Council-certified prawns, as well as

Tasmanian grass-fed beef (Lohman, 2015). Her use of RSPCA Approved Indoor standard chicken, 33 rather than a higher welfare standard was criticised by food writer for The Australian, John Lethlean. Lethlean (2015b) cited an Animals Australia chart that showed the RSPCA Approved Indoor standard only ranked better than factory farming for the fact that “small bales of straw” were provided as “environmental enrichment.” In part of her response to Lethlean’s critique, Kwong made a poignant statement about influencing a transition to more ethical and sustainable food choices:

People are at different stages on the “ladder of discovery” when

it comes to food choices, and I want to take them step by step up that

ladder towards sustainable, ethical, higher welfare food. As our

knowledge about the conditions in which our food is produced

increases, the momentum starts to build. Too much, too soon can be

33 Lethlean assumes Kwong’s range adheres to the RSPCA Indoor rather than the higher Outdoor standard as her products do not specify which standard they follow (REF).

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confronting, too expensive and just too big an ask, so my aim is to

encourage people to take that first step (Kwong in Lethlean, 2015a,

para. 6).

Kwong’s statement is important for two reasons. Firstly, mindful of the mainstream supermarket consumers the Cooking with Kylie Kwong range was targeting, she acknowledges the everyday constraints households face in selecting and preparing food. Her use of RSPCA Approved chicken, while not of the highest ethical standard, could at least make an incrementally better option available and one which is financially accessible for a large number of people. This approach reflects the middle ground that the everyday foodie seeks to occupy.

Beyond Saving the Animals

Taking higher-welfare approaches to consumption of meat and animal products, reducing, or even omitting these products from one’s diet are only some of the ways to take an ethical and sustainable approach to food sourcing/shopping and consumption.

In Chapter 3 I introduced War on Waste, the documentary series Craig Reucassel presented on the ABC in 2017 and 2018. Earlier, War on Waste was used as an example of how media productions can take advantage of the dynamic, cross-platform nature of the post-broadcast environment. Such was the series’ impact, it won the

AACTA Award for Best Documentary Television Program (AACTA, 2019), and the

2018 Logie Award for Most Outstanding Factual or Documentary (ABC News, 2018), before being commissioned for its second season (Spring, 2018). The first season focused on the waste associated with food, plastics, and fast fashion, providing a foundation for the wider public to continue discussions about more sustainable approaches to consumption. War on Waste revealed supermarket practices that mean

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tonnes of fruit and vegetables never make it to supermarkets because they do not meet supermarket specifications of size, shape, weight, or colour. In visiting LMB Farms in

Far North Queensland, which is the third-largest banana-growing farm in Australia,

Reucassel learns from owner Jade Buchanan that, “There’s very strict supermarket specifications on sizing,” and that up to 40 per cent of a harvest may be destroyed due to these specifications. Buchanan shows Reucassel a hand of bananas where the

“fingers [individual bananas] are too long.” She then throws the hand onto a conveyor which takes them to be chopped and put into a trailer to be dumped. Buchanan says length is not the only determinant, but that fruit must be discarded if its “too fat, too skinny, too short, too long, too marked, too ugly.” When Reucassel questioned

Buchanan on whether food relief organisations can collect fruit not fit for supermarket orders Buchanan replied, “Look I would be open to any of those kinds of suggestions because it breaks our hearts to throw this much fruit away.”

Single-use plastic is another significant aspect of waste associated with supermarket shopping and food consumption. This kind of waste is now such an issue that the cover of the June 2018 edition of National Geographic, as shown in Figure 2 below, features a plastic bag floating in water like an iceberg. Plastics appear at many points of food consumption: the plastic bags provided in the produce area of supermarkets; the plastic bags used to carry shopping home; and the plastic wrap on trays of meat, bread bags; as well as other kinds of processed food packaging. Even fruits and vegetables that have their own protective skins like bananas and apples are sometimes also wrapped in plastic, though there are some reasons for what may appear to be excessive packaging. The ABC reported that shrink wrap on continental cucumbers increased shelf life and that without the wrap, food waste—and the associated emissions of carbon dioxide and methane—would increase (Breen, 2019).

