managing through our mouths: producing taste on the food network

MOBILIZED IDENTITIES: MEDIATED SUBJECTIVITY AND CULTURAL CRISIS

IN THE NEOLIBERAL ERA

EDITED BY CAMERON MCCARTHY,

ALICIA KOZMA, KARLA PALMA-MILLANAO, MARGARET FITZPATRICK,

AND NICOLE LAMERS

First published in 2013 in Champaign, Illinois, USA by Common Ground Publishing LLC as part of the Global Studies book series Copyright © Cameron McCarthy 2013 All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the applicable copyright legislation, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mobilized identities : mediated subjectivity and cultural crisis in the neoliberal era / edited by Cameron McCarthy, Alicia Kozma, Karla Palma-millanao, Margaret Fitzpatrick, and Nicole Lamers. pages cm ISBN 978-1-61229-378-3 (pbk : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61229-379-0 (pdf) 1. Group identity. 2. Nationalism. 3. Transnationalism. 4. Cosmopolitanism. 5. Culture diffusion. I. McCarthy, Cameron. HM753.M63 2013 305--dc23 2013048104 Cover image credit: Karla Palma-Millanao

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Chapter 1: Managing through Our Mouths: Producing Taste on the Food Network

Alicia Kozma As James Clifford (1988) has straightforwardly posited, “To say that the individual is culturally constructed has become a truism” (p. 92). It is, then, the work of cultural studies to investigate, and make sense of, the ways in which this construction functions, and of its reverberations. Television, as a widely available and omnipresent cultural and communicative force, provides a rich space through which to examine the construction, production, and management of culture. The recent trajectory of television studies has been one focused on a medium in transition. Consequentially, the development and deployment of post-television theory, generated by the significant and rapid changes in the technical, narrative, and structural evolutions of televisual programming since the 1990s, is emerging as an influential paradigm.

Post-television theory contemplates the effects that such changes as the rise in multichannel delivery, the diminished broadcast networks, the impact of technical innovations like satellite delivery and digital recording devices, multinational corporate media ownership, convergence culture, and the change in audience participation have all played in the reconceptualization of the meaning of television as a medium (Spigel, 2004). One of its primary areas1 of interest has been the development of niche cable stations as a result of the move away from broadcasting toward narrowcasting. The advent of narrowcasting strategies in television production has moved quickly past its original concern with individual program development, and is now best represented in the onslaught of niche cable networks.

Niche networks are dedicated to providing programming streams which capitalize on an overarching interest of their dedicated audiences. One of the most successful niche networks to develop over the past fifteen to twenty years is the 1 The implementation of post-television as an industry practice has been keenly felt in the operationalization of convergence regimes, specifically implementing multiple forms of viewership, distribution, and marketing across various screens and technological platforms. This can be understood, in part, as a post-Fordist development of flexible television systems meant to inundate consumers with consistently accessible programming, and importantly, advertising.

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Food Network. Broadcast into over 90 million homes daily, Food Network has laid claim to a significant television audience share and staked out a foothold in the popular culture landscape of the United States. As such, Food Network represents two very important evolutionary steps in the operationalization of post-television: it has transitioned itself beyond a simple network channel and into a constitutive brand, and it has employed that brand as a tool for the production and management of culturally constructed taste.

Both of these developments speak to a larger system of reference within the industrial production of contemporary television networks, one that is constructed around the rise in reality television programming as a stable, cheap, and easily reproducible genre, as well as a system that is largely built on the neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility, care of the self, and in particular, care of the body and domestic space. The Food Network capitalizes on these dual forces to integrate a focus on nutrition, a particularly salient discourse currently circulating within the Unites States, to assimilate the growing preoccupation around nutrition and food modernization into a commercial enterprise and site for the generation of taste-related sensibilities and behaviors across the public sphere. This, in part, is the network’s contribution to the development of post-television past simple concerns around convergence and into the realm of lifestyle management through the creation of a channel as brand, and a brand that serves to foster the development and surveillance of the taste-related habitus of the body politic.

Building off this idea of Food Network as a new iteration of post-television in its emphasis on channel as brand, this work will attempt to unpack the impact of the brand and its ideology through the production and management of taste as a function of neoliberal domestic citizenry. These performances, the production and management of domesticity, grounded in Foucault’s technologies of the self, develop into a type of household citizenship, which is marked by financial management, nutritional management, the consumption of specific/classed food items, and the highlighting of the “family meal” as the centerpiece of the construction and maintenance of the nuclear family. These interventions build on a tradition of taste culture production through instructional cooking programs, a tradition that stems from the The French Chef (1963-1973) with Julia Child, which worked to impart the knowledge and palate for classic French cuisine and methods, long held as the standard of high gastronomy, onto the American public.

Continuing this tradition, the Food Network is engaged in a televisual campaign focused on operationalizing cultural taste and self-government through education and expert intervention. These interventions depend on two critical factors. The first is a process of establishing an intimate relationship between Food Network personalities and the viewers. Building on this is the second factor, which focuses on the cultivation of the reputations of the network personalities as reliable experts and knowledgeable educators. These two vectors intersect, positioning the network personalities and their viewers in a relationship of professional and apprentice. From this relationship develops the foundation upon which expert inventions are dispensed and consumed.

In attempting this project, the broader goal of this investigation will be to make an intervention into post-television literature, calling for a greater emphasis on the ideological changes endemic to post-television and the effect of these changes on the function of television in contemporary cultural life. To effectively

MANAGING THROUGH OUR MOUTHS 3

accomplish this, it is necessary to combine multiple approaches, and as such this chapter will utilize the lens of the political economy of television, cultural analysis, and institutional and organization evaluations, combined with a discursive evaluation of the textual production of representative Food Network programs. This discursive evaluation will consider not just the programs themselves—including Chefography (2007-present), Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee (2003-present) and Sandra’s Money Saving Meals (2009-present), The Next Iron Chef (2007-present) and Chopped: Masters (2009-present) and Ten Dollar Dinners (2009-present)—but also the construction of the on-air talent, many of whom are not only intimately tied to the Food Network as a brand extension, but whom have also “crossed over” to become non-Food Network television personalities as well.2

Using a theoretical framework that draws on post-television theory, affect, and the conjuncture of Foucaultian and Bourdieuian conceptualizations of taste, this chapter attempts to unveil the ways in which we can understand how the channel as brand has lead to an intervention in the ways in which Food Network combines the two overarching ideologies, intimacy creation and the cultivation of experts and educators, to produce and reproduce neoliberal household citizenship. It is, however, first necessary to tackle to complex issue underlying not only my analysis but the claims of Food Network as a whole: taste.

