This book serves up an accessible, critical introduction to food television, providing readers with a solid foundation for understanding how culinary culture became pop culture via the medium of television.
The book follows FoodTV’s journey from purely instructional resource to a wide variety of formats, from celebrity chef and restaurant profiles to culinary travel and every manner of cooking competition from kids to cannabis. Tasha Oren traces the generic expansion of cooking on television as she argues for its development as a uniquely apt lens through which to observe and understand television’s own dramatic extension from network to cable to streaming platforms. She demonstrates how FoodTV became popular commercial television through its growth beyond instruction, response to industrial and cultural change, and a decisive turn away from an association with domesticity or femininity. The story of FoodTV offers a new understanding of how certain material, stylistic, and textual practices that make up television emerge as conventions, and how such conventions both endure and evolve.
This book is an ideal guide for students and scholars of media studies, television studies, food studies, and cultural studies.
1. Eating in Public: The Birth and Rebirth of The Food Network 2. Cuisine Victorious: Cooking Competitions from Cult to Blockbuster TV 3. On Plates and Platforms: The Chef Biography and the Extensions of Television 4. Baked In: Cooking in Viceland
Biography
Tasha Oren is Associate Professor in the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Department and Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Tufts University. Her books include Demon in the Box: Jews, Arabs, Politics and Culture in the Making of Israeli Television, the edited collections The Handbook of Contemporary Feminism (with Andrea Press), Global Asian American Popular Cultures (with Shilpa Davē and Leilani Nishime), Global Television Formats—Understanding Television Across Borders (with Sharon Shahaf), and other edited collections, essays, and articles.