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Food Scientist Dr Felicity Denham (in Breen, 2019) said, “So it depends what type of environmental impact you’re concerned about, do you want to have solid landfill or greenhouse gas emissions?” Another way that packaged produce is useful is in allowing people living with a disability to live more independently. Meek (2018) reported that pre-cut and packaged produce gave people like Wendy Favorito who lives with rheumatoid arthritis the freedom to prepare meals without relying on someone else in her household to help her chop up vegetables. The second episode in season 1 of War on Waste focused specifically on plastic waste. Even prior to the ABC series going to air, households I interviewed cited waste from packaging as something they were trying to reduce. Phoebe had “started to worry a fair bit more about packaging,” feeling that the amount of packaging households go through is “fricken ridiculous.” It contributed to the fact that she liked to keep her pantry to staples like rice, pasta, tinned goods, spices, and oil, while avoiding packaged processed food.

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Figure 2. National Geographic Cover, June 2018.

Some of the food waste-reducing initiatives Reucassel explored on War on

Waste were already being enacted by Molly, a household respondent in this research.

As well as reducing her meat intake—as explored earlier—she was also in the beginning stages of learning how to compost. Molly saw it as a practice that served multiple purposes. There was an altruistic motivation for Molly in starting to compost.

She stated that she was “doing what I can for the environment.” At the same time,

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Molly exemplified the money-conscious characteristics of an everyday foodie, saying that composting saved her money on buying fertiliser for her garden.

For both Phoebe and Molly, their desire to produce less plastic and begin practices like composting, respectively, environmental preservation was not their only motivation. Phoebe equated the keeping of less packets of processed food in her pantry as not only less wasteful, but as healthier for her and her partner Nick. Meanwhile

Molly saw the financial benefits of composting on top of the environmental ones. This is not to say that their efforts are any less legitimate, but highlights complex nature of consumption. It also reflects Lindenfeld’s (2010, p. 381) observation in regard to FSEs like Food Inc. where she feels the “anthropocentric perspective on food that relegates environmental issues into peripheral status.” This too echoes Arcari’s (2018) arguments around the human dominance of animals as explored in relation to Claudia’s consumption of ethical meat earlier.

Outside the home, food businesses are also demonstrating that they are actively engaged in reducing food waste. Not only does this involve the composting of food scraps, but utilising local, and therefore seasonal, produce. Carlos Gatica spoke about the “close the loop” policy in place at King Arthur that is maintained in cooperation with farmers Phil and Alice who run Loop Growers. Gatica said at King Arthur, all of their trimmings went into a compost bin that Loop Growers collects and then uses that compost to grow produce, which then can be supplied back to cafés. As well as utilising Loop Growers, King Arthur also takes produce deliveries from Food Connect.

Food Connect, established in 2005, demonstrates a commitment to many aspects of ethical consumption, including eating locally and seasonally, growing organically, and looking after farmers. Having enterprises like Loop Growers and Food Connect as key suppliers is an influencing factor in King Arthur’s menus. Gatica acknowledges that

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working in an environmentally-conscious establishment means he can no longer, “just pick up the phone, call a supplier and get what I want.” Rather, he must be creative in writing a menu:

So what that [purchasing local and seasonal produce] means is

when we write a menu, it has to be in line with what we can actually

get, not necessarily what we want. Which the challenge is then that we

have to think outside the square with how we cook. So that’s been a

learning curve for me.

The anonymous, homogeneous nature of food purchased in supermarkets that was explored in the previous chapter, Gatica believes is one of the reasons consumers have become “detached” from their food. This scenario he states, “is not good at all because it means we have no respect, we have no respect for the way we cook it, we don’t respect that we waste it.” Although he was talking more in terms of chefs and professional kitchens, Gatica believed knowing who produced your food made you value the produce more:

It’s not abnormal to know of a chef that is down at the fish market

at 3am buying the freshest fish for the day’s special, the day’s menu.

