Food Media by Signe Rousseau

Author:Signe Rousseau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Published: 2012-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

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Fetishism and the Imagination: Heston Blumenthal and Nigella Lawson

Everyday Mythology

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996: 5) has characterized modernity as a space where ‘the imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies. It has entered the logic of ordinary life from which it has been largely sequestered’. In the case of food media, it is clear that imagination has played a central role for a long time. We have also seen how food television has, since its beginnings, straddled a tenuous boundary between education and entertainment, and between fantasy and reality. In their newly appointed roles as social activists, the examples of Rachael Ray and Jamie Oliver point to a fast-growing tendency to reprioritize the educational potential of food media, particularly in tandem with the proliferating food-related ‘risks’ of modern life. Here the work of the imagination is to envisage, through them, a ‘better’ and more healthful life.

That does not mean they do not continue to entertain. As the two previous chapters outline, for all of Ray’s and Oliver’s commitment to educating their audiences, entertainment remains primary to the experience of watching their shows. Even those viewers (and participants) who do gain knowledge show less evidence of having been educated in the sense of learning to think for themselves than of having experienced the thrill of having acquired a specifically celebrity-branded, and therefore potentially limited, type of knowledge. But there is no question that Ray and Oliver have each in their own way contributed to bringing the educational aspect of food media forcefully back onto the table and, along with it, the question of whose responsibility it is to fix our apparently sick world anyway.

This chapter looks at two British celebrity chefs who have made careers out of looking in the other direction. Heston Blumenthal and Nigella Lawson could hardly be more different in terms of their approaches to cooking, their route to fame or their television shows. But they have in common a powerful, and admittedly compelling, penchant for indulging in the type of food, cooking and eating that can exist only where questions of economics, health and social responsibility do not. Together, they exemplify the strongest vicarious and imaginary function of food television. This is not because it really is impossible to learn anything from them, or to recreate at least some of their dishes in an everyday kitchen, but because their brands are built on fetish.

Like the phrase ‘food porn’, ‘fetish’ is a word that has been normalized in food media. One of the central arguments of this book is that chefs have become superstars because many people fetishize food, and I am not the first to claim that we are food fetishists. But like ‘food porn’, the term ‘fetish’ is too often cast in a playful gesture that (like its conceptual relative, ‘obsession’) leaves little room for anything unpleasant or disquieting. Witness Anthony Bourdain’s recent

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