Theorizing Taste For the purposes of this project and its relation to the medium of television, the ideas of both Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault will be represented as a type of hybrid logic. Television functions as a set of behaviors and practices which are organized around its use and also modeled through its programming. Therefore television, much like taste, is both theory and material practice. In order to fully understand the role that television is playing in constructing what I am calling household citizenship, taste must be understood as both aspirational and implementable. Simply put: Bourdieu’s theories of taste and taste cultures will be positioned as aspirational values modeled by televisual programming, which the viewer is taught to work toward through a strategic deployment of Foucault’s technologies of power and the self. This formulation is in no way to marginalize the specific practices contained within Bourdieu’s ideas of taste, nor should it discount the aspirational functions of Foucault’s technologies. Rather, by breeding Bourdieu and Foucault in dialectic rather than in tension a strategic deployment of both high theory and practical operationalism will serve as the foundation for the intervention this project works to put forth.

Critical to this undertaking, then, is positioning this project within the preexisting theoretical constructions of taste and taste cultures put forth by both theorists. Taste, in a Bourdieuian framework is “[…] the propensity and capacity 2 A representative example of a Food Network on-air personality who transitioned to a broader audience is Rachael Ray, who currently hosts a successful daytime talk show on CBS, a show which was created by Oprah Winfrey after several successful appearances by Ray on Winfrey’s own talk show. Ray has produced 21 cookbooks, become a television producer in her own right, and has won four Daytime Emmy’s for her talk show.


to appropriate (mentally or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices […]” (Bourdieu, 1984, pg. 174.). This allows the appropriator to construct themselves according to the culture and taste level associated with their chosen objects and/or practices. Bourdieu’s interest in taste is one which is heuristically constructed, as he sees these issues as vital to the application of the construction of everyday power relations and the functioning institutions, such as schools, which reinforce those power relations. Taste culture, then, serves as a dominating force in, and expression of, cultural habits, social status, and class status. Endemic to the cultivation and expression of taste is cultural capital, which functions as the accumulated knowledge that one acquires through their upbringing and education (Bourdieu, 1984).

Cultural capital functions as social cache in three forms: embodied capital, objectified capital, and institutional capital. Embodied capital is akin to inherited capital: those tastes, traditions, and aesthetic appreciations that are passed through the family structure. Objectified capital speaks to the ownership of cultural goods and the ability for individuals to “consume” culture through ownership. Institutionalized cultural capital refers to credentials or institutional affiliations, often academic, which speak to an individual’s intellectual and systemized pedigree.

Bourdieu sees these forms of capital as integral to cultural and social production and reproduction, specifically in the context of maintaining distinct taste level and social class structures. The generational transmission of cultural knowledge serves to both reproduce and expand upon existing knowledge, which in turns maintains the boundaries of the social class to which it belongs (Bourdieu, 1973). This is achieved through the structural reproduction of cultural agents (read: classed individuals), imbued with the capacity (read: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized cultural capital) to reproduce the cultural and social structure they are indoctrinated into. In this way, cultural capital and its associated tastes, build in layers, from generation to generation, making it harder to demolish the gap between those social classes afforded large amounts of cultural capital, whom are associated with “high” culture, and those with low amount of cultural capital, whom are associated with “low” or “mass” culture. Although these historical constructions of cultural capital will change over time, their essential function will remain the same. Therefore, the ability of these cultural agents to appropriately replicate their cultural inheritance informs the social and cultural reproduction cycle.

Accordingly, taste and its corresponding taste cultures serve as drivers of cultural practice. Taste cultures are used as markers and functions of the class they are born of, establishing and reinforcing social hierarchy. Members of various taste cultures use their cultural consumption to communicate their status, both to their fellow taste culture insiders as a marker of belonging, and to outsiders as a system of group boundary demarcation. This is consumption as classification. Taste cultures, and the cultural capital necessary to form them, serve as a discrete set of skills, which are necessary to demonstrate the cultural competence required to be considered a legitimate representation of the “high” culture dialectic. This demonstrates how taste cultures wield cultural exclusion as a type of power.


Taste, then, is formed, in large part, through the intersecting vectors of social institutions, systemized thought processes, and symbolic power. Symbolic power, for both Bourdieu and Foucault, is of primary importance in this triangular relationship, as power is viewed as widely disseminated, and often unquestionably accepted, in the everyday world (Bourdieu, 1993). Foucault sees symbolic power as largely inseparable from forms of economic and political power, and as such highlights a “[…] connection between the multiplicity of rationalities in a society (and among societies) and the dispersion of how and where power is exercised” (Ouellette and Hay, 2008, pg. 9). In his essay “Technologies of the Self,” Foucault describes a system of technologies which individuals employ in multiple permutations in order to better understand their own human condition. Two of these technologies, of power and of the self, are most critical when considering the function of taste as a structuring cultural form. These technologies are described as:

[…](3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality (Foucault, 2012).

Technologies of power, then, are the economic, political, and social forms of power exercised on individual self-production, bearing down as external forces, molding the self into a dominated citizen. Technologies of the self involve a consistent process of working on and caring for oneself as a matter of obligation to oneself (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). Care of the self does not employ inherent knowledge. Rather it is an outcome of applying learned knowledge sets, constructed according to historical context, as a ritualized self-improvement process.

For Foucault, these two forms combine into the idea of governmentality. As a product of these two technologies, Foucault uses the term governmentality to demonstrate his belief that power is born of expertise, and the systems of knowledge and processes of social institutions (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). Therefore, the broad diffusion of power as institutionalized expertise helps to manage spheres of social self-governance. One of these spheres can be read as the sphere of individual cultural construction, as subjects are encouraged to create themselves in and through dominant cultural norms. Taste cultures and their associated cultural capital are tools for, and representatives of, technologies of power and of the self, as individual subjects create themselves as cultural productions.

