Taste and the TV Chef

How Storytelling Can Save the Planet

By (author) Gilly Smith

Publication date:

30 September 2020

Publisher

Intellect Books

Dimensions:

244x170mm
7x10"

ISBN-13: 9781789383058

Food journalist, podcast producer and former academic Gilly Smith offers fresh insights into the creation of contemporary British food culture. Her latest book explores the story of modern food culture with the creators of lifestyle and food TV and with the academics carving a new world in food and media studies. Taste and the TV Chef investigates how television changed the way Britain eats and sold it to the world.

While cooking shows are far from new, they have exploded in popularity in recent years and changed consumption patterns at a time when what we eat has an enormous impact on climate change.

What was once merely a genre is now a full-blown phenomenon: never before has food been so photographed, fawned over, fetishized and celebrated as various answers to saving the planet. Celebrity chefs and so-called ‘foodies’ have risen to new levels of fame, and the cultural capital of cooking has never been so valuable.

Looks at the influence of chefs like Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and Gordon Ramsay and the role of TV storytelling in transforming how and what we consume. A ground-breaking contribution to food and media studies, which includes rare interviews with the producers who created some of the most influential stories television ever told, Taste and the TV Chef investigates how food and lifestyle TV changed the way an entire country ate, and then fed it to the rest of the world.

Main academic readership will be scholars, researchers and students in cultural studies, media studies. Also practitioners and students in the fields of TV production and writing.

Will also appeal to anyone with an interest in the development of food TV and the rise of the TV chef.

Introduction

Part One
• Birth of the Cool
• The Manufacture of Delight
• The Making of Britishness
• The Game-changers

Part Two
• Creating a National Conversation
• Creating Capital
• Selling Britain to the World
• Dude Food and Fairy Cakes
• Storytelling and Race
• Storytelling and Class
• The Making of Jamie
• Barthes on Jamie: Myth and the TV Revolutionary
• The Odyssey Narrative
• The Making of Dreams
• Sugar Smart

Part Three
• Intangible Memories
• Sharing the Memories
• The Utopia of Food TV
• A Hungarian Food Revolution
• How to Build a Food Culture

Part Four
• Can Storytelling Save the World?
• Are We There Yet?

'Gilly Smith is so good at getting chefs, TV producers and campaigners to tell the stories that matter, and her infectiousness and enthusiasm to create a more diverse, representative, green and fairer world is a joy to read.' – Melissa Hemsley, author of Eat Green, real food activist and sustainability champion

'Our food lies at the heart of big challenges facing humanity, including climate change and the loss of wildlife. This powerful, and highly readable account of how TV food changed the way we eat offers compelling lessons and real hope for the future.' – Philip Lymbery, Global Chief Executive of Compassion in World Farming, author of Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat and Dead Zone

'Gilly Smith brilliantly takes us behind the screen to explore the enduring popularity of TV cooking shows and how certain chefs hit the cultural zeitgeist. It is a fascinating, in-depth tale of culinary popular culture, told with insight and wit.' – Angela Clutton, author of The Vinegar Cupboard