Celebrity Chefs Research Articles

‘I am what feeds me’: food as subversive voice in Padma Lakshmi’s love, loss and what we ate (2016)

ABSTRACT Diasporic women maintain links to the homeland by recreating traditional recipes. They also assimilate and adapt through their foodways. The diasporic food memoir has emerged as a unique medium for redefining and renegotiating the domestic and professional roles of women. Food is used in a multitude of ways, by women, in order to exercise power, control, and agency. Padma Lakshmi’s Love, Loss and What We Ate delves into the complexities of navigating through and reminiscing about life vis-à-vis the food one eats. Lakshmi gives voice to her bodily struggles, experiences with racial prejudice and showcases how being a celebrity chef has enabled her to create food content that problematizes simplistic understandings of both American and Indian cuisines. This paper argues that food gives Lakshmi a subversive voice to explore the biases and stereotypes implicit in being an Indian-American celebrity chef. It investigates how the culinary space facilitates a nuanced conversation regarding exoticization and marginalization of women from the Indian diaspora. Food enables Lakshmi to explore and enunciate femininity and individuality. Using feminist food criticism, we illustrate how food and recipes become a metaphor for the diasporic self and showcase the evolution of an Indian-American woman.

Wellness communities and vaccine hesitancy

This article articulates the intersection of wellness communities and anti-vaccine (‘anti-vax’) groups to demonstrate how vaccine misinformation and pseudoscience can propagate. This misinformation is often pushed by wellness influencers. One recent example is wellness figure Pete Evans, a celebrity chef and self-described ‘qualified health coach’. By 2020, however, Evans had developed anti-vax views and began to promote fake COVID cures, anti-vax misinformation, and COVID conspiracy theories from QAnon. This contribution examines this overlap to demonstrate how wellness influencers spread misinformation that fuel vaccine hesitancy. Evans is just one example; journalists have reported on yoga teachers in California protesting against lockdowns and on wellness influencers claiming that a ‘“shadowy cabal” of scientists and companies’ were responsible for COVID. These examples demonstrate how community intersections can amplify misinformation, pseudoscience and anti-vax views to a motivated and highly receptive audience.

Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice

Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice

Celebrity chef humanitarianism and the possibility of a “giftless” future for the New Orleans foodscape [Book review

First paragraph: A searing and classic anthropological question about the meaning of a “gift” undergirds Jeanne K. Firth’s fantastic ethnography, Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice: “Does a gift require inequality or unequal power relations?” (pp. 21, 169). Firth joins a vibrant scholarly conversation that goes back to the 1925 release of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift. She traces how anthropologists, feminist scholars, philoso­phers, and critical theorist have developed theory around gift giving and exchange for decades, and then applies and builds on that theory in a unique ethnographic setting: charities run by celebrity chef philanthropists in New Orleans. She interprets her fieldnotes from charity events and her interviews with scholarship recipients and donors using this theory, illuminating how chef philanthropy has played an integral role in shaping “post–Hurricane Katrina” New Orleans. Firth reveals the way rac­ism, classism, and sexism inform celebrity chef foundations. That said, the book does not only decry how inequality seeps into and is reproduced by chef foundations; it also explores how actors across the system both resist and reinforce these dynamics. Additionally, it explores how a focus on the land instead of individualized “heroes,” social movements instead of corporations, and even cooks instead of chefs can create more space and opportunities for justice and liberation. . . .

The origins and growth of the Meatless Monday movement.

Meatless Monday is a global movement that encourages people to reduce meat in their diets for their own health and the health of the planet. We conducted a comprehensive review of primary and secondary sources and archival material documenting the origins, historical roots, and growth of Meatless Monday and simultaneous developments in public health. Sources for the paper included publications of the US Food Administration and articles and media identified using searches of ProQuest Historical Newspapers, Newspapers.com Academic, ProQuest US Newsstream, ProQuest Canadian Newstream, ProQuest International Newsstream databases, and Google.com. Meatless Monday was conceived by the advertising executive and public health advocate Sid Lerner in 2003, inspired by the meatless days observed during World War I and II. Meatless Monday grew steadily from 2003 to 2023 through advocacy by food writers, talk show hosts, and celebrity chefs, and through participation by schools, cities, restaurants, corporations, and institutions worldwide. School systems began to observe Meatless Monday, such as Baltimore City Public Schools in 2009 and New York City Public Schools in 2019. Meat-Free Monday campaign was launched by Paul McCartney and his daughters in 2009 in the United Kingdom. The Humane Society of the United States became an advocate for Meatless Monday and helped institute it in >200 US school systems. From 2003 to 2023, Meatless Monday spread to over 40 countries and was observed in public schools in countries such as Brazil, Ireland, and Belgium. Findings regarding high meat consumption and its adverse effects on health, high greenhouse gas production and environment degradation, and problems with animal welfare under conditions of industrial food animal production emerged during the same period and influenced many to advocate Meatless Monday. Meatless days of World War I and II were driven by patriotic motivations to provide food for the US troops and the Allies in Europe, whereas motivations for observing Meatless Monday were largely related to concerns regarding personal health, the environment, and animal welfare. Meatless Monday grew from relatively humble origins to a highly recognized worldwide movement with wide appeal as a way to begin reducing meat consumption for personal and planetary health.