The joining then of a Bourdieuian aspriational taste culture with the Foucaultian practicality of technologies of the self allows for the Food Network to accomplish two critical things: the channel establishes a model taste culture for its viewers to aspire to, and gives them the tools to implement those aspirations through their instructional and entertainment programming and its related


purchasable products. The network, then, is not only creating an optimal taste location, it is giving its viewers a roadmap, via its programming, detailing how to navigate the self-development and domestic practices necessary to achieve citizenship in this taste location. It is perhaps this last point, that of citizenship, which becomes critical to understanding not only how, but why, Food Network audiences are propelled into this specific type of cultural, and self, production. As such, I will now turn to a consideration of household citizenship.

Televising Taste Production, Branding Household Citizenship Potentially, what makes the Food Network so compelling to its vast audiences is its ability to position itself as integral to the most basic, and nostalgic, aspects of contemporary life: food, home, and family.3 It achieves this privileged position by constructing itself as a “lifestyle” network: a televisual space where audiences can learn how to create and sustain a specifically cultured and classed outward manifestation of a private lifestyle. The function of Food Network, then, as one of the most popular and conspicuous lifestyle networks, is to capitalize on the audience’s desire to be acknowledged for acquiring and demonstrating an appropriate lifestyle by providing them with the branded television education and purchasable product tools to achieve this.

Originally launched in 1993 as the TV Food Network, the Food Network is primarily owned by Scripps Networks Interactive, with a minority ownership share controlled by the Tribune Company. A combination of both episodic and one-time programming, Food Network began organized around shows focused on sharing instructional cooking knowledge. The programming on the network is currently divided into two streams: “Food Network in the Kitchen,” which holds the original focus on instructional cooking and airs during daytime hours, and “Food Network Nighttime,” which is food-related entertainment programming that airs in the evening and prime-time hours.

Food Network attracts a fairly defined audience demographic, with some notable shared characteristics that can be used to define their primary viewership as a “domestic demographic.” A claim of a domestic demographic represents an industry-presumed imagined community of “typical” audience members for the channel: iterations of non-working or work-at-home individuals who are responsible for the domestic management of their household A sample of these demographics constructs the Network’s audience as one which is: 68% female; 69% homeowners; median age of 45 years; 26% with 2+ children living at home; 55% have prepared 2+ dinners at home within a week; and with a median 3 Nostalgia is becoming, more and more, an important part of contemporary television culture, particularly within the reality television genre. Recent reality television shows like Breaking Amish (2012-present), Colonial House (2004) and Frontier House (2002) all contain dominant narratives about the benefits of simple living, family time, and community bonding, and how these activities, considered social necessities, have been eroded in modern society. Most recently (2012), TLC aired a special on a number of couples in Orange County, California, who choose to live their entire lives as if it was still the 1950s. The show, Wives with Beehives, was aired as a special but is expected to be picked up as a full series due to its high ratings. This is, of course, just a small selection of programs which advance a narrative of nostalgia.


household income of $71,133 (scriptsnetworksdigital.com). Its television programming combined with its incredibly popular foodnetwork.com website, which hosts over 14 million unique visitors per year, the Food Network Magazine, the “In the Kitchen” mobile phone application, and an endless line of purchasable products, has elevated the network to the number seven cable television brand in the United States (Vasquez, 2011). These variously integrated platforms have helped the network to develop into a lifestyle brand in its own right. Although Food Network is certainly not the only example of a lifestyle network, it is perhaps the most compelling example of a channel who’s branding of its own market and demographics is produced as a constitutive whole, rather than a channel, audience, and brand fragmented by franchises or even individual shows. Here it is helpful to compare Food Network against another popular lifestyle channel, Bravo. Although Bravo contains within it several marketable branded franchises, including The Real Housewives franchise and the Top Chef franchise, it has yet to find a cohesive identity for itself as a total channel brand.

How, then, has this constitutive channel brand, and its associated audienceship as a domestic demographic, been implemented? Endemic to the construction of a domestic demographic is the notion of household citizenship, as it is this citizenship that serves as a primary motivator for network viewership. As stated previously, the creation of household citizenship is dependent on a combination of four factors: financial management, nutritional management, the consumption of specific/classed food items, and the highlighting of the “family meal” as the centerpiece of the construction and maintenance of the nuclear family. The network works to build education around, and indoctrination into, these four intersecting vectors both through its choice of programming, but also through the discourse’s that are established through said programming, as well as the expert/education dialectic these discourse’s promote.

These assemblages of citizenship and discourses will be discussed in detail in the following sections, but in order to fully gauge their role in creating household citizenship a note on the connection between citizenship and neoliberalism will be helpful in establishing the linkage between citizenship and the function of producing and managing taste. Citizenship in this context is an affinity more closely aligned with Raymond’s Williams structure of feeling, as a way of naming the lived experiences of life during a specific time and place, then it is to its traditional function, which Aihwa Ong articulates as the “[…] connection between government and citizenship as a strictly juridicallegal relationship” (2006, pg. 6). Under a neoliberal regime, this citizenship is a responsibility that is placed squarely at the feet of the consumers, by requiring them to activate their citizenship, in part, through something Ouellette and Hay term life interventions.

A life intervention, within the scope of reality television, is a television program which mobilizes professional motivators and lifestyle experts to help individuals overcome obstacles in all aspects of their personal, professional, and domestic lives (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). This incorporates a very specific teaching function into reality television shows, one which replaces the state’s role in helping to produce fully-functioning citizens. Ouellette and Hay see this as a contemporary iteration of the 19th century vision of the role of social work, and social workers, in the construction of appropriate and incorporated citizens. If social work, in its historical role, was constructed as a space where individuals


could learn approved codes of conduct and composition for their domestic, parental, community, and professional lives, Ouellette and Hay see reality television as utilizing social work’s “[…] twin legacy as a professionalized helping intervention and as an indirect and diffused mode of behavioral guidance and social control”(2008, pg. 64). The critical difference is that reality television is distinctly removed from the state, which leaves the modeling of social control in the hands of the corporations who produce these programs. This is a case of the market influencing not just the financial, but also the social, aspects of citizenship. As such, household citizenship becomes the currency the viewers and network trade, as the networks demand citizenship as the entrance fee into the network’s preferred taste culture and as the viewer’s use it to justify their taste culture membership.