It’s important because it means you’re developing a relationship, not

only with the person that is catching that produce, but also gives you

respect for the food. You’re not going to readily waste it. You’re really

going to think about it when you’re cooking it, you’re going to care.

In the context of everyday households, the time constraints of shopping before dawn and developing relationships with multiple vendors may be unrealistic, especially considering time was a limitation everyday foodies reported facing

(Kirkwood, 2013; 2014). The sentiment of reducing supply chains and promoting a

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greater sense of community can help restore pride and care in cooking. Thor Svensen of Sovereign Foods has recognised that long supply chains not only impede the fostering of social ties, but also makes accessing ethical and sustainable food more expensive. In establishing Sovereign Foods, Svensen says their work to bring the produce of various local, organic suppliers to the marketplace at a lower price, helps to make these ethically produced foods more accessible to the public. Accessibility to such produce and dry goods can subsequently lead to many other beneficial food practices, as Svensen explained:

So, what we want to try and do is reduce the supply chain, allow

people to get access one step up the supply chain so they can get it more

affordably. And so by removing as many barriers to entry as we can,

then we can hopefully get people taking us up on it. And therefore, it’ll

be you know, increased community, local areas, increase in people

having access to healthy, wholefoods. Therefore, hopefully trying to

increase people’s skills in the kitchen, all those sorts of things.

Svensen’s work at Sovereign Foods captures the kind of culinary environment

Gatica longs for. Although the benefits and dynamics of social interactions around food—which included practices like produce sharing—were explored in Chapter 5, the contribution of enhancing community and reducing barriers to access on ethical and sustainable foods are included here in Chapter 8, as they illustrate how such relationships can promote a more mindful approach to shopping, cooking, and eating.

Another concept of breakfast that has become equally fetishised and ridiculed, and ultimately political part of Australian culinary culture is avocado on toast. Alana

Lowes, a finalist on season three of MCA, recounted the confidence of a Bundaberg café owner who “changed her whole menu to only cook what is in season in the

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region.” This meant that when avocados went out of season, avocado came off her menu. Lowes questioned, “But could you imagine if people took avocado on toast off the menus here in Brisbane?” The café owner’s environmentally-minded initiative thereby comes into conflict with a one of the most pervasive culinary trends. Lowes remarked however that “her [the café owner’s] customers trust her that there will be something else just as good as avocado on toast on the menu.”

Avocado on toast has reached such a point that it has become the centre of an economic debate between Baby Boomers and Millennials about housing affordability.

In October 2016, demographer, media commentator, and Baby Boomer Bernard Salt wrote a column in The Weekend Australian Magazine about hipster cafés which incited controversy around housing affordability, citing Millennials’ predilection for ordering avocado on toast at cafés as a reason why Generation Y are struggling to enter the property market:

I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled

feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to

eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family.

But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn't they be

economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out?

Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on

a house (Salt, 2016).

Avocado toast was not even the original target of the column, with Salt taking issue with hipster cafés more broadly, also commenting on the uncomfortable nature of using upturned milk crates as seats, difficult to read menus, loud music, and confusing toilet signage. It was the above comment linking the popularity of avocado on toast at cafés to the difficulty young people are having entering the housing market however,

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that attracted the most vociferous response. Ryan (2016) reported on some of the social media response, screen capturing a series of Tweets. These included statements like

“Bernard salt [sic] can pry my smashed avocado from my cold dead hands;”

“@BernardSalt is right of course, just give up $22 a week and you’ll have a deposit on a median priced house in Sydney in… 175 years;” and “Skipped smashed avocado for breakfast this morning. Excited to buy a house next week.” According to Ryan (2016),

Salt was “bemused.” He said, “I clearly touched the avocado zeitgeist in Australia […]

You can say a lot of things about Generation Y – they are remarkably tolerant – but you don’t mess with their breakfast” (Salt in Ryan, 2016). In a column of his own in response to the furore, Salt reinforced that his column was satire pointed at Baby

Boomers, targeting “their bodily breakdown and the conservatism of their thinking.”

