Joanne Hollows

Food and cultural studies

1. Food-Cultural Studies: Three paradigms 2. The Raw and the Cooked 3. Food, Bodies and Etiquette 4. Consumption and Taste 5. The National Diet 6. The Global Kitchen 7. Shopping for Food 8. Eating In 9. Eating Out 10. Food Writing 11. Television Chefs 12. Food Ethics and Anxieties

‘At least he’s doing something’: Moral entrepreneurship and individual responsibility in Jamie’s Ministry of Food

Jamie Oliver’s celebrity image has undergone various transformations since his debut as ‘the naked chef’. In this article, we focus on his recent series, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, locating it within debates about lifestyle television, class and neoliberalism. We identify a shift in his image from lifestyle expert to moral entrepreneur, involved with a range of social enterprises. We examine the show’s textual strategies, highlighting similarities with earlier forms of social exploration and contemporary depictions of the working class. We conclude with a consideration of how the show resonates with an emergent discourse that represents Britain as a broken society in need of political and social ‘healing’. In the show, representations of fast food, obese bodies, sink estates and poverty of aspiration delineated a general crisis demanding direct action by an inspirational figure. In this way, the show legitimated Jamie’s new role as a moral and social entrepreneur.

From River Cottage to Chicken Run: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the class politics of ethical consumption

Lifestyle television provides a key site through which to explore the dilemmas of ethical consumption, as the genre shifts to consider the ethics of different consumption practices and taste cultures. UK television cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls TV programmes offer fertile ground not only for thinking about television personalities as lifestyle experts and moral entrepreneurs, but also for thinking about how the meanings and uses of their television image are inflected by genre. In this article we explore how the shift from the lifestyled downshifting narrative of the River Cottage series to the ‘campaigning culinary documentary’ Hughs Chicken Run exposes issues of celebrity, class and ethics. While both series are concerned with ethical consumption, they work in different ways to reveal a distinction between ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ consumption practices and positions – positions that are inevitably classed.

Please don't try this at home: Heston Blumenthal, cookery TV and the culinary field

Abstract The British chef Heston Blumenthal is at the forefront of a well-publicized shift within high-end restaurant cuisine towards avant-garde innovation and experimentation. At the same time, Blumenthal has increasingly pursued a parallel career as a television chef. This article considers how Blumenthals TV shows rework the conventions of British cookery television through their foregrounding of cooking as an intellectual and aesthetic practice. It argues that this marks a break with the dominant form of TV cookery in the UK, in which cuisine is an achievable lifestyle practice, offering the promise of self-transformation and improvement. Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Stephen Mennell, the article discusses the ways in which such a televised demonstration of artistic integrity and autonomy has been used as a means to brand the celebrity chef as “a culinary alchemist” and to convert the symbolic profits accruing from culinary distinction into economic profits.

Making sense of urban food festivals: cultural regeneration, disorder and hospitable cities.

This article examines urban food festivals, and in doing so it carries out a case study of Nottinghams food and drink festival (NFDF). It contends that such festivals need to be understood in relation to local contexts, such as the reputation for alcohol-related disorder associated with Nottinghams night-time economy. Rather than being used to attract tourism, NFDF was primarily directed at existing residents of Nottingham, where it sought to produce particular kinds of guests who would be able to invest in the citys wider regeneration. Here, the article draws on recent academic work on hospitality in demonstrating how NFDF attempted to rebrand the city centre as a more hospitable place. It concludes by showing how visitors to NFDF exhibited a sense of generosity and pride, and argues that the meaning of urban food festivals cannot, therefore, simply be reduced to the logic of neoliberal governance.

Spare Rib, Second-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Consumption

This article examines the significance of representations of both consumer culture and consumption practices in the British feminist magazine Spare Rib during its initial years of publication from 1972 to 1974. The analysis identifies how the magazine combined an established feminist critique of consumer culture with guidance on responsible consumption practices. The dispositions towards consumption that are recommended to readers are shaped by four key values: these are health, the natural, economy and craft production. These values underpin a politics of consumption during a period in which Spare Rib attempted to negotiate a feminist identity. However, once this feminist identity was established, content centred around consumption rapidly diminished as it was apparently not “feminist” enough. The article questions how a “conventional” position was established against both consumer culture and consumption practices within second-wave feminism and raises questions about the impact of this position on feminisms relationship to both consumer culture and consumption practices today.