Not surprisingly, this entrance fee is intimately linked to the rhetoric of choice and consumption. For Bourdieu “Taste is an acquired disposition […] to establish and mark differences by a process of distinction which is not (or not necessarily) a distinct knowledge[…] since it ensures recognition (in the ordinary sense) of the object without implying knowledge of the distinctive features which define it” (1984, pg. 466). Food Network equates dispositional acquisition with consumption, and specifically with the choice implicit in consumption practices. Viewers are expected to choose to prepare Food Network recipes, purchase Food Network products, learn from Food Network celebrity chefs, and watch Food Network programming in order to acquire both the knowledge and affect of the network’s preferred taste culture. This acquisition is, like the function of the life intervention, a twisted vestige of 19th century ideals around class and its performance. As Stuart Ewan notes, “The conviction that personal status looms as a ready possibility for everyone is a faith that was fueled by nineteenth-century industrialism. The proliferation of styled goods, which crossed into the lives of an increasing number of people, provided a spectacle of upward social mobility” (1988, pg. 59). For those who do not choose, or potentially worse, who make the wrong choice, their position within the taste culture, their ability to be socially mobile, is tenuous at best.

This taste culture is specifically classed, with an emphasis on creating consumption more closely aligned with a elite construction of food and food culture, or what Johnston and Cairns term foodscapes, which intimately relate food practices to “[…] specific places, people, and political-economic systems” (2012, pg. 230). Markers of these economic systems are subtly imbedded in Food Network programming, from the expansive East Hampton kitchen of Ina Garten, to the ultra-modern Los Angeles kitchen and plethora of expensive equipment and tools of Giada De Laurentis, to the close-up shots of the multiple, and extremely large, diamond rings that Paula Deen wears while cooking. The style, then, of class that these spaces are displaying becomes critically important to the ways in which viewers understand themselves and their potential for class and cultural mobility. As Ewan posits, “In American society today—where ‘image management’ has become both a lucrative business and a matter-of-fact ‘necessity’ in commerce, industry, politics, and interpersonal relations—style has ripened into an intrinsic and influential form of information” (1988, pg. 259). The subliminal discourse of economic class also presupposes that viewers possess the economic, temporal, and production means necessary to emulate the proposed


taste culture. Viewers, then, are expected to produce themselves as members of a network-generated taste culture through the accumulation of the knowledge, products, and importantly, affect, integral to household citizenship.

Jack Bratich’s (2010) project of affective convergence is useful here, and is defined as the sum of reality television’s parts, as it combines, connects, and accumulates a program’s affect. For Bratich (2010), affect serves as a critical filter through which reality television contributes to the shaping of selves. As such, affect must be understood as subpersonal, or individual, capabilities (as in stimulations and impulses) and interpersonal capabilities (as in social relations). It is the interactions of these two capabilities which form subjects through a circular construction: affect can form a subject while subjects can form affect.

Subject formation, then, can be read as a product of affect. However, it can also be understood as a process of subjectivation, or “[…] practices by which selves are made up or the processes by which individuals come to constitute themselves via a series of techniques, texts, and interactions” (Bratich, 2010, pg. 56). The process of multiple interactions of different constructions of self allows for various points of interruption in the process, serving as sites of reconstruction and perfection of self along normative citizenship standards. It is the Food Network’s neoliberal rhetoric of choice that works to form these reconstructions and perfections, producing and reproducing a managed and preferred household citizenship for its viewers.

Intersecting with issues of choice, affective convergence, and classed taste culture creation, the cultivation of household citizenship is also highly dependent on the position of the network as a brand in and of itself. Essential to this development is the positionality of the network within the post-television landscape, and its function as a tool. Indeed, it is the power of the Food Network to present itself not as a loosely related set of texts, but rather as a wholly constructed universe which allows for the generation and presentation of a single preferred taste culture. In her book The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Amanda Lotz defines the function of television as one of a culture industry in and of itself, conceptualized as an extension of Horkheimer and Adorno’s original construction of said term. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) contend that all of society, indeed every sphere of life, is organized through the principles of the factory, in essence producing a “culture industry” around which modern life is organized. Critical to this is the changing relationship between work and leisure, noting that as modern consumers, labor is an intrinsic function of leisure. As such, during leisure time an individual is constantly producing and reproducing the principles of the factory. Based on this industrial perspective, cultural hegemony is established as a hyper-rational mode of production mixed with the fantasy of the culture industry. This Fordist construction of culture leads to industrial monopolies producing cultural monopolies, and a single, overarching hegemonistic culture is established.

Lotz expands on a model of cultural hegemony by locating the function of post-television as a culture industry working as a commercial enterprise, seeking to maximize profits while producing programs that are important creative and cultural forms. The emphasis on creative and cultural forms evolves Horkheimer and Adorno’s original thesis, and positions television as a medium that straddles the divide between cultural institution and cultural industry. This hybridity of


institutionalization and industrialization generates a network’s ideology around taste cultures as normative, and indeed “[i]deological theory suggests that by making a position appear to be commonsense and natural, it becomes a cultural norm” (Mittell, 2010, pg. 275).

Therefore, it is a combination of Food Network programming and the role of television as a space of meaning production which works to reinforce the cultural normativity of specific taste cultures. The programming communicates the social values and beliefs of household citizenship, which in turn reproduces cultural hegemony. As Paul C. Adams explains, “[t]elevision functions as a social context, providing sensory communion and social congregation; it also functions as a center of meaning, helping a society define ‘us’ and ‘them,’ conferring values on persons and objects, and possibly, supporting hegemonic social control” (1992, pg. 117). Television, then, becomes a place in and of itself, where cultural ideologies are not only produced, but taught and reinforced to its viewing audiences. This is television as a porous meeting place, a hybrid space which simultaneous reflects and creates defining hegemonic structures (Massey, 1999).