Experiences of a fine dining event held inside a working prison

ABSTRACT Fine dining experiences offered inside working prisons are one type of hospitality initiative attempting to support prisoner rehabilitation and offer a memorable dining experience for the paying public. Previous hospitality research has not explored how fine dining delivered in a working prison, offered through this type of social initiative, is experienced by those involved: the inmates volunteering in the event, the celebrity chefs who mentor them, paying diners and other event stakeholders. This case study research examined the “Gate to Plate” fine dining event held inside Rimutaka men’s prison in New Zealand. We analysed publicly available material online about this hospitality initiative to discern the key experiences of those involved. Thematic analysis of the data revealed four main themes relating to the experiences of those involved in the fine dining event: a quality food and meal experience; pride and passion arising from being involved; skills for change; and shifted perceptions. While the case study research revealed positive experiences of the prison’s fine dining event and suggested it was a potentially transformative experience for all those involved in it, we critically discuss wider implications of the event, and the positive portrayals by all those involved, for hospitality initiatives in working prisons.

Utopia Lost? The Cultural Incorporation of the Subcultural Kitchen

abstract: The publication of Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly marked a turning point in the representation of chefs and cooks in popular media. Bourdain, although by no means the first celebrity chef, introduced a new image, what I call the “chef underground.” The kitchen is a space of labor exploitation. Yet, for those travelers in the chef underground it allowed for a transient existence, relatively free from outside scrutiny and normative expectations of behavior. By detailing these alternative social and cultural dispositions—and aligning himself with them—Bourdain constructed a unique antiestablishment persona for himself as well as rendered the nebulous group of outsider chefs and cooks legible in mainstream culture. Drawing on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, I argue that, prior to the publication of Kitchen Confidential , the professional kitchen functioned in a utopian manner by providing a space in which alternative, antisocial ways of being offered a refuge from dominant notions of proper subjecthood. Through ethnographic fieldwork in a restaurant featured on Bourdain’s television show No Reservations , I aim to understand how Bourdain’s exposure of the chef underground affects those in professional kitchens and if this once utopian space offers a way of recuperating an alternative temporality.

The travelogue cooking show in a sub-state nation: Representing Scotland in British food television

Food television offers a new and unique lens on national identity, the Anglo-Scottish relationship, and their cultural representation in contemporary Britain. This article is based on the analysis of three British travelogue cooking shows, first broadcast between 1995 and 2011, about Scotland and its food. The programmes analysed exemplify and reinforce long-standing cultural constructions of the relationship between England and Scotland as sub-state nations of the United Kingdom, as well as illustrating and creating new national scripts, notably in relation to class and gender. These ‘homeland’ travelogue cooking shows consistently associate Scotland with a defined set of local and traditional foods, closely associated with a Romantic construction of Scotland, its history and landscape. However, the programmes also indicate wider changes in British and Scottish food culture during this period, including the rise of the local food movement and the increasing economic success and cultural confidence of the Scottish food and drink industry. The article highlights the role of celebrity chefs in the cultural construction of contemporary British sub-state national relationships.

Book review: Joanne Hollows, Celebrity Chefs, Food Media and the Politics of Eating

Book review: Joanne Hollows, <i>Celebrity Chefs, Food Media and the Politics of Eating</i>

Food writings in a postmodern society: a discourse analysis of influencer and celebrity chef cookbooks in Belgium

Food writings in a postmodern society: a discourse analysis of influencer and celebrity chef cookbooks in Belgium

Consumer Intention towards Buying Edible Beef Offal and the Relevance of Food Neophobia.

