Food and Media

Practices, Distinctions and Heterotopias

Jonatan Leer, Karen Klitgaard Povlsen, Jonatan Leer, Karen Klitgaard Povlsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138546745
• eBook ISBN: 9781317134527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Food is everywhere in contemporary mediascapes, as witnessed by the increase in cookbooks, food magazines, television cookery shows, online blogs, recipes, news items and social media posts about food. This mediatization of food means that the media often interplays between food consumption and everyday practices, between private and political matters and between individuals, groups, and societies.

This volume argues that contemporary food studies need to pay more attention to the significance of media in relation to how we 'do' food. Understanding food media is particularly central to the diverse contemporary social and cultural practices of food where media use plays an increasingly important but also differentiated and differentiating role in both large-scale decisions and most people's everyday practices.

The contributions in this book offer critical studies of food media discourses and of media users' interpretations, negotiations and uses that construct places and spaces as well as possible identities and everyday practices of sameness or otherness that might form new, or renew old food politics.

1 Introduction

Jonatan Leer and Karen Klitgaard Povlsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315582603-1

Almost all human beings enact, but also reflect on, everyday practices to do with food consumption and media use on a daily basis. It has been this way for centuries. In this anthology, we focus on the various relations and interactions between food and media: between practices of representation of food in the media and practices of interpretation of mediated food by media users.

The contribution offered by this volume lies in its presentation of a range of methodological, theoretical and empirical perspectives on food, as represented in and practised through traditional and digital media – the internet, television, campaigns, books, magazines, etc. The geographical and disciplinary diversity of the articles reflects the importance of media in various spaces of food culture, as well as the importance of food in media products and media use. Increasing interest on the part of food scholars appears worldwide in the study of food through a media lens (Appadurai, 1988; Adema, 2000; Ashley et al., 2004; Bell and Hollows, 2005; Hollows, 2008; Halkier, 2010; Johnston and Baumann, 2010; Hollows and Bell, 2011; Naccarato and LeBesco, 2012;Rousseau, 2012 a, 2012 b; Johnson and Goodman, 2015; Leer and Kjær, 2015). This parallels the increased interest by media scholars in the importance of food for media producers and consumers in the past ten years (Bonner, 2005; Reilly, 2006; Miller, 2007; Bonner, 2009; Krogager et al., 2015; Rittenhofer and Povlsen, 2015; Thorsø et al., 2016).

In this volume we are not advocating the founding of a new concept or research tradition. However, we see the relation between food and media as interactive, and extremely important, as media pervade all spheres and all chains of contemporary food-ways, from certified labels to television chefs and blogs and recipes on the internet. So our overall aim with this volume is to show that contemporary food studies need to pay more attention to the significance of media in relation to how we ‘do’ food. Media need to be addressed in food studies, not only when they are at the centre of a project (for instance when studying gender and taste ideals in food television), but also when they are less obvious and less central (for instance an investigation of children’s food preferences could gain immensely from understanding how media play a role in children’s relations to food) – as demonstrated by Krogager and Eichner in this volume.

This volume offers ways to initiate and develop the media dimension of food cultures – both methodologically and theoretically – in its numerous arenas. The contributors move from single-media studies such as cookbooks or TV shows to cross-media studies of the uses of cookbooks, magazines, TV and internet. The volume thus shows the development from representation to reception or use; from studies that concentrate on the producer and texts to studies that focus on the receiver or user. Cultural studies, food studies and media studies are thus combined.

Though the chapters are diverse in their historical and geographical scope and in their methodological and theoretical perspective, all the contributions in this volume are unified, first and foremost, by their focus on articulations of sameness and diversity, difference and ‘otherness,’ in single as well as cross-media content and among media users. A second common factor is sensitivity towards the cultural contexts in which media are embedded. Although we see a tendency towards globalisation of media contents, we also see a strong tendency towards local contents and uses. Media formats and platforms are becoming more alike worldwide, yet at the same time more diverse in relation to use and in relation also to contents that are co-produced by users. Media and food may travel across cultures through export, in which case they may stay the same, or they may be transformed or adapted. Thus on the one hand we see the politics of media food as hegemonic, globalised and commercialised; but on the other, we are aware of the constructions of local diversities and cultural capital that are articulated in media food and in the uses and negotiations of the mediated representations.

These two common features are reflected in the chapters in this volume by the shared methodological understanding of food and media as ‘sayings,’ as well as ‘doings.’ On both macro and micro level, food-ways and identity are considered cultural practices – both done and as said – that are socially constructed, and that should therefore be understood in relation to the dynamics of their historical, social and cultural context.

Furthermore, three ideas run through the contributions and structure connections between the chapters. Firstly, all contributions understand media and food as practice, and accordingly discuss the composite relationship between media and food practices. An important key to comprehending this intertwinement is the second shared theme, that of distinction and taste. In the contributions of the book, both food practices and the uses and interactions with media tend also to be practices of taste. Hence, the social and mediated spaces in which both sets of practices are enacted have particular potential to express belongingness, diversity and a growing range of distinctions. The volume thus goes beyond Bourdieu in its attempt to rearticulate his central term of distinction. Throughout the volume, we operate with a post-Bourdieusian perspective as we understand distinctions as social and individual constructions in all spheres of life. Food distinctions and media distinctions intersect with other lifestyle distinctions. As taste practices demarcate boundaries and openings both locally and globally, a spatial approach is helpful in analysing the spaces of food and media. So, thirdly, Foucault’s reflections on counter-spaces – named heterotopias – and their relations to hegemonic spaces are suggested as an instrument to grasp the cultural significations and paradoxes of the spaces of distinction created by the food and media constellations. It is certainly in the opera-tionalisation of the concept of heterotopia for understanding the relationship between practice, distinction, food and media that the original contribution of this volume lies.

