Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization (Casey Ryan Kelly)

This book, published by Casey Ryan Kelly, comprises five chapters that examine the impact of food television on culture. Food television is no longer considered a source of food production and consumption, but a starting point for space, place, and identity. The author of the book attempts to provide a finite answer to the question of how media culture invites American audiences to think about the relationship between food, geography, travel, and cultural difference. The author exemplifies the local versus exotic foods based on Bizarre Foods, Bizarre Foods America, No Reservations, and “traditional” American comfort food in the light of The Pioneer Woman and Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Man v. Food. In addition, taste is regarded as a feasible expression of judgment, preference, and hierarchy cultivated concerning historically and culturally specific food practices in American food culture and non-Western nations. The role of the “normal” food-place-identity is opposed to the role of the other. Three key propositions are regarded from the perspective of how food TV mediates an ongoing confrontation between cosmopolitan ideas and the dominance of Western power; how nostalgia and mythology of American exceptionalism give meaning to the food-place-identities; how entertaining formats use techniques of documentary and filmmaking to internalize the anthropological voice of food television.