Gourmet Travel: Culinary Television Representations of Food-Inspired Touring

Abstract

This article examines one of the earliest forms of culinary television, the food/travel program. The vicarious travel opportunities such programs offer are explored to reveal the lifestyle aspirations of contemporary audiences. Food is an essential part of any culture and often relatively accessible, and therefore an easy way to experience other places and lives, however vicariously. In the close study of two contemporary Australian television programs, Food Safari and Luke Nguyen's Vietnam, this article examines media representations of cultures and cuisines, and constructions of otherness. The pivotal role the hosts of current food television play in the promotion of consumption is also explored. It finds that in combining the pleasures of food and travel, culinary programs provide a risk-free way of exploring foreignness, both locally and globally. Ideas of authenticity are key to these explorations. However, culinary television depictions of cultures and cuisines are complex and, at times, problematic in encouraging understanding primarily through consumption.