In this introduction, we develop these three ideas and we argue that the ideas of practice, distinction and heterotopia offer a productive way of thinking about and analysing the entanglements of food and media. Our goal is not to offer a one-size-fits-all solution for how to study food and media. Rather, the volume proposes a multitude of perspectives on the field, and a series of tools to investigate food and media within this framework. Our introduction to the chapters and their approaches to food and media will serve to illustrate this last point.

Media and food practices

In and outside media studies, an intense debate on mediatization and mediation (Couldry and Hepp, 2013; Jensen, 2013; Krotz and Hepp, 2014) has developed during the last ten years, with new considerations on the interplay between media, culture and society (Schulz, 2004; Krotz, 2007; Hjarvard, 2008; Livingstone, 2009; Lundby, 2009; Krotz and Hepp, 2014; Hepp et al., 2015) – not least in understanding the increasing relevance of media to various fields of society. Mediated communication or mediation is the more general term, denoting communication or representation processes, such as food as content in various media such as TV, the internet, magazines, etc. (Livingstone, 2009; Couldry, 2012; Livingstone and Lunt, 2014). Mediatization, on the other hand, is the conveying of historical transformations in social and cultural environments through communication and media, such as the growing importance of media institutions in society (Hjarvard, 2009; Hepp et al., 2015). The debate has sensitised media research for studies that empirically demonstrate how media institutions, media products, media texts and uses of digital media or mass-media consumption have become seamlessly interwoven in all aspects of everyday consumption and practices, including food (Jensen, 2013).

Media practices play a central differentiated and differentiating role in people’s everyday practices in relation to food, both in and outside the home. The interplay between what we eat and which media we use is complex, and it is best understood when we regard the two fields of consumption as an interrelating influence (Simmel, 1972). In this volume our understanding of mediatization lies on a par with Friedrich Krotz’s focus on the transformative potential of media tools as used by ordinary people to construct their social and cultural world (Krotz, 2009, pp. 24–25). Thus every historical period realises the interrelation between media and cultural fields such as food in specific ways that are to be explored empirically. Vera Alexander’s chapter offers a nineteenth-century example of how letters, drawings and books become tools for understanding new food items and constructing new food-ways in daily life. Jonatan Leer does the same in his chapter on how contemporary TV chefs construct taste regimes and masculinity on TV. As a whole the volume attempts to present specific cases on how media play an increasing role in culture and society:

It seems that we have moved from a social analysis in which the mass media comprise one among many influential but independent institutions whose relations with the media can be usefully analysed to a social analysis in which everything is mediated, the consequence being that all influential institutions in society have themselves been transformed, reconstituted, by contemporary processes of mediation.

(Livingstone, 2009, p. 2)

The concept of mediatization is such a move – one that can be researched in relation to empirical cases of social constructions of media, identity and culture in people’s daily lives. This has created a renewed interest in media as relays for both individual and societal food practices, focusing on ‘normal’ and routinised media practices embedded in the context of everyday life – which is why there is also a renewed interest in practice theory in media studies (Couldry, 2004; Halkier, 2010).

Practice theory lies in line with the social-constructivist view of human beings’ transformation and construction of the world they live in and by. Social structure and human agency are understood as a dynamic dialectic (Giddens, 1984). Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) demonstrated how practice theory might be applied to empirical data and cases. Reckwitz’s definition of practice makes it evident that it is highly relevant also for media and cultural studies:

A ‘practice’ (Praktik) is a routinised type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, form of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use….

A practice – a way of cooking, of consuming, of working, of investigating, of taking care of oneself of others, etc.

(Reckwitz, 2002, pp. 249–250)

All these activities are interwoven in media representations or uses of media. An entertaining TV show might inform viewers of new food items, or ways of cooking. Some viewers seek more information on the internet, or recipes, and look at labels or texts on food wrappings before they buy it, cook it and consume it. Food consumption is more often than not embedded in cross-media uses, from print to electronic and digital media of all sorts. Just as most media use and most food consumption is individual and social at the same time, the individual subject is a crossing-point for food and media practices – but in a social context of work, family ties, and living circumstances.

While practice theory, with a few exceptions (Couldry, 2004, 2012; Halkier, 2010; Hepp, 2013), has been blind to media as a relay to other practices, media researchers are beginning to see the possibilities in practice theory for media representations, as well as media reception, because of the intense mediatization of late modern societies. Couldry (2004), Hepp et al. (2015), and Krotz and Hepp (2014) were the first to urge media sociologists to reorient their research towards practice theory. The orientation towards practice theory in this volume is focused on practice in relation to discourse and interpretation, or sayings as doings (in part I); and on practice in relation to the production and use of media and media content, or doings as sayings (in part II) (Couldry, 2010, p. 2). Both fields are contained in the space of practices that organise our everyday lives, framed by conventions, habits and material, and technological possibilities and restrictions. In both fields, sayings and doings are considered actions, and in both fields, hierarchies, conventions and distinctions make some practices more mainstream than others, as Couldry argues in his debate with the anthropologist Hobart (Couldry and Hobart, 2010). In both fields, other practices than media and food-ways exis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Food practices in the media
• Part II Practices of food and media
• Index