Celebrity Chefs Research Articles

Vegan: Ethical Considerations in Challenging Meat-Eating Norms

Vegan: Ethical Considerations in Challenging Meat-Eating Norms

Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler

Reviewed by: Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man by Nieves Pascual Soler Alice L. McLean (bio) Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies: Cast-Iron Man Nieves Pascual Soler Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, ix + 126 pp. ISBN 978-3319709222, $54.99 hardcover. Food and Masculinity in Contemporary Autobiographies explores men's life writing, focusing on works penned by celebrity chefs. The book begins with a cursory overview of the secondary role food plays in nineteenth-century canonical "narratives of masculinity" by Henry Adams, Henry James, and Benjamin Franklin before diving into contemporary life writing by seven men—namely, Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, Grant Achatz, Marco Pierre White, Randy King, Steven Rinella, and Hank Shaw. According to Nieves Pascual Soler, the type of autobiography crafted by these chefs enables them to script a performance that works to mask—yet ultimately belies—a deep anxiety about cooking as an ideologically effeminate task. To aid in his performance, each chef-author draws on various forms of hyper-masculine life writing, casting himself as a hero, a criminal, or a hunter. As Pascual Soler acknowledges, the role of cooking has long been split along gender lines, with men serving as professional chefs and women as home cooks. Although not explicitly articulated in Food and Masculinity, this split likewise manifests within the cookbook genre—Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) trained generations of middle-class white women how to rule the home kitchen, while Auguste Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire (1903) served as the canonical text for twentieth-century professional chefs. Not surprisingly, the trajectory of men's and women's food writing has been significantly impacted by the rigidly gendered nature of cooking, a rigidity that becomes especially manifest in the culinary autobiographies explored in Chapter 3. Pascual Soler argues that chefs are driven to depict themselves as heroes or anti-heroes in order to compensate for the "feminizing power of cooking" (49). The drive to jettison femininity from the professional kitchen, as Pascual Soler shows, finds its most powerful exemplar in the work of Marco Pierre White, whose Devil in the Kitchen (first published as White Slave in England but renamed when reprinted for an American audience) showcases the "badass" celebrity chef who initiated a wave of "criminal confessionals," a genre that includes Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Gordon Ramsay's Roasting in Hell's Kitchen, and Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty. This genre of food writing, according to Pascual Soler, presents a persona that draws inspiration from detective fiction and criminal autobiography. As it does in Chapter 3, the book situates men's culinary autobiographies within various genres of fiction and autobiography. It does not, however, seriously ponder how life writing blends into food writing or examine in detail the gender ideologies that bifurcate men's and women's culinary autobiographies. It reviews only cursorily Traci Marie Kelly's "'If I Were a Voodoo Priestess': Women's Culinary Autobiographies," Denise Gigante's Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century [End Page 924] Gastronomy, and my own Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century American Women's Food Writing. The book would benefit from a more sustained engagement with the historical context laid out by these three works of literary food studies, a context that clearly establishes a history of gendered autobiographical food writing dating back to the early 1800s, and underscores that genre and gender within culinary literature have long been mutually constitutive. In particular, the autobiographies explored in Food and Masculinity are directly descended from the two most masculine forms of culinary literature—professional cookbooks and gastronomic essays, the latter of which "worked in many ways against the feminized aesthetic of the novel, founded on ideals of bourgeois domesticity" (Gigante xxxv). Rather than contextualizing the chefs' narratives within the tradition of food writing, Pascual Soler places them into the historical context of the heroic journey, criminal writing, and the hunting autobiography in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Using Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the foundation for her second chapter, Pascual Soler argues that the autobiographies by Michael Ruhlman, Bill Buford, and Grant Achatz construct narratives in which the author transforms...

Don’t Steal My Recipe! A Comparative Study of French and U.S. Law on the Protection of Culinary Recipes and Dishes Against Copying

Food and gastronomy are at the heart of every culture. In 2010, The Gastronomic Meal of the French was listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. Interest in gastronomy became mainstream in the U.S. starting in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s. The emergence of cooking literature, television cooking, celebrity chefs, and competitive cooking programs have now permeated American and French popular culture like never before. It is also a huge business for restaurants. This article examines the legal status of recipes and culinary creations in U.S. and French law, and what can be done to stop others from copying your culinary recipe. It attempts to answer the following questions: can you copyright individual recipes, or a collection of recipes, as in a cookbook? Can you patent a method to prepare a dish? What about filing for a trademark for your recipe to prevent competitors from using a similar name for your dish? What about keeping your recipe a trade secret? What other legal protections might be available? In a world of the internet, social networks and the culture of sharing can you really protect your recipes from being copied and, more importantly, should you? What are the steps needed to share a recipe properly? Legal, doctrinal, sociological and practical aspects will be considered in this study.

Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original ed. by Sara B. Franklin

Reviewed by: Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original ed. by Sara B. Franklin Laura Sloan Patterson Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original. Edited by Sara B. Franklin. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 259. $28.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3855-3.) Known as the "quietest, most enigmatic star in the culinary firmament," Edna Lewis was born in Freetown, Virginia, a town founded by former slaves (p. 18). This "vibrant, creative, and hard-working community of families" provided her with a lifelong love of fresh, seasonal ingredients and recipes shaped by the local environment and culture (p. 243). In The Taste of Country Cooking (1976), Lewis shares the cooking of this community, along with reminiscences on its natural and agricultural rhythms. Yet Lewis's path was not confined to culinary arts: she also worked as a model, a dressmaker (creating clothing for Marilyn Monroe), a communist activist, and a pheasant farmer. She rose to prominence as a chef at New York's Café Nicholson, after John Nicholson offered her both a chef position and a partnership in the restaurant in 1949. As editor Sara B. Franklin writes, "[Lewis] is considered a key source on the black experience in the post-Reconstruction South, as well as a trailblazer of the contemporary revival and popularity of regional agriculture and cooking generally, and of southern food in particular" (p. 3). Despite her renown among mid- and late-twentieth-century chefs and local food enthusiasts and activists, Lewis was not as well known as other like-minded chefs of her era, such as Alice Waters. A 2014 commemorative postage stamp created a wider public curiosity about Lewis because she was featured as one of five "Celebrity Chefs," alongside James Beard, Julia Child, Joyce Chen, and Felipe Rojas-Lombardi (p. 145). Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original offers a well-rounded portrait of Lewis through essays written by chefs, food activists, food writers and editors, academics, cookbook creators, and Lewis's friends and family members. Because previously there was limited information about Lewis, this volume is an essential resource for scholars of foodways, culinary history, American [End Page 740] culture, and southern culture. The volume is structured in three sections: "Encountering Miss Lewis," "Miss Lewis Standing in Culinary History," and "At Table with Miss Lewis Today." The first section offers essayists' accounts of meeting Lewis, whether in person over a meal she prepared or on the page through archival research. This method of introduction allows readers new to Lewis's work to view her through a variety of lenses. Part 2, as its title indicates, explores Lewis's reputation as chef and cookbook author, examining not only her groundbreaking status as an African American chef but also the reasons she did not become a household name. In this section, Lewis is positioned within the African diaspora, American history, and the cultural specifics of her Virginia region. Here, the reader receives a full picture of Lewis's context and spheres of influence. The third section departs from a mostly academic tone to offer more intimate personal interviews and essays from Lewis's friends, family members, and close colleagues. A 2016 interview with Nathalie Dupree, bestselling southern cookbook author and cooking show host, is particularly revealing. Dupree offers details about Lewis's disappointments in personal and professional relationships, as well as her financial struggles, that are not detailed elsewhere in the book. "Afterwords: A Family Remembers" by Ruth Lewis Smith (Lewis's sister) and Nina Williams-Mbengue (Lewis's niece) rounds out the volume by adding a portrait of a generous family member and detailing family history. Among the book's gems are the recipes sprinkled throughout. In most cases, the recipes demonstrate how a professional chef has modified a Lewis recipe or technique to make it, for instance, vegan or to use local ingredients found in Maine rather than in the South. While purists might balk at the variations, the recipes demonstrate Lewis's influence on contemporary food culture. There are also direct celebrations of Lewis, such as Alice Waters's "menu to celebrate the anniversary of Edna Lewis's birth … exactly a...

Emulating Vatel: Portraitomanie, Celebrity, and Culinary Intermediality, 1880-1914

With the rise of gastronomic culture in nineteenth-century France, self-immolating seventeenth-century maître d'hôtel Francois Vatel was rehabilitated, however erroneously, as a model of culinary distinction and precursor of the celebrity chef. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, popular images of Vatel (post and trade cards, catalog covers or letterhead), like failed attempts at more exalted renderings – notably a lard statue – provide a paragon to emulate. Through "culinary intermediality," key elements of culinary art figure within visual art, as Vatel portraits intertwine with foodstuffs, food preparation, kitchen paraphernalia, and the hopes and dreams of both professional and home chefs.