Building off of this hybridity is a genre of program shown on the network. Working as multiple iterations of reality television, Food Network programming is an assemblage of genres: panel discussion shows, education shows, game shows, knowledge-based competitions, and even variety shows. The programming is a hybrid of function and form, as the multiple genres being hailed “[…] work as discursive clusters, and certain definitions and meanings come together at any given time to suggest a coherent and clear genre. But these clusters are contingent and transitory, shifting over time and taking on new meanings and definitions in different contexts” (Mittell, 2001, pg. 11). This multi-genre discourse, and its insistent permeability and flexibility, allows for the network not to be defined by its individual shows, but rather by the interactions between the shows and between the shows and audiences, allowing their implicit referencing to generate taste culture ideology through the viewers reproduction of it (Mittell, 2001).

Sending You Best Dishes…From My Kitchen to Yours4 For the taste ideology of Food Network to be successfully produced and managed it must first and foremost be accepted by its viewers. Acceptance is a basic yet critical step, one which positions the audience as eager knowledge receptors, opening up televisual channels for the transmission of information around taste, its production, and its proper management. This acceptance, however, is not immediately granted by the audience member, and in fact has to be cultivated and enforced through the network’s positioning of its roster of on-air talent not as television characters but as helpful neighbors and friendly teachers. This transformation process, and the perceived credibility it fosters, functions through intimacy creation and the construction of on air-talent as “real” people.

4 This is a version of the sign-off line that cook and host Paula Deen uses to close her primary show on Food Network. It has also been versioned as “I send you best dishes and love, from my kitchen to yours.”


Misha Kavka (2010) demonstrates how intimacy creation on reality television shows function as a type of affective flow, forming bonds of recognition and identification amongst show participants and its viewers. Because a contestant on a reality television show is constructed as a non-actor, the audience for that show is more comfortable constructing the participant with a measure of authenticity and relatability, based on their non-professional status and their assumed “realness.” The discourse around realness is critical to reality television, and plays a major role in the connection created between viewers and show participants. The role of audience identification to on screen characters has long been a tenant of psychoanalytic film theory. In particular, Lacainan film theory stresses that identification is formed through the gaze of the viewer, which “[…] represents a point of identification, an ideological operation in which the spectator invests her/himself in the filmic image”(McGowan, 2003, pg. 28). This labor of identification can be logically applied to television audiences, and makes a novel intervention once combined with the rhetoric of “realness” in reality television.

The presumption of “realness” of participants is equated to an “every person” status, and can generate an intense identification between viewer and participant, creating deep psychic and emotional ties to that particular contestant, and therefore, the show. Many reality shows, particularly competition shows, build their format around these intense identifications, asking fans to “vote” for their favorite contestants, transforming fan identification practices into a type of brand loyalty in which the brand is the contestant themselves. 5 This recognition of realness develops an intimacy, and this intimacy operates like a current, flowing from the program which fostered it to ancillary programs (such as spin-offs) and products (specifically the branded merchandise tied to the show). It can also flow between the viewer and the contestant, whom viewers now feel they have developed a relationship with, albeit one-sided (Kavka, 2010).

The construction of intimacy takes an interesting turn when applied to Food Network, in particular its programming featuring trained chefs. These chefs participate in a variety of different shows, acting as instructional hosts for “In the Kitchen” programming, serving as judges on “Food Network Nighttime” competition shows, or sharing knowledge as commentators on compilation shows. On-air talent is not confined to appearing only on their own programming, but rather can have multiple shows of their own and/or appear on numerous different programs across the network’s roster.6 Multiple iterations of talent and their additive role across programming speak to the network’s totality as brand rather than as a channel of individual television shows. As talent migrates through 5 For current examples of shows who “brand” their contestants through original, manufactured, and leveraged audience identification practices see American Idol (2002-present), The Voice (2011-present), America’s Got Talent (2006-present), The X Factor (2011-present), and Randy Jackson Presents American’s Best Dance Crew (2008-present). This list is, of course, not exhaustive. 6 For example, Guy Fieri, who first appeared on the network as the winner of the competition show The Next Food Network Star (2005-present), has two of his own shows—Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives (2007-present) and Guy’s Big Bite (2007-present)—as well as appearing on eight others regular shows. Fieri was also tapped to host an NBC primetime game show called Minute to Win It in 2010.


numerous program, the network positions its shows as ones with permeable boundaries, where on-air talent exist outside of temporal and spatial restrictions, and where programs do not exist in juxtaposition with one another, but rather as a spatial imaginary, a Foucaultian heterotopic space. Therefore, while also reinforcing the network’s position as constitutive brand rather than simply as a channel delivery system, the ubiquitousness of their on-air talent works to create strong identificatory ties within audience groups, manufacturing intimacy.

One of the most effective shows used to generate the affective flow of intimacy is Chefography. Chefography, as the name implies, is a one-hour show dedicated to a different Food Network personality and their biographical story. The show airs as special programming rather than on a regular schedule, and has told the story of the network’s biggest stars, including but not limited to: Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, Rachel Ray, Sandra Lee, Paula Deen, and Bobby Flay. In a telling move toward its own self-construction as brand, the network released a 2008 Chefography episode about itself and its beginnings.

The role of a show like Chefography is to foster viewer identification with on-air talent, as a way to both creating viewership loyalty but also as a way to establish the myths of each network star, a myth which lends itself heavily to the creation of the ethos of their own show. The show examines the lives of the chefs from birth through major events like professional schooling, marriage, children, divorce, illness, and their eventual breakthrough into television. Of particular attention are the many influences, both in the form of people and events, which have informed their own cooking philosophy. An apt example of this is the episode aired on March 20, 2007 concerning Sandra Lee, host of Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee and Sandra’s Money Saving Meals.