Millennials however, took the comment in Salt’s original column to heart, as it ignored bigger contributions to housing unaffordability and turned “smashed avocado into an emblem of millennial indulgence” (Rychter, 2016). Lifestyle website Broadsheet reported collaborating with a few Melbourne cafes to put a “home saver” smashed avo item on the menu this week” (Rychter, 2016). These avocado toast dishes and their humorous names were used as a way of pushing back against Salt’s perceived insult.

The names chosen for these dishes included: “The Retirement Plan,” “The Baby

Boomer,” “Avonomics,” and “Corn-tract of Sale” and sold for $10 or $11 (Rychter,

2016). The intergenerational tension created over one dish highlights the multifaceted and highly political nature of food.

Although ethical and sustainable, it would not be unthinkable for Kate

McCartney and Kate McClennan of The Katering Show to sit at a café like King Arthur and claim “these days there are so many options available to people who can afford to have principles.” When talking about food trends and the fact King Arthur tends not

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to follow them, Gatica says the café’s location in New Farm means they “can get away with it.” The current median house price in the inner-city suburb is over $1.5 million.34

New Farm and neighbouring suburb, Fortitude Valley is an area synonymous with upmarket food culture in Brisbane. When talking to Emma and Matt whose long-term involvement with the deli scene in Brisbane and on the Sunshine Coast, they flagged areas like the James Street precinct, which spans the two suburbs, as a place where gourmet food culture emerged in the early 2000s. Despite ethical and sustainable approaches to food becoming more mainstream, the sentiments expressed in this chapter highlight that class and financial boundaries still exist.

Conclusion

This analysis has shown how popular media and cultural texts have played a significant role in shaping contemporary concerns around the impact of food production and consumption on the people who produce food, animals, and the environment. Throughout this chapter, respondents of varying wealth, education, and interest in food—whether they were from the household or industry sample— expressed concern regarding the impacts of their culinary choices, beyond personal health impacts. While a lot of the ethical and sustainable considerations discussed in this chapter were made were in relation to rethinking or altering the consumption of animal products, it is evident that respondents’ mindfulness of others and the environment was all encompassing, including changes to vegetable consumption, use of food packaging, and supporting local businesses instead of big corporations like supermarkets. At first glance, many of these behaviours appear to align with de

Solier’s conceptualisation of ethical food consumption that is based around altruism.

34 Price current at 12 May 2018 from https://www.realestate.com.au/neighbourhoods/new%20farm- 4005-qld

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Interviews revealed however that there were in many cases more self-centred motivations for pursuing ethical or sustainable options, whether it be saving money, or for better health. Erin’s transition to vegetarianism and later veganism is perhaps the most altruism-driven example evident in this research. That is not to say such practices are not worthy or useful. But these tensions highlight the pragmatic nature of everyday consumption, and the nuances in consumers’ thinking when selecting the food they do or do not eat. While some ethical and sustainable food practices offer money or health benefits, other practices are beyond the realm of everyday consumers.

This was most evident in relation to Claudia’s pursuit of higher welfare animal products, which came at a greater cost in money and time.

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Chapter 9: Conclusion

The night before sitting down to write the conclusion to this thesis, a friend and

I drove past an old fruit shop we used to frequent. It was perched on hill in Albany

Creek, a suburb about a half-hour drive northwest of Brisbane’s CBD. It was a long, rectangular building with a pantry and fridge section at one end that contained all sorts of interesting condiments and organic dairy products, with a juice bar at the other end of the store, and rows of fruit and vegetables in the middle. If you had gone a little overboard with your shopping, the friendly staff would help you carry your box of produce to the car. But unfortunately, the fruit shop is no more. It was demolished earlier this year, replaced by—of all things—the construction of a Hungry Jack’s outlet.

It is a poignant scenario for a number of reasons. There is a stinging irony in that a place that represented the approach to food that is promoted by celebrity chefs, other lifestyle experts, as well as government, was bulldozed to make way for deep fryers, grills, soft drink machines, and freezers. It is also a stark reminder that despite the many healthy, innovative, and conscientious consumption practices outlined by participants in this research, Big Food corporations are still in search of growth and profits. As a consequence, for great portions of the population, fast food is still a big part of their food realities.