The Miserable, Mythical, Magical Marmiton

Revealing paradoxes abounded in early Third Republic French representations of the marmiton, or culinary apprentice. Investigative reportage and reformist discourse exposed apprentices’ miserable existence while still depicting these young fellows as playful and carefree. Conversely, popular marmiton mythology, particularly in children’s literature, idealized culinary apprenticeship, amid glimpses of harsh living and working conditions, while also highlighting admittedly rare opportunities for ambitious apprentices to achieve substantial public success. Max Jacob’s children’s book Histoire du Roi Kaboul Ier et du Marmiton Gauwain provides an emblematic example with its parodic fairy-tale rendering of celebrity chef Auguste Escoffier’s extraordinary triumphs. Ultimately, while enchanting, the rosy popular vision of the magical marmiton obfuscated exploitative child labor practices underpinning the whole culinary enterprise in this supposed golden age of French gastronomy.

The Truth About Mrs Marshall

We are all familiar today with the names of celebrity chefs. They can be so well-known that a first name is enough to identify them: two from Britian that imme­diately spring to mind are Nigella and Delia. Their surnames, Lawson and Smith, are unnecessary. In the Victorian era another celebrity cook was born with the surname Smith. She achieved fame, however, under her married name: Mrs Agnes Bertha Marshall, and was more famous in her day than Mrs Beeton. She published cookery books, lectured and gave public demonstrations on the subject. She edited a magazine called The Table and, with her husband, ran a cookery school in Mortimer Street, Westminster. She popularized the making of ice-cream with her patent inventions, and is credited with devising the first ice-cream cone for one of her recipes. But, as so often happens, her name and achievements faded from public memory after her death in 1905. This article augments what we know about Mrs. Marshall.

Innovation and Derivation in Canadian Food Television Programming

The 1980s neo-liberal political agenda, which deemed media market liberalization necessary to stimulate programming innovation and expand audience choice, reshaped Canadian television programming, prompting a new round of debate over the quality, distinctiveness, and value of domestic TV shows. Yet producers’ transformation of the daytime cooking show into a popular, lucrative food lifestyle media segment received little critical attention. Thus, part 1 of this article draws on foreign and domestic food show examples, popular with Canadian audiences, to highlight three program innovations that underwrote Canadian food audience expansion over the last 25 years: an intensified focus on eating, entertaining, and aesthetics; production of celebrity chefs and commercial synergies; and reliance on global reality TV formats. Part 2 analyses two seasons of Dinner Party Wars, an exemplar Canadian food show. Reliance on the global trends outlined above renders DPW largely indistinguishable from foreign TV food fare. So too did DPW put in circulation common middle-class, neo-liberal fantasies—turning home entertaining into a public spectacle of competition; finding fault in weak performances of entrepreneurial spirit; taking participants’ inability to achieve restaurant standards of productivity as signs of laziness; and failure to conform to middle-class manners and tastes shocking. Yet within participants’ menu choices and interactions with experts a distinct narrative of Canadian multiculturalism is found.

Monocultural and multicultural gastronationalism: National narratives in European food shows

This article argues that we are witnessing a wave of gastronationalism in European food television. In televised rediscoveries of national cuisines, narratives of the national identity are unfolded, and in these narratives various boundaries are defined and various subjects are included, excluded and ranked in the national narrative. Based on the analysis of Le Chef en France (2011–2012) with the leading celebrity chef in France Cyril Lignac and Jamie’s Great Britain (2012) with Jamie Oliver, the article proposes to distinguish between a monocultural gastronationalism and a multicultural gastronationalism. Finally, the article also suggests that the wave of TV shows with a gastronationalist discourse could be seen as a form of normalization of gastronationalism.