The show describes how after Lee’s mother’s second divorce, she was forced to become the caregiver for her four younger siblings at the age of 11. Living with their grandmother, Lee was tasked with managing the finances, grocery shopping, and preparing all meals for the family with limited resources and knowledge. Her show, Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, takes this origin story and transforms it into a cooking philosophy, which combines a small amount of fresh ingredients with store-bought or “pantry items” already in the home.7 It is Lee’s past transposed as myth which not only creates a justification for her often-criticized cooking philosophy, but also gives the audience insight into Lee as a person, fostering intimacy, and potentially sympathy. This process is repeated during the course of Chefography, mythologizing the show’s subjects while giving the viewer a glimpse into the private lives of their favorite on-air talent. Chefography, and the enduring legends it has created around the network’s talent, becomes a pivotal factor in the creation of intimacy amongst Food Network viewers.

Intimacy, however, is not only established retroactively through biographical retellings, but is also found contemporaneously generated through Food Network shows which invert the traditional positionality of on-air talent, having them 7 Lee has constructed a “semi-homemade empire.” She first gained success for a craft curtain product she invented, and sold via infomercials, in the 1990s. A magazine based on her Semi-Homemade show was released in 2009, and she is the author of over 20 books. Most recently, however, her business ventures have been eclipsed by her personal life as the long-time girlfriend of New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo.


compete in competitions and being judged by their peers. By placing one-air talent in the role of competitor rather than judge, the network humanizes their stars, leaving them open to the types of judgment, criticism, and self-questioning that is usually the province of novice reality television contestants. The role reversal, then, accomplishes two tasks: it further encourages intimacy by leveling the hierarchy between viewer (read: potential reality show contestant) and talent (read: expert placed in the position of an amateur), and through the talent’s performance forces them to reiterate their skill and knowledge, justifying the viewer’s endemic belief in their role as taste culture educator.

The Next Iron Chef and Chopped: Masters epitomize this strategy of intimacy creation. The Next Iron Chef is a contest restricted to well know professional, and often celebrity chefs, who compete to win a coveted spot as an Iron Chef on the parent program Iron Chef America (2005-present). Contestants compete in weekly challenges, with the lowest performer sent home until a new Iron Chef is crowned. The winner then takes regular part in the parent show. Contestants are not only professionals, but they are chefs who regularly appear on other Food Network shows as hosts and judges. In the 2011 season, aptly dubbed the “Super Chef” season, eight of the contestants either hosted or judged current shows on the channel, and the remaining two have appeared, on multiple occasions, as contestants on other Food Network programs. Using chefs who are already well-know to the viewership, and in some cases so known as to be heavily overexposed, is short-hand for intimacy creation. This trades on the audience’s already established affective connections to these individuals to create a ready-made loyal audience for the show.

The program Chopped: Masters operates in a similar way. An iteration of the traditional Chopped format, where four chefs compete in three rounds of cooking using baskets filled with mandated “secret ingredients,” the Masters version substitutes the traditionally unknown chef contestants for celebrity chef contestants, many of whom are usually judges on the show itself. Key to the intimacy creation on both of these shows is this role reversal. The chefs are removed from their traditional space as experts and put into a situation where they themselves will be judged, rather than those proclaiming the judgment. By removing them from a space of expertise and situating them in a space usually reserved for amateurs, the shows are attempting to complicate the constructed televisual personas of these chefs, effectively saying “yes, we are experts, but we are also just like you.” Thus, the shows operate as dual intimacy creation, positioning the chefs as both experts and amateurs, allowing the audiences to both identify with them as “real” people and valorize them as “experts” concurrently. With intimacy thus established, the network is then free to institutionalize its taste ideology through expert intervention and education focused on creating neoliberal household citizenship.

Producing Taste through Neoliberal Education Shows such as the ones described above, as well as others like The Best Thing I Ever Ate (2009-present) and Dear Food Network (variable air dates), not only serve to increase affective intimacy between talent and viewer, but allow the intimate connection to reinforce the talent as authorities to be trusted and


emulated, in short, as experts. This position forms the foundation of the network’s neoliberal education and training function, a key factor in its production and management of taste.

The conceptualization of reality television as tool of neoliberal governance was codified in Laurie Ouellette and James Hay’s (2008) book Better Living Through Reality TV. Ouellette and Hay critically examine the ways in which multiple genres of reality television work to reinforce the neoliberal perspective of self-management and care of the self through a series of life interventions designed to give the program participants and audience members alike the necessary education to construct themselves as appropriate neoliberal household citizens. This examination is predicated on the idea of media as a critical site where neoliberal ideology is played out. They cite Nikolas Rose, and his evaluation of the importance of media in this process:

[…] cultural technologies are integral to modern approaches to governing precisely because they can translate the particular goals of rulers and authorities into diffuse guidelines for living with no obvious connection to official government, formal laws or regulatory procedures (Ouellette and Hay, 2008, pg. 67).

Television, in its role as normalized media, and specifically reality television in its role as ubiquitous programming, exemplifies this translation process and the overall role of media in creating self-governing techniques.

Critical to self-governing techniques is the viewer’s openness to accept a ‘life intervention.’ A life intervention, within the scope of reality television, is a television program which mobilizes professional motivators and lifestyle experts to help individuals overcome obstacles in all aspects of their personal, professional, and domestic lives. (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). This incorporates a very specific teaching function into reality television shows, one which replaces the state’s role in helping to produce fully-functioning citizens. An integral function of that citizenship creation is food behaviors. Reflecting on the idea of the need for transformation through food consumption or what they call ‘eating for change,’ Johnston and Cairns’ (2012) observations regarding commodity activism become salient. They posit that:

[…]despite efforts to create social transformation, consumer-based initiatives may inadvertently promote a neoliberal food system in which market mechanisms reign supreme and individuals assume the burden on political responsibility, as they are invited to self-regulating practices centered on making morally sound consumption choices (pg. 226).

The transference of the burden of social transformation from the shoulders of the state to the shoulders of the citizen emphasizes the rhetoric of choice in neoliberal constructionist behaviors. Choice in relation to consumption is therefore solidified as a critical factor in the individual’s development of their social houeshold citizenship.

These maneuvers link directly back to Foucault’s techniques of the self and the relation of social citizenship modeling as biopolitics, working to discipline


bodies for proper presentation in a performative and capitalist world (Bourdon, 2008). The Food Network as neoliberal interventionist educator attempts to produce the knowledge associated with biopolitical self-surveillance, constructing its audience as fully-functioning neoliberal household citizens. This serves to transform the household citizen into apprentice social workers: individuals who submit themselves to interventionist programming to generate the knowledge necessary to manage and govern their household. This creates the domestic demographic as household citizens who are both capable of, and thankful for, being taught how to fulfill their potential as taste culture members.