The popularity of farmers’ markets, increased popularity of practices like composting, greater calls for consumers to pack reusable bags, straws, cutlery, and water bottles when going out to shop or get takeaway, and pressure on supermarkets to treat farmers and suppliers better, shows that contemporary society is seeking to slow down the world that people like the McDonald brothers and Ray Kroc sought to

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speed up. It seems that on some level, end-consumers are heeding the cries of people like farmer Joel Salatin. In Food Inc. Salatin lamented that rather than go back and address problems associated with industrial agriculture, Big Food sought technology- based solutions that enabled “greater efficiencies” to proceed, but in turn introduced more dangers to the process of food production. At the same time, the knocking down of fruit shops and replacing them with fast-food outlets shows that these corporations still have a place where the speed of everyday life shows the world has not really slowed down, and the instant satisfaction derived from a combination of fat, sugar, and salt is still sometimes irresistible.

The Introduction, as well as Chapters 2 and 3 established the rationale for this thesis through examining existing research on food media and food culture that have facilitated the emergence of post gourmet food culture. Chapter 2 established key cultural reference points of foodies, everyday foodies, as well as cultural omnivorousness in relation to food. The scholarship around these concepts tells the story of how the middle-class approach to food has evolved from conspicuous consumption to a more mindful approach that is concerned with experiences (de Solier,

2013b), as well as ethical, local, and exotic cuisines (Johnston & Baumann, 2015).

Furthermore, research related to everyday food realities of supermarket shopping, processed food and fast food revealed class tensions and contradictions around what kinds of food and food processing were socially acceptable, as well as the role of factors like time and money in food provisioning for households.

Chapter 3 meanwhile established how food media has evolved, focusing on the past half-century. It articulated that like food culture more broadly (as explored in

Chapter 2) the genre has become increasingly fragmented, both in content and form.

Class and gender have been persistent themes in culinary media, the examination of

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these and other themes however had occurred largely in a vacuum, confined to a particular text or platform. Now that post-broadcast technologies are changing the form, delivery and rituals around what would have once been considered simply television, this chapter argues that greater scholarly attention should be devoted to how audiences or users engage with different types of food media.

Chapter 4 detailed the selective ethnographically-informed approach taken in this research as well as the specific methods and procedures undertaken in the collection and examination of interview data, and textual analysis. This chapter introduced the household and industry participants, as well as explained the rationale behind pursuing FSE texts as an object of analysis. More specifically, the choices

Super Size Me and That Sugar Film were justified as anchoring points of Chapter 7 due to their representation of pivotal moments in the development of the FSE genre.

Through employing the methods of semi-structured in-depth interviews and textual analysis, I have been able to articulate an understanding of the reality of post-gourmet

Australia.

The first analysis chapter—Chapter 5—started at the fundamental level of social interactions and meaning around food. This exploration went beyond commensality to show how food helped bind not only friends or family together, but played a significant role in helping migrants build a home in Australia. This was both in the literal sense of making a living, but also food was seen as a signifier of the community one was part of, or wanted to belong to. The ability to be social while eating also played a role in determining what kind of dining establishments were popular or not. Some restaurants, markets, and cafés recognised this as important, as was evident in talking to members of industry, particularly Elie Moubarak, Nick Goding, and Carlos Gatica.

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Chapter 6 examined the role media plays in learning about food. Specifically, it looked at the types of platforms and content respondents utilised, how these platforms may be combined, and what benefits they received in terms of education or entertainment from engaging with food media. Notably it illustrated that traditional media, like cookbooks and food television have longevity in a digital foodscape and that digital and traditional food media tend to be used together.

Chapter 7 addressed the emergence of the FSE genre and primarily analysed texts rather than the interview data. This chapter situated these documentary films and non-fiction books as a subgenre of SIDs and as a category within which CCDs may be classed as a subgenre. A significant change in the genre over the last 10-15 years whereby the focus of these texts transitioned from critiques of junk or fast food, to broader interrogations of how supermarket food—including supposedly fresh meat and produce, as well as processed foods marketed as healthy—have adverse consequences for consumer health, farmers, animals, workers, and the environment.