Zappers, Phantomware and Other Sales Suppression Software in the State of Washington

Electronic sales suppression (ESS) is a fraud that has been a (prominent) feature of the North American retail business since at least 1996. The first EES case in the US dates from 1981. ESS is a global problem. Depending on the jurisdiction, and the research study consulted, ESS is estimated to be present in 34% (of Canadian), 50% (of German – two studies), and 70% (of Swedish and Slovenian) businesses. It may be the case today, that “you cannot leave home without” encountering (or participating in) ESS. The most common types of sales suppression technology are Zappers and Phantomware programming. In some instances, sales suppression is a personal (hands-on) service offered by installers or ECR/POS sales representatives. This is Sales Suppression as a Service or SSaaS. Recently suppression has entered the Dark Cloud, a fully automated manipulation of sales data that (physically) takes place off shore and uses internet-based data transfers. The common solution in all cases is digital security, or fighting technology with technology. In the US, ESS has funded common criminals, organized crime syndicates, foreign and domestic terrorist organizations. US suppression cases have involved celebrity chefs, sitting members of Congress, the funding arm of Hezbollah, popular grocery store chains, restaurants, bars/ strip clubs, and small owner-operated pizza parlors. The technological response in the US has been weak. For some reason, the US has been very slow in taking up the technology-with-technology fight. Given that the State of Washington collects 47.3% of its revenue (not including local government taxes) from the retail sales tax, and that technology has been the backbone of the State’s economy for years, it is only natural that Washington would take a US leadership position in this effort. Washington still trails by a wide margin the international efforts. The US has a lot to learn from jurisdictions like Belgium, Brazil, Canada (notably the provinces of Quebec and Ontario), China, Croatia, Italy, Russia, Rwanda, Sweden, and by January 1, 2 each of the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait).

P148 - Culinary Training of School Food Service Workers with a Celebrity Chef

Background (Background, Rationale, Prior Research, and/or Theory): Professional development to improve culinary skills, promote smarter lunchroom techniques (SL) and knowledge of 2015 Dietary Guidelines (DG) is suggested to help workers plan and prepare meals that are healthy and acceptable to students. Objective: To examine satisfaction and perceived learning from professional development of culinary skills by a celebrity chef, promotion of whole fruits and under-consumed vegetable subgroups (UCVS), SL, foods to increase or decrease from DG, and plan and conduct event using training theme. Study Design, Setting, Participants, Intervention: Nonexperimental, one group, post only, plan to recruit 90 foodservice workers to one of three regional trainings; participants were consented and completed an anonymous 18-item online Qualtrics survey after culinary training by chef in school cafeterias. Outcome Measures and Analysis: Responses were analyzed descriptively for participant characteristics, satisfaction with professional development program, perceived learning, confidence with techniques, perceived knowledge, knowledge of DG messages, inspiration by significant referent, follow-up implementation of event with student reach. Results: Recruitment was 67% of goal, 78% of registrants participated in training. Participants were women, including, 47% cafeteria managers, 32% foodservice directors, 17% food-prep cooks. Three-quarters reported learning helpful culinary techniques, ways to promote UCVS, SL techniques, were confident with techniques and inspired by chef to use new techniques/recipes, with 78% overall satisfaction. All correctly listed one dark green vegetable, 87% listed two; 100% correctly listed two vegetables from red/orange vegetable subgroup, and >95% knew DG to limit saturated fat, trans fat, added sugars, and increase whole fruit, dark green vegetables, whole grains, beans/peas. Eighty-five percent knew to increase lower fat dairy foods. Only 13% created event based on training, but events reached 3,553 students. Conclusions and Implications: Training by a celebrity chef was a popular venue for professional development; more recruitment efforts and follow-up with registrants to boost attendance, and follow-up with event planning might extend reach of the program. Funding: USDA Team Nutrition.

(De)constructing distinction: Class inequality and elite authenticity in mediatized food discourse

Orienting to recent work on language materiality (Cavanaugh and Shankar) and elite discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski 2017a), I examine the discursive production of class status and the management of distinction/privilege in mediatized food discourse. Specifically, this paper presents a critical discourse analysis of aNew York Timesfood section corpus comprised of 259 articles (e.g. restaurant reviews, celebrity chef profiles, features concerning cooking techniques or trending ingredients, etc.) in which I identify an over‐arching discourse ofelite authenticity. I show how elite authenticity is a key strategy by which distinction is nowadays both (re)produced and (dis)avowed in food discourse, and that it is accomplished via five rhetorical strategies: historicity, simplicity, pioneer spirit, lowbrow appreciation, and locality/sustainability. Thus, food discourse, rooted in familiar bourgeois anxieties and privileges, sustains the post‐class ideologies (Thurlow) and omnivorous consumption (Khan) at the heart of contemporary class formations.

