Full Description
This volume is the first to combine textual analysis of food media texts with interviews with media production staff, reality TV contestants, celebrity chefs, and food producers and retailers across the artisan-conventional spectrum. Intensified media interest in food has seen food politics become a dominant feature of popular media—from television and social media to cookbooks and advertising. This is often thought to be driven by consumers and by new ethics of consumption, but Media and Food Industries reveals how contemporary food politics is also being shaped by political and economic imperatives within the media and food industries. It explores the behind-the-scenes production dynamics of contemporary food media to assess the roles of—and relationships between—media and food industries in shaping new concerns and meanings with respect to food.
Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: New Food Politics.- PART 1: CONTEXTS.- Chapter 2. Resisting 'Agribusiness Apocalypse': The Pleasures and Politics of Ethical Food.- Chapter 3. Food Television and Celebrity Chefs: Lifestyle Branding and Commodified Idyllism.- PART 2: CONNECTIONS.- Chapter 4. The 'Social Life' of Celebrity Brands: Maggie Beer's Verjuice.- Chapter 5. Media Tourism and Rural Romance: Constructing Food Television's 'Cult Geographies'.- Chapter 6. 'It Tastes Better'? Cookbooks, Happy Farmers and Affective Labour.- PART 3: APPROPRIATIONS.- Chapter 7. Media, Supermarkets and the Strategic Manufacture of Consumer Trust.- Chapter 8. Soft-Selling Supermarkets: Food Television and Integrated Advertising.- Chapter 9. Conclusion: A New Politics of Food?.