It is in this educational function where the four specific strategies of financial management, nutritional management, the consumption of specific food items, and the highlighting of the “family meal” as the centerpiece of the construction and maintenance of the nuclear family become apparent. There are several representations of this on Food Network, specifically during the “Food Network in the Kitchen” daytime instructional program stream, which is aimed squarely at the construction of a household citizen. However, none may be as apropos an example of this as the shows Sandra’s Money Saving Meals and Ten Dollar Dinners. Both of these programs are instances of the neoliberal function of reality television, dedicated to creating a type of household citizenship that emphasizes the rationale of the welfare state as self-management through family meal creation.

Sandra’s Money Saving Meals, hosted by Sandra Lee, is a spin-off of her regular show, Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, and is built around the idea of using the same ingredients to create two meals on a budget. Interestingly, and in an unusual fashion for a majority of the network’s hosts, Lee’s credibility as an “economic cook” is not established through her status as wife and mother; she is neither. Rather, it is validated through her previously described biography. Thus, she trades on her affective intimacy and her pedigree of domestic responsibility and financial management to engender her audience to her culinary philosophy.

During the course of the show, Lee shares tips with her viewers on which low-cost foods are the most versatile and can be used for multiple meals, as well as how “shopping smart” by buying generic brands or lower-grade cuts of meat can stretch a small budget. During the meal preparation Lee keeps a running total of the cost of the items in each recipe, and at its finish, totals the cost of the meal. She then divides the total meal cost by four, as a representation of the “average” family size, to demonstrate how affordable it can be to make home cooked meals for each person in a family. Although Lee does not have children of her own, she constantly dialogues on the show about creating recipes for her nieces and nephews, implying that food production is in the service of childrearing, further emphasizing the role of the nuclear family in household citizenship.

Lee’s show, then, serves as a representative example of two of the functions of household citizenship: financial management and the family meal as a representation of a presumed nuclear family of four. However, Lee’s show also presumes the intention of her viewers to be part of the network’s taste culture, as almost all of her recipes rely on “pantry food,” or those foods considered as constant staples of a well-functioning kitchen. This takes for granted a number of attributes of her viewers, but critical among them are the economic ability of her


audience to maintain a stocked pantry, as well as the assumption that viewers have been indoctrinated into the correct pantry staples, presuming that all of her viewers would be coming from the same ethnic or national background as her recipes.

This reliance on pantry foods actually undercuts her financial claims and overall philosophy of the show. For example, on an episode of her show Lee claims that a recipe for French toast with brown sugar banana syrup, containing a total of twelve different ingredients and made to feed four, costs a total of $6.04 to prepare. If fact, should one chose to prepare this recipe and was forced to buy all twelve ingredients it would cost a total of $33.09 to prepare. 8 Lee’s calculations, in order to remain so low, have to take into account preexisting pantry food, as well as pricing out only the specific portions of the food used, which is unrealistic for an everyday shopper; the recipe may only call for two tablespoons of molasses, but in order to get those two tablespoons the viewer is forced to buy an entire jar of molasses for $3.39. Even in programming that purports financial management and frugal food production, markers of middle to high economic status are fore grounded and shown as necessary for admission into the network’s taste culture.

Ten Dollar Dinners is similar in its construction, although its meals are cooked on a slightly more restrictive budget. Hosted by Melissa d’Arabian, who herself was the winner of the Food Network’s reality show The Next Food Network Star (2005-present), the show is organized around preparing an appetizer, main course, and dessert on a $10 dollar budget. As d’Arabian says to open the show, “My promise to you: four people, ten bucks, infinite possibilities.” Again, as with Money Saving Meals, the food is prepared for a family of four, an interesting construction considering d’Arabian is the mother in a family of six. Like Lee, d’Arabian’s discourse during the show is focused on money saving tips, with an emphasis on reusing leftover food, the importance of providing home cooked meals regardless of budgetary constraints, and “smart” grocery shopping.

Grocery shopping in particular in highlighted on Ten Dollar Dinners. D’Arabian provides tips on smart shopping during the show, translating grocery shopping from a personal into a collective affair (Johnston and Cairns, 2012). She also hosts short video clips on foodnetwork.com where she, in a physical grocery 8 To calculate this price, the ingredients necessary to prepare the meal were priced at Stop and Shop, a national grocery chain, and only the prices for generic products were used. 8Deen’s involvement in controversy extended into 2013, when after a lawsuit filed by an employees at her Savannah, GA restaurant The Lady and Sons, accused Deen and her brother of racial discrimination amongst their employees. The resulting fallout and media storm whipped up by several bizarre “apology” statements she herself made, saw Deen losing her contract with Food Network, QVC, and several other significant retail outlets. As a result, Deen will not be producing new content for Food Network, although she is still represented on their website (as of August 2013). The fate of her son’s television show is unknown at this time.


store, walks the viewer through different money-saving strategies. The straight-forward education purpose of these videos and the positioning of d’Arabian as expert in these matters are evidenced by a sample of the video descriptions:

Melissa explains how to save by shopping for clearance or discounted

items. Melissa shows how to save money by buying dried beans instead of

canned. Melissa explains manager's specials and how they help you save on

dairy. Melissa demonstrates how to cut your shopping bills by buying in bulk. Melissa explains how to save big on proteins by shopping for loss

leaders. Melissa explains how to get the most from the grocery store's day-old

bread. (foodnetwork.com) Stressing fiduciary responsibility is as important a message in these shows, as is the emphasis on constructing an appropriate level of domesticity through ritual family meal creation. Ouellette and Hay (2008) state that under a neoliberal rationale “As ‘lifestyle’ becomes one of the principal domains through which citizens are expected to look after themselves in the name of their own interests, their capacity to make ‘rational’ choices in matters of health, consumption, family, and household take on more urgency” (pg. 86). These programs epitomize that standard. They are oriented around teaching viewers how to manage food finances while producing home cooked meals for contemporary families as a requirement for household citizenship.