Celebrity chefs, consumption politics and food labelling: Exploring the contradictions

The mainstreaming of ethical consumption over the past two decades has attuned citizen-consumers to their power to shape food production practices through their consumption choices. To navigate the complexity inherent in contemporary food supply chains, ethical consumers often turn to certification and labelling schemes to identify which products to purchase. However, the existence of competing supply chain interests, coupled with the myriad different ways production factors and processes can be combined, has constructed certification and labelling as a highly contested space. Within this context, celebrity chefs have taken on a significant role in influencing food cultures, consumption practices and public policy. As a group of powerful cultural and political intermediaries, celebrity chefs have used their public profile to address causes related to food ethics and sustainability, and to shape consumer ‘choice’ by advocating for the consumption of labelled and certified food products. This article analyses the media campaigns of British celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to promote ‘free range’ chicken and eggs. It reveals how the celebrity chefs’ interventions into consumption politics often occurs without sufficient sensitivity to the specificities of the particular labelling and certification systems they are promoting, with very different systems often presented as achieving identical ends. In presenting ‘free range’ as a single, idealised and uncontested standard, they (perhaps unwittingly) expose themselves to the range of contradictions involved in the need to present complex information on animal friendly and sustainably produced food in simple, unambiguous and entertaining formats.

Sustainable Everyday Life and Celebrity Environmental Advocacy in Hugh’s War on Waste

ABSTRACTThis study employs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s television program, Hugh’s War on Waste, to explore representations of sustainable everyday life and the functions of celebrity environmental advocacy. The analysis is located within broader understandings of the discursive and contested nature of sustainability and the representative functions of environmental celebrities who act as figures of both distinction and equivalence. It discusses Fearnley-Whittingstall within the context of the stable of celebrity chefs, and it demonstrates how Hugh’s War on Waste is an example of the burgeoning televisual genre based on forms of campaigning about food issues. The analysis specifically explores how Hugh’s War on Waste is informed by: narratives of self-transformation where individuals are marshaled into appropriate practices of waste management and sustainability, presentations of the pleasures associated with such practices, and revelations of the networks of food production, distribution and consumption across the contexts of domestic everyday life, farms, supermarkets, and other corporations.

Making the Animals on the Plate Visible: Anglophone Celebrity Chef Cookbooks Ranked by Sentient Animal Deaths

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of chefs to a position of cultural prominence. This rise has coincided with increased consciousness of ethical issues pertaining to food, particularly as they concern animals. We rank cookbooks by celebrity chefs according to the minimum number of sentient animals that must be killed to make their recipes. On our stipulative definition, celebrity chefs are those with their own television show on a national network in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia. Thirty cookbooks by 26 such chefs were categorized according to the total number of cows, pigs, chicken, fish and other species they included as ingredients. The total number of animals killed was divided by the number of non-dessert recipes to generate an average number of animal deaths per recipe for each book. We outline the rationale for our project and its methodology before presenting a ranked table of 30 cookbooks by celebrity chefs. This method generates several interesting findings. The first concerns the wide variation in animal fatalities among cookbooks. The chef with the heaviest animal footprint killed 5.25 animals per recipe, while the omnivorous chef with the smallest footprints killed 0.19 per recipe. Clearly, not all approaches to meat eating are equal when it comes to their animal mortality rate. Pigs and large ruminants are all substantially bigger than poultry, which are themselves bigger than many fish. The prime determinant of a chef’s place in the index was the number of small animals his or her recipes required. Whether a chef cooked in the style of a particular cuisine (Italian, French, Mexican etc.), by contrast, had no discernible influence on his or her ranking. We analyze how different chefs present themselves—as either especially sensitive or insensitive to ethical issues involving animals and food—and note cases where these presentations do or do not match their index ranking.

Distinctions and boundaries: men’s talk about food celebrities

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how a group of men relate to food celebrities in the contemporary Swedish food-media landscape, especially celebrity chefs on TV.Design/methodology/approachSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 men in Sweden (22–88 years of age), with different backgrounds and with a variety of interest in food.FindingsThe paper demonstrates different ways in which the men relate to food celebrities. The men produce cultural distinctions of taste and symbolic boundaries, primarily related to gender and age, but also class. Through this, a specific position of “just right” emerged. This position is about aversion to excess, such as exaggerated gendered performances or pretentious forms of cooking. One individual plays a particularly central role in the stories: Actor and Celebrity Chef Per Morberg. He comes across as a complex cultural figure: a symbol of slobbish and tasteless cooking and a symbol of excess. At the same time, he is mentioned as the sole example of the exact opposite – as a celebrity chef who represents authenticity.Practical implicationsScholars and policy makers must be careful of assuming culinary or social influence on consumers from food celebrities simply based on their media representations. As shown here and in similar studies, people relate to them and interpret their performances in a variety of ways.Originality/valueThis is one of the few studies that target the role of food celebrities in contemporary Western consumer culture from the point of view of the consumers rather than analyses of media representations.