This shift was illustrated through using Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super

Size Me and Damon Gameau’s 2014 That Sugar Film as markers from which this change could be mapped. This chapter analysed the key tropes of the FSE genre and highlighted how industry’s interference with science, as well as marketing processes make it increasingly difficult for consumers to discern what food choices are right for them.

In Chapter 8, the focus returned to the interview data in analysing the types of ethical and sustainable food practices that households have adopted and their views on the food system. Although Phoebe was one of the few respondents who directly referenced FSE texts, the views and practices participants spoke about, indicated that discourses promoted within FSEs had reached mainstream consciousness. A key

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concern among the household sample was how meat is treated as part of everyday diets, with respondents reducing meat consumption, consuming higher welfare meat, or refraining from meat consumption altogether. Furthermore, Erin gave insight into a vegan lifestyle, and her account helped to illuminate how much more accessible the approach had become in recent years. The desire to engage in ethical and sustainable consumption extended beyond considerations around animal products to encompass waste reducing measures through composting, as well as reducing the use of single- use plastic related to food consumption.

Key Findings

This wide-ranging qualitative research has provided an exploratory investigation into the post-gourmet foodscape in Australia. This culinary environment is marked by increasing complexity as a number of competing concerns have been brought to the attention of audiences via various media including FSEs. The empirical work of this thesis provides insight as to how everyday households negotiate the post-gourmet foodscape, their culinary priorities, and some of the difficulties they face.

The findings of this research can be distilled into three parts. First, the post- gourmet foodscape is complex culinary environment where there are not only a number of different culinary approaches available, which are underpinned by various health or sustainability concerns. A key way in which everyday audiences and consumers come into contact with these different culinary paradigms is through food media. In a post-broadcast era increasingly shaped by social media and streaming there is more space for a greater variety of voices and more ways to engage with content than in the broadcast era where television, print, and radio functioned—and were studied—in a more discrete manner. Chapter 6 highlighted the opportunities that studying food media as it is experienced in everyday life, rather than in a vacuum of a

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specific platform or text offers, in terms of understanding how platforms are understood by audiences and used together, or separately.

Second, this research established the Food System Exposé genre of documentary films and non-fiction books. Although these texts have existed for decades, and others like Lindenfeld (2011; 2010), Lindenfeld and Parasecoli (2018), Nash and Corner

(2016), and Bell, Hollows, and Jones (2017) have provided valuable insights and conceptualisations around documentaries and food films, the burgeoning production of these films—and books—had not yet been defined as a genre of its own.

Establishing the FSE genre recognises the growth in texts that interrogate and critique the industrial food system and calls for more ethical approaches from individuals and policy makers. The fact that such a rapidly growing body of texts exists should be one signal that culinary culture is at a critical juncture that cannot be ignored by government, industry, and consumers.

Finally, the proliferation of the FSE genre in combination with the uptake and interest in more ethical and sustainable approaches to consumption is indicative of a more mindful phase of culinary culture. The practices and beliefs of households and businesses that participated in this research show that considerations of personal health are only one factor of consideration when choosing how to shop or what to eat.

Consumers are taking into account the impact of food production on the environment, workers, farmers, and animals when shopping, cooking, and eating. These ethical and sustainable practices sometimes have personal health or monetary benefits, and some ethical approaches are not considered ethical according to other consumption paradigms—for instance consuming higher welfare animal products as opposed to veganism—but an altruistic element is still evident.

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Future Research

Since the bulk of this study’s analysis was written, Australia as well as the rest of the world has faced a challenge not seen since the Spanish Flu of 1918, in negotiating the COVID-19 pandemic. The immediate needs of supressing or eliminating the virus, tending to the sick, and mourning the dead have rightfully taken precedence. In drawing together threads of this thesis however, reflecting on how the pandemic is also reshaping or reorienting approaches to food is appropriate. Once bountiful with produce and stock, the threat of lockdowns has led to panic buying in supermarkets, bustling restaurants and cafés have been reduced to takeaway only service, and the highly transmissible nature of COVID-19 has led to an increasing reliance on digital technologies to minimise face-to-face interactions.

