Resourcefulness, advocacy, gratitude: Three ethnic narratives in Master Chef Israel

Abstract

This article looks at the experience of Mizrahi contestants in Master Chef Israel as exemplifying the limitations certain ethnicities impose on the incorporation of native culinary knowledge into the realm of haute cuisine. It also considers how such ethnicities can serve as obstacles to winning reality television shows. Specifically, I ask how Mizrahi participants can use their ethnicity explicitly within the context of reality TV to negotiate the articulation of their culinary knowledge and food practices into the public discourse on haute cuisine. I argue that Mizrahi contestants are pushed either to use ethnicity as a resource to enrich their cookery, to acknowledge the limitations it imposes on their kitchens or to use it as a stock of knowledge to be enriched so they become better Mizrahi cooks. The three versions of ethnicity, which work simultaneously in the show, point to the dynamic and changing nature of ethnicity and its ability to provide its holders with various modes of participation in the culinary sphere.