Enhancing the willingness to eat edible offal can be a valuable strategy to mitigate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to growing meat production and to provide food with high protein content to a growing global population. Although some edible offal is considered delicacies, we hardly find such foods in Western countries' everyday diet, and their human consumption has decreased during the last decades. This study analyses the consumer purchase intention of BEEF edible offal using an extended version of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), where food neophobia and food disgust sensitivity play an essential role in determining consumers' willingness to eat beef edible offal. An online survey was conducted among a sample of Italian adult regular meat eaters (n = 720), stratified by age, gender, education and residence. The results showed a direct negative impact of food neophobia on the intention to consume offal. Further, we were able to quantify a negative indirect impact of food neophobia on intention through the mediation of food disgust sensitivity and attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control, which all exert an essential role in determining the willingness to consume beef edible offal. We found that the mediated impact of food neophobia on the intention to consume beef offal is much higher than the direct impact. In conclusion, recommendations and implications, such as promoting cooking shows with celebrity chefs, new products or new packaging of edible offal, were developed based on the results to increase edible beef consumption.

Book Review: Celebrity Chefs, Food Media and the Politics of Eating

Book Review: Celebrity Chefs, Food Media and the Politics of Eating

The Common Meat: Culinary Capital, Food Privilege, and Waste in Starve

Written by Brian Wood with art by Danijel Žeželj and Dave Stewart, Starve (Image 2015–2016) is a comic book revolving around the comeback of self-exiled celebrity chef Gavin Cruikshank. His food travelling TV show has been turned into a culinary sport arena in which renowned chefs battle for the entertainment of the super-rich 1% of the world’s population, cooking with rare ingredients whose consumption is illegal or regulated due to extinction. Caught in a conflict with the TV network and his ex-wife, Cruikshank is sickened by the very essence of the reality show, serving only to feed the expectations of opulence, decadence, and exclusivity of the privileged audience. The comic tackles issues related to waste and abuse of food sources, while denouncing the nature of the gourmet food industry. By showing Cruikshank’s navigation through the show and his consequent boycott, Starve lays bare the mechanisms of an industry in which chefs are bound to produce transgressive novelty, whether procuring the meat of animals on the brink of extinction or transforming “common meat” into refined bites that can indulge the privileged palate. Social power asymmetries are exposed to appalling effect, as the mediated context glamourizes the otherwise “distasteful” handling of animal bodies that is assumed as reserved for kitchen peons and the lower classes. In the dystopic yet realistic universe described in Starve, culinary capital is key to inequality, but also a means of empowerment against food insecurity. Cruikshank’s aim to create a network of food businesses rooted in their neighborhood and the optimization of the available resources embodies the possibility to revert food deserts, counterbalancing the mechanisms of the gourmet industry.

The Influence of a Celebrity Chef on Customer Repurchase Behavior: Empirical Study of Taiwan's F&B Industry During COVID-19 Pandemic.

The spread of COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted severe blows on the global hospitality industry. In Taiwan, revenue from the food and beverage (F&B) department has decreased by more than 90%. This study aims to understand whether celebrity chefs can effectively help and enhance their corporates' business performance under COVID-19's severe impacts via leveraging their personal brand value, explores the influence of a celebrity chef on customer repurchase behavior during the epidemic and examines whether such a chef has a mediation effect on the relationship between corporate brand and customer satisfaction. The primary data were collected from the respondents through online questionnaire in Taiwan to get 245 respondents as a sample size of the research from Nov. 10 to Nov. 25 in 2021, and through validity and reliability analysis that processed by statistical software using factor analysis and structural equation modeling to see if celebrity chefs' personality branding could influence customer repurchase behavior, and also examine the relationship between corporate brand and celebrity chef. The findings show that corporate brand enhances both a celebrity chef's personal brand and customer satisfaction, and that a celebrity chef has a positive effect on both customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can partially mediate the effect of corporate brand; furthermore, a celebrity chef has a positive effect on customer repurchase behavior. In Taiwan relative studies into aspects of a celebrity chef's effect on consumer behavior are limited, and so this research offers new insights into the celebrity chef phenomenon there as well as elsewhere.