Prior to the pandemic, getting takeaway food and coffee in disposable containers was becoming increasingly viewed as passé, but now patronising cafés and restaurants in this way is seen as an act of supporting local business, and using disposables is the price of minimising the risk of transmitting COVID-19 while doing so. Instead of pondering whether to buy regular steak or grass-fed, ethically sourced steak, consumers scramble for whatever meat is available on supermarket shelves during periods of panic buying.

While culinary priorities during the pandemic have shifted somewhat, food’s place in popular culture remains prominent. In 2020, I published two popular and well- received pieces on news website The Conversation (see Kirkwood, 2020a; 2020b).

Notably, one of these articles was about the Dalgona Coffee trend that took hold in the early part of 2020 when many parts of the world were in the first significant COVID-

19 induced lockdown (Kirkwood, 2020b). Although Dalgona Coffee is essentially whipped instant coffee, the very simple concoction looked different, was something

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new to try, and was easily achievable at home. Subsequently, online searches for

Dalgona Coffee grew 1,800 per cent and 1,700 per cent during March and April 2020, respectively, and Dalgona Coffee videos were shared across social media platforms including Instagram, TikTok and Facebook (Kirkwood, 2020b).

The online searching and sharing around Dalgona Coffee was just one of the ways digital technologies interacted with food culture during the height of the pandemic. Food delivery services like Uber Eats had been in major Australian cities like Brisbane since 2016 (Davies, 2016). As delivery services like Uber Eats, as well as competitors like Menulog and Deliveroo complemented the option to collect takeaway meals, they too had to adjust their operations, providing options for contactless delivery to minimise risk of COVID-19 transmission (Starkey, 2020).

These occurrences only just begin to scrape the surface of how COVID-19’s impact intersects with food media, food culture and, importantly, the intervention of digital media in this mix.

With the abovementioned findings in mind, as well as the impacts of the pandemic, the emergence of a post-gourmet food culture in Australia presents clear avenues of further research that investigates the future of food provisioning in relation to consumers, businesses and industry, animals, and the environment. Throughout this thesis, alongside the growing awareness of the consequences of the industrial food system and a willingness to adopt ethical and sustainable behaviours, has been a need to balance this with everyday factors of limited time and money. Therefore, the most significant question to emerge from this research is that as the post-gourmet phase of culinary culture progresses, how will governments, industry, and consumers further the ethical and sustainable culinary practices that are becoming increasingly mainstream, but at the same time cater to demands for convenience, affordability, and

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safety during the pandemic? Furthermore, as food media has played a role in bringing

Australia’s culinary culture to this point, how can food media producers, whether they be professional or amateur take advantage of the affordances of the post-broadcast era to educate and entertain? Thereby keeping culinary pursuits at the forefront of

Australian everyday culture.

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Appendices

Appendix A

Food System Exposé Texts

Year Type Author/Producer/Director Title 1906 Book Upton Sinclair The Jungle 1962 Book Rachel Carson Silent Spring 1971 Book Frances Moore Lappé Diet for a Small Planet 1972 Book John Yudkin Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar is Killing us and What we can do to Stop it 1981 Film Frank Lisciandro The Sugar Film 1985 Book Nancy Appleton Lick the Sugar Habit 1997 Film Franny Armstrong, Ken McLibel Loach 2001 Book Eric Schlosser Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World 2002 Book Marion Nestle Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health 2003 Book Greg Critser Fat Land 2003 Book Ellen Ruppel Shell Fat Wars: The Inside Story of the Obesity Industry 2004 Film Morgan Spurlock Super Size Me 2004 Book Joanna Blythman Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets 2004 Book Kelly D. Brownell, Food Fight: The Inside Story of Katherine Battle Horgen the Food Industry 2004 Book Brian Halweil Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket 2005 Film Shaun Monson Earthlings

