The Practice of the Meal by Benedetta Cappellini David Marshall & Elizabeth Parsons

Author:Benedetta Cappellini, David Marshall & Elizabeth Parsons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Screening the practice of the meal

The practice of the meal is thoroughly medialised (Halkier, 2012), to draw our attention to the importance of representations, images and their canned delights, and to better understand them, not as mere froth or necessary distractions and fictions but as critical for understanding people’s relations with themselves and each other. Perhaps the most obvious is the cult of personality and celebrity that has always been paramount in the world of TV chefs. Think only of the machismo of Gordon Ramsay, the laddishness of early Jamie Oliver (Brownlie et al., 2005), or the beauty and allure of Nigella Lawson (Brownlie & Hewer, 2010). The screen grants such mortals presence, charismatic authority and the promise of imagined worlds of consumption for us all to dwell within if only for an hour or less. But, in a world of austerity where the clamouring pressures of duty and responsibility reign supreme, such baubles of affectation, such images of taste and status, can however quickly lose their appeal so tales must be rethought, re-spun and re-crafted to take account of changing circumstance, import and context. Such changes hint at what Giddens refers to as ‘deeply structured changes in the tissue of everyday life’ (1991: 17). From the moment of stylised cheffing to a counterworld of provisioning, caught in this shift are the supermarkets that are quickly losing their appeal (e.g. Tesco, Sainsbury’s), and the switch to price consciousness where the likes of Lidl, Aldi and the newly revamped Netto1 speak of contrasting market solutions in a climate in which pressure drops are all too necessary. From appearances and the stylisation of TV chefs in culinary contexts, to a renewed faith in necessity and austerity at all costs, supermarket loyalty is therefore recalibrating and notions of loyalty on the wane; why be loyal in a world that lacks commitment? Price comparisons are everywhere and now shopping around for whatever recipes life has to offer is on trend and encouraged by the supermarkets themselves. For as Giddens suggested:

Modernity is a post-traditional order, in which the question, ‘How shall I live?’ has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about how to behave, what to wear and what to eat – and many other things – as well as interpreted within the temporal unfolding of self-identity.

(1991: 14)

By this token, cultural intermediaries such as celebrity chefs, while easy to dismiss as irrelevant to the rituals and conventions of food as lived (Marshall, 2005), might be worth revisiting for the cultural tales and myths which they offer up for rethinking practices, routines and conventions; for understanding the shift in focus from the festive and celebratory to the everyday and mundane.

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