Between the Balkans and Central Europe: Celebrity chefs, national culinary identity and the post-socialist elite in Slovenia

This article explores the construction of a national and supra-national culinary identity in Slovenia in the decades since its independence from Yugoslavia through the TV chefs Valentina and Luka Novak’s celebrity cookbooks. As they cook for the nation, they establish the idea of what is to be “Slovene” in post-socialism. Based on an analysis of the spin-off cookbooks from their popular TV series Love through the Stomach broadcast on Slovene television from 2009 to 2014, the paper discusses their complex navigation between various aspects of Slovenia’s history, as the chefs distance the cuisine from its Yugoslav past and explicitly reorient its food culture toward Central Europe. In doing this, they reflect and reinforce larger discourse shifts that have been taking place in Slovenia since the 1980s and through which its political and media elites prepared the ground for Slovenia’s entry to the EU in 2004, distancing themselves from its “Balkan” neighbors and embracing its European essence. This paper shows how such shifts can be reflected in culinary texts, such as cookbooks, contributing to the understanding of everyday food texts as political texts. The paper also demonstrates the role of the Slovene middle-class elite as culinary trendsetters in the post-socialist period.

A critical analysis of the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's discourse of fastness and BBC Persian’s dubbing strategies

Translation Studies scholars have recently indicated the emergence of a political ecology of translation. Viewing this new trend, the present study aimed to explore discoursal features of Jamie Oliver's talk in Jamie’s Thirty Minute Meals cookery show and the way they were rendered in the dubbed version broadcast by BBC Persian. To this end, the comparative model of research and the notion of tertium comparationis was used. To analyze the discoursal features of Jamie Oliver, the principles of the grounded theory were applied. The findings indicate that the predominant stylistic features of fastness in Jamie Oliver’s talk are repetition of title, using time phrases indicating fastness, and using words implying easiness and briskness. Analysis of the dubbed version revealed that all the identified expressions of fastness were translated literally into Persian, though they do not sound natural. In other words, in Toury’s (1980) term adequate or source-oriented strategies were used to dub the show into Persian. The findings can shed some light on the realization of food colonization in translation.

Review: Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru, by María Elena García

Review: <i>Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru</i>, by María Elena García

Paula Deen, the N-Word &amp;amp; Media: Reactions from Senior Citizens

In 2013 Celebrity Chef Paula Deen admitted to using the N-word; this study focused on the ensuring scandal and the reactions to it and her. To help interpret Deen’s situation and the reaction to it with context, multiple theories (parasocial interaction and expectancy violation theory) were utilized along with mixed methods research design. Further, Comedian Chris Rock was used as a comparative example of a celebrity who also used the N-word. A 36-item online questionnaire was administered (N = 1346) in 2013 at the height of the Deen scandal. In addition to the questionnaire, the study engaged participants over the age of 60 with three focus group interviews and six follow-up personal interviews to provide interpretive perspectives. Key findings include: 1) Seniors liked Paula Deen and considered her a positive, grandmotherly figure; 2) Seniors thought that the controversy was blown far out of proportion and that the punishment Deen experienced was excessive; 3) Seniors thought that Deen should be forgiven.

Food discourse: ethics and aesthetics on Instagram

PurposeThe aim of the study is threefold: understanding the interconnections amongst visual and verbal multimodal communication strategies used in food discourse; identifying the themes of celebrity chef's food discourse with respect to pro-environmental behaviour; and providing a methodological framework to visually analyse food-themed videos.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses mise-en-scène and critical discourse and multimodal analyses to gain insights on food discourse from 20 videos shared by a Michelin starred chef on social media platforms.FindingsResults show that a pro-environmental cooking philosophy challenges the normative discourse on food and educates general audiences and foodies alike. Mise-en-scène and discourse analyses of Instagram visual content reveal that leftovers are central to the ethical message and are intertwined – through the aesthetic of the videos-with concepts of inclusivity, diversity and nourishment.Practical implicationsChefs, and restaurants, are encouraged to recognise their responsibility as role models, thus able to influence the societal production of food discourse.Originality/valueThe findings provide new insights into the role of a celebrity chef in promoting sustainable food preparation and consumption.

Spice talk: An Orientalist register in Nigella Lawson's cooking shows

AbstractThis study argues that spice talk, a register that indexes spices as exotic, is one linguistic instantiation of the discourse of Orientalism. I identify the presence of this register from the advent of the Spice Trade to the present, then provide a case study of its use in cooking show programs by British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, whose Orientalist description of the spices and foods she prepares is a means of indexing physical commodities from the East as ‘‘Oriental’’ and naturalizing the link between spices and the exotic, as well as upholding power imbalances. I maintain that spice talk comprises five thematic features: poetics, sensuality, tourism, otherness, and coloniality. I argue throughout for a situated understanding of spice talk, asserting that contemporary practices of consumption and patterns of taste cannot be divorced from the broader social order or the weight of history.