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Year Type Author/Producer/Director Title 2005 Book Morgan Spurlock Don't Eat this Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America 2005 Book William Leith The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict 2006 Book Joanna Blythman Bad Food Britain 2006 Book Michele Simon Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines our Health and how to Fight Back 2006 Book Michael Pollan The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals 2006 Book Peter Singer, Jim Mason The Ethics of what we Eat 2006 Book Eric Schlosser, Charles Chew on This: Everything you Wilson don't want to know about Fast Food 2007 Film Ian Cheney, Aaron Woolf King Corn 2008 Film Robert Kenner Food Inc. 2008 Book Paul Roberts The End of Food 2008 Book Michael Pollan In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto 2008 Book Eric Finkelstein, Laurie The Fattening of America: How Zuckerman the economy makes us fat, if it matters and what to do about it 2009 Book Jonathan Safran Foer Eating Animals 2009 Film Tom Naughton Fat Head 2009 Book Nancy Appleton Suicide by Sugar: A Startling Look at Our #1 National Addiction 2010 Film Joe Cross Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead 2010 Book David Kirby Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment 2011 Film Lee Fulkerson Forks over Knives

248 Appendices

Year Type Author/Producer/Director Title 2011 Film Marisa Miller Wolfson, Vegucated Demetrius Bagley, Frank Mataska 2011 Book Julie Guthman Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism 2011 Book Barry Estabrook Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed our Most Alluring Fruit 2012 Book David Gillespie Big Fat Lies: How the Diet Industry is Making You Sick, Fat and Poor 2012 Film James Colquhoun, Hungry For Change Laurentine Ten Bosch Carlo Ledesma 2012 Film Lori Silverbush, Kristi A Place at the Table Jacobson 2012 Book Raj Patel Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System 2012 Book Robert Lustig Fat Chance: The Hidden Truth About Sugar 2012 Book Joel Salatin Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World 2013 Book Michel Moss Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us 2013 Film Kate Geis, Rebecca Feeding Frenzy: The Food Rideout, Sut Jhally Industry, Marketing and the Creation of a Health Crisis 2013 Book Melanie Warner Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal

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Year Type Author/Producer/Director Title 2013 Book Anthony Winson The Industrial Diet: The Degradation of Food and the Struggle for Healthy Eating 2014 Film Damon Gameau That Sugar Film 2014 Film Kip Andersen, Keegan Cowspiracy Kuhn 2014 Book Sarah Boseley The Shape We're In: How Junk Food and Diets are Shortening Our Lives 2014 Book Philip Lymbery, Isabel Farmageddon: The True Cost of Oakeshott Cheap Meat 2014 Film Joe Cross Fast, Sick and Nearly Dead 2

2014 Film Stephanie Soechtig, Katie Fed Up Couric 2014 Film Troy Jones Overfed and Undernourished 2015 Book Joanna Blythman Swallow this 2015 Book Marion Nestle Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) 2015 Book Malcolm Knox Supermarket Monsters 2015 Film Michael Schwarz In Defense of Food 2015 Film Michèle Hozer Sugar Coated 2015 Film Jamie Oliver Sugar Rush 2015 Book Tim Lang Food Wars: The Global Battle Michael Heasman for Mouths, Minds and Markets 2016 Book Gary Taubes The Case Against Sugar 2016 Film Michal Siewierski Food Choices 2016 Film Matt Wechsler, Annie Sustainable Speicher 2016 Film John Papola At the Fork 2016 Film Jon Betz, Taggart Siegel Seed: The Untold Story 2017 Film Kip Andersen, Keegan What the Health Kuhn

250 Appendices

Year Type Author/Producer/Director Title 2017 Book Joel Fuhrman Fast Food Genocide: How Processed Food is Killing us and what we can do about it 2017 Book Chin Jou Superszing Urban America: How Inner Citites Got Fast Food with Government Help 2017 Film Pete Evans The Magic Pill 2017 Film Christopher Dillon Quinn Eating Animals 2018 Book Marion Nestle Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What we Eat 2018 Film Ronni Kahn Food Fighter 2018 Film Louis Psihoyos The Game Changers 2018 Film Chris Delforce Dominion 2019 Book Bee Wilson The Way We Eat Now: Strategies For Eating in a World of Change

Appendices 251