The Supplement at the… Sau(r)ce: On Jamie Oliver’s (Dis)placed Global Brand Identity

Amidst the constantly augmenting gastronomic capital of celebrity chefs, this study scrutinizes from a critical discourse analytic angle how Jamie Oliver has managed to carve a global brand identity through a process that is termed (dis)placed branding. A roadmap is furnished as to how Italy as place brand and Italianness are discursively articulated, (dis)placed and appropriated in Jamie Oliver’s travelogues which are reflected in his global brand identity. By enriching the CDA methodological toolbox with a deconstructive reading strategy, it is shown that Oliver’s celebrity equity ultimately boils down to supplementing the localized meaning of place of origin with a simulacral, hyperreal place of origin. In this manner, the celebrity’s recipes become more original than the original or doubly original. The (dis)placed branding process that is outlined in the face of Oliver’s global branding strategy is critically discussed with reference to the employed discursive strategies, lexicogrammatical and multimodal choices.

Attila Hildmann goes international

Abstract This study examines website localization practices against the background of a rising awareness of food culture and celebrity chef branding in a digitalized and globalized world. As part of a structured media campaign set up in 2014, the localization of Attila Hildmann’s official website substantially contributed to launching the German vegan chef’s brand in the United States, along with the promotion of his two translated cookbooks and frequent appearances in arranged US TV and radio shows. The two language versions of the official website of German vegan food celebrity Attila Hildmann are compared with respect to their form and content. The objective of the study is to determine to what extent and in which way the German website along with the persona-based culinary brand Attila Hildmann is globalized and localized into English to accommodate for the needs of an American target audience. More specifically, we want to investigate which website content has been copied without any change, and which content has been literally translated, adapted to the target locale (i.e. transcreated by adding or omitting elements), or completely recreated. Focusing on the front-end elements of both website versions, we adopt both a macro level and a micro level approach to assess the degree of localization. Eleven parameters encompassing 28 features are analyzed across selected website sections that we assume to be especially sensitive to culturally specific information and localization strategies. The analysis reveals that a hybrid strategy of globalization and localization has been employed, i.e. the website is partially localized for a US target audience.

The Object of Research: Considering Material Engagement Theory and Ethnographic Method

The paper outlines a methodological approach for investigating how consumers create brand meaning using the material resources companies provide. The approach draws from Material Engagement Theory—to discuss the role of consumers in creating patterns of meaning by engaging with objects. It also explicates the role of objects in supporting this patterning. We explain how an in‐situ diary tool (dscout, in our case) can be useful to support this approach. We demonstrate our methodological approach in the context of the Red Rooster Harlem, a cosmopolitan restaurant in New York, owned by the celebrity Chef Marcus Samuelsson.

“Our” Culinary Heritage

This article develops the concept of gastrodiplomacy—or the use of food to enhance a region’s brand and image—through analysis of two cookbooks: Heritage, by Sean Brock, and Peru: The Cookbook, by Gastón Acurio. Each of these celebrity chefs mobilizes diversity and multiculturalism rhetorically to suggest that contemporary foodways are an authentic portal to racial harmony and inclusion. I argue that these chefs’ social position as men of European descent perpetuates the “white gaze” of contemporary public engagement with cuisine and foodways because the historic and contemporary contributions of marginalized groups become narrative props rather than authentic voices. By focusing on two sites—Peru and the American South—this article demonstrates the function of gastrodiplomacy as a form of soft power that rhetorically undermines racial and class hegemonies while practically reinforcing them. The historical and social contexts of these two regions demand an analysis that incorporates discussion of the connections among foodways, culture, place, and power and consideration of linkages between the U.S. South and the Global South. From a sociological perspective, this article demonstrates the ways in which contemporary food movements often perform rhetorical maneuvers that obfuscate inequality by using white male voices to present foodways as common and universal.