Steve Jones

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.

Some investigations into non-passive listening

Our knowledge of the function of the auditory nervous system is based upon a wealth of data obtained, for the most part, in anaesthetised animals. More recently, it has been generally acknowledged that factors such as attention profoundly modulate the activity of sensory systems and this can take place at many levels of processing. Imaging studies, in particular, have revealed the greater activation of auditory areas and areas outside of sensory processing areas when attending to a stimulus. We present here a brief review of the consequences of such non-passive listening and go on to describe some of the experiments we are conducting to investigate them. In imaging studies, using fMRI, we can demonstrate the activation of attention networks that are non-specific to the sensory modality as well as greater and different activation of the areas of the supra-temporal plane that includes primary and secondary auditory areas. The profuse descending connections of the auditory system seem likely to be part of the mechanisms subserving attention to sound. These are generally thought to be largely inactivated by anaesthesia. However, we have been able to demonstrate that even in an anaesthetised preparation, removing the descending control from the cortex leads to quite profound changes in the temporal patterns of activation by sounds in thalamus and inferior colliculus. Some of these effects seem to be specific to the ear of stimulation and affect interaural processing. To bridge these observations we are developing an awake behaving preparation involving freely moving animals in which it will be possible to investigate the effects of consciousness (by contrasting awake and anaesthetized), passive and active listening.

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.

Food writing and food cultures The case of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson

In spite of a growth in sociological and cultural analyses of food practices, little attention has been paid to food writing and cookery books. This article will seek to rectify this by analysing the work of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. We argue that their work not only belongs to a predominantly male tradition of gastronomic writing, but that it also seeks to salvage certain forms of female domesticity. While this represents a break with tradition, the particular force of David and Grigson’s work lies in its appeal to culinary authenticity. If the techniques of modern food production threaten the unique flavours of authentic foods, then David and Grigson turn initially to forms of continental cuisine, and then eventually to the traditions of English cuisine, as an antidote to the drive of modernity. We conclude that their response to the processes of modernity is thus an ambivalent one, and one which provides some useful insights into contemporary food concerns.

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.