1st Edition
Food and American TV Constructing Identity in Bite-Sized Narratives
The Mundane Made Meaningful: Introducing Food Studies Approaches to Television Analysis
Carrie Helms Tippen and Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis
Chapter 1: Television’s Literary Appetite: Tracing American TV’s Evolution, Academic Recognition, and Food as Narrative Device
Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis
PART I: Reruns
Chapter 2: The Post-Scarcity Dystopia: The Evolution of Food and Cooking in Star Trek (1966-2024)
Maureen Costura and Daniel Costura
Chapter 3: Porkchops, Applesauce, and Escapism: Gender, Nostalgia, and Food Culture in The Brady Bunch
Blue Profitt
Chapter 4: Pastries, a Guilty but Harmless Pleasure in The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Benjamin Campion
PART II: Prestige Programming
Chapter 5: The Serious Business of Cooking, Feminism, and Commercial Aesthetics from Lessons in Chemistry
Emily J. H. Contois
Chapter 6: Culinary Contrasts in Shameless and Reflections on American Identity
Jarvis Tyrell Curry
Chapter 7: Table for One at the Yankee Doodle Burger Barn: Food, Identity, and Chosen Family in Ted Lasso
Rebecca D. Mazumdar
Chapter 8: Building a Monster out of Rib Bones: Barbecue and Barbarism in House of Cards
Carrie Helms Tippen
Chapter 9: “Every Second Counts”: The Bear’s Culinary Musicality and Confused Temporality
Jordan Fallon
Chapter 10: Ballaboosta to Ballbuster: Jewish Female Archetypes in the American Sitcom
Nathalie Ross
PART III: Family Drama
Chapter 11: “I Can’t Live on Rabbit Food, I’m a Warrior!”: Small Screen Food and Supernatural’s Sad Story of That Afternoon
Anna Caterino
Chapter 12: To Protect and to Serve … the Food: Around the Family Dinner Table in Blue Bloods
Brygida Gasztold
Chapter 13: Latinxs Doing Cooking on the Small Screen: Exploring Representations of Food and Gender in Gentefied, Love, Victor, and Pose
Joshua I. Lopez
PART IV: Comfort Watching
Chapter 14: The Pie Hole: Traditions, Foodscape, and Community in Pushing Daisies
Alissa Burger
Chapter 15: Food, Loneliness, and Community in Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building
Ruth G. Garcia and Jody R. Rosen
Chapter 16: Breaking and Making the Body: Subverting Sad-Girl Food Narratives in Televisual Breakups
Andrea Adolph
Biography
Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis is Associate Professor of Literary Studies, working at the Institute of English Studies at The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. She is the author of Race and Repast: Foodscapes in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (2022) and coauthor of Pathologizing Black Bodies: The Legacy of Plantation Slavery (2023).
Carrie Helms Tippen is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Education at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, USA. She is the author of Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (2018) and Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (2025).