It is clearly no coincidence that both of these programs debuted at the height of the current U.S. economic crisis. Since the global recession of 2009, the number of people in the United States living below the poverty line is at its highest in 52 years (Tavernsie, 2012). This crisis has been particularly difficult for the U.S. middle class, whose position had already been seriously eroded in the years leading up to the 2009 crisis, due in no small part to an increase in the costs of goods and basic services, the rapidly growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the exponential pressure of middle class families to live beyond their means as a type of aspirational class achievement. “Compared with a generation ago […] today’s middle-class families earn about 75 percents more (all figures are adjusted for inflation), thanks in large part to Mom’s entrance into the work force. But after shelling out for four fixed expenses – mortgage, health insurance, child care of education, and car payments – today’s median-income family has less left over, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the single-income family of the 1970s” (Potier, 2012). It is of little wonder, then, why the show places such a strong emphasis on working to fulfill a critical educational function for the household demographic: how to maintain a classed taste culture while working with diminished means.

D’Arabian, for all of her focus on affordable meal creation, is also positioned as someone who is part of an elite foodscape, demonstrated through her biography, where d’Arabian is created as a hybrid of elite taste culture and practical household manager. Her biography, shared both during her time on Next


Food Network Star (2005-present) and codified on foodnetwork.com, stresses her time spent working in Paris, her ability to speak two languages, and her access to haute cuisine through her marriage to a native Frenchmen. She consistently reproduces variations on traditional French food, translating recipes like duck á l’orange and cassoulet into a “ten dollar dinner” context. During this process, her discourse on the show references her time spent abroad, her husband’s childhood foods, and recipes passed down from her mother-in-law. In this she is demonstrating that for the organization of varyingly classed individuals into a one specifically classed taste culture, “The culture of an elite status group must be monopolized, it must be legitimized, and it must be sacralized” (DiMaggio, 1998, pg. 460). As such, d’Arabian is a representative example of the component of household citizenship focused on promoting the consumption of specifically classed food items.

The final component of household citizenship as taste culture, nutritional management, has been a harder tenant for the Food Network to successfully promote. Sandra Lee rarely mentions nutrition, although d’Arbaian uses the word “healthy” liberally throughout her show, albeit more as a buzz word than in any defined capacity. There seems to be a focus on healthy eating in general across the network, although what composes that behavior is ambigious at best. In fact, some on-air talent has been pointedly criticized for their flagrant dismissal of nutritional concerns, in particular celebrity cook Paula Deen, most well known for her instructional show Paula’s Home Cooking (2006-present), although she has hosted numerous other shows for the network.

Deen is known for her U.S. Southern cuisine, which focuses on “comfort food.” Colloquially known for using “a pound of butter” in most recipes, her questionable nutrition standards have gained national negative attention on several occasions, but two specific instances stand out and bear repeating. Firstly, in 2008, a recipe for what she calls “The Lady’s Brunch Burger” gained national attention. The Brunch Burger is a 1 ½ pound hamburger served with 2 strips of bacon and a fried egg, sandwiched between two glazed doughnuts. Secondly, in 2012, Deen acknowledged that she had developed diabetes, but refused to name her recipes or nutritional guidelines as a contributing factor. She then encouraged further backlash when she went on to sign a deal as a spokesperson for diabetes medication.

Interestingly, in light of these criticisms, the network has maintained it ambiguous discourse around “healthy” eating on its primary cable station. While it has undertaken several campaigns to combat childhood hunger, the most high-profile of which was collaboration with Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry Campaign, there has been little more than lip-service paid to healthy eating initiatives on the primary Food Network channel. However, the channel has initiated programming aimed at a more nutritionally-conscious ideology on its new spin-off channel, Cooking. In particular, Paula Deen’s son Bobby has been given his own show on Cooking called Not My Mama’s Meals (2012-present), where he takes his mother’s recipes and transforms them into leaner, light, and more calorie-conscious versions. The Cooking website (www.cooking channeltv.com), separate and distinct from the Food Network’s primary website, is more explicitly geared toward healthy eating. For example, its top ten articles in January 2013 included the following topics:


Meal Makeover Recipes Eat More Fruits + Veggies 20 Superfoods You Should Be Eating Not My Mama’s Meals Fad Diets: Yay or Nay? 35 Healthy Chicken Dinners Top Kale Recipes Health Cooking Techniques Lighter Pasta Recipes (cookingchanneltv.com)

Currently, Cooking is not available on all cable providers, and unlike Food Network does not come in standard basic cable packages, so its impact as either a viable alternative or complimentary station to the home network is yet untested. The Food Network website does host a sub-section constructed to highlight healthy eating, including sections on recipes for restrictive diets (gluten free, vegetarian, diabetic friendly, low carb, and heart healthy), videos of on-air personalities working out and giving tips on how they maintain their ‘healthy’ lifestyles, recipes for 100 calorie foods, and a free healthy eating e-newsletter. Regardless, nutrition remains a critical discourse as part of the network’s household citizenship and taste culture, however vaguely presented.

Conclusion Bourdieu (1984) remarks that “Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is embodied, helps to shape the class body” (pg. 190). This becomes especially salient in the case of the Food Network, which is helping to shape not only our classed/taste bodies, but our physical bodies as well. The impact of this is demonstrative of how normalized both the Food Network and its ideologically produced taste culture has become.

As Jason Mittell (2010) notes, as an ideological position appears natural and commonsensical, it transforms from a position into a cultural norm. It seems more and more apparent that this is what the Food Network is not only aiming for, but potentially achieving very quickly in its short lifespan. The institutionalizing of its preferred taste culture is not only shaping its own programming, but also shaping the way its audiences are conceptualizing themselves as cultural citizens. As such, it seems increasingly important that we work to understand the impact of a creation of a network as a brand, and the influence of that branding within a neoliberal framework. To do so will not only serve to advance the logic of post-television theory, but will allow us to better understand the proliferation of classed taste cultures, and the impact they have in the construction of multiple types of citizenship and socio-cultural creation.

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managing through our mouths: producing taste on the food network

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