Conclusion: Living Food Discourse

Abstract

Cooking shows take us to the heart of food discourse, the way we talk about food and relate to one another through food. Language structures viewers’ experience and perception of food and of the host themselves, from the viewers’ home kitchen, table, and TV screen to the celebrity chef cooking and plating a dish. While showing how to cook food, cooking show hosts narrate a food discourse, that is, how food and language can help us live fully engaged in our lives. In ‘living food discourse,’ we talk about food in the bigger sense—talking, watching, listening, cooking, and eating food—to create identities and construct societies. This book examined the language of celebrity chefs on TV cooking shows, specifically four linguistic features: recipe telling, storytelling, evaluations, and humor that serve to construct the host as a trusted expert and friend. Viewers learn the language and watch the performance of TV celebrity chefs on America’s food television channel Food Network. The many sensual aspects—tastes, smells, sounds, sights, and touch—of food and language are multimodal and circulate between individuals and communities, as it does virtually between celebrity chefs and viewers.