Celebrity Chefs Research Articles

Mapping digital foodscapes: Digital food influencers and the grammars of good food

Drawing on recent debates around food, space and digital media, this paper introduces and develops the concepts of the digital foodscape and ‘good’ food grammars. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital platforms, discourses and personas, we investigate the ways a key set of digital food influencers (DFIs) construct, curate and share the meanings of good food. We first explore who these influencers are, describe what platforms they inhabit, how the variable social media affordances work through these platforms and the notions of good food they construct. We then focus specifically on DFIs’ communicative practices on Twitter to analyse the core discourses DFIs produce and those that are taken up by audiences through re-tweets and likes as well as the re-tweeted tweets of DFIs. Overall, our findings suggest that first, good food grammars are being constructed by rule setters beyond the already well-established food personalities and celebrity chefs of the UK’s foodscape. Yet, these grammars also re-inscribe a form of white, hetero-normative middle- and upper- class privilege that produces particular grammars of good food. Second, different social media and digital platforms provide space for diverse good food grammars given their variable affordances. Twitter, in particular, is the place where the grammars of DFIs take on non-food themes such as self-empowerment, inspiration, charity campaigning and awareness raising. Third, the notions of good food in DFI grammars revolve around a range of constructions, with the most elevated related to ‘clean’ eating and/or ‘clean’ lifestyles that combined healthy, ‘free from’ diets with fitness regimes and expand DFI grammars – and ultimately their brands – into a more holistic lifestyle brand. This paper’s initial empirical and conceptual foray into digital foodscapes and DFIs opens up space for further research on food and digital media within Geography and beyond.

When the Next Celebrity Chef Is a Robot, and You Are His Team Mate, How Will You Feel?

Human Robotic Interaction is becoming less of a sci-fi movie and becoming a reality in our daily lives. Specialized robots under human teleoperation have proven successful in dangerous environments and medical applications. Today robots are increasingly becoming involved in various aspects of food production facilities and are a part of the kitchen brigade around the globe. Collaborative robots or cobots, come in many flavors. Their ability to operate directly with humans, plus adaptability, portability, and ease of use make them perfect teammates to assist with tedious work in food production facilities. In it is a known fact that many chefs struggle already with anxiety, stress, and depression because of long hours of work and the harsh conditions they sometimes operate in. In this literature review, we will analyze the effect that HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) has on employees‟ cognitive behavior in a production plant. The focus of the literature review will be on research already performed in different industries to come to a possible suggestion that chefs can go through different behavioral responses when working next to a robot in a kitchen environment. An in-depth literature review will be conducted, and research criteria will be constructed to analyze the reasons why the behavioral responses of chefs might be different when the teammate is robotic.

Delving into the Role of Celebrity Chefs and Gourmets in Culinary Destination Marketing

This paper aims to explore the role of celebrity chefs and gourmets in culinary destination marketing based on the perceptions of celebrity chefs and gourmets. Drawing on qualitative data collected through 20 semi-structured interviews with celebrity chefs and gourmets in Turkey, the findings highlight the role of these celebrities in culinary destination marketing. This role is shaped through three key interconnected dimensions; namely, provocativeness, credibility, and supportiveness. The study is among the first attempts to explore, in an integrated manner, the role of celebrity chefs and gourmets from a destination marketing perspective. The study makes several theoretical contributions and proposes practical implications for practitioners in both destinations and firm levels.

A comparative exploration of celebrity chef influence on millennials

ABSTRACT This study extends literature about celebrity chef influence and millennial food habits. It explored the impact of chefs’ engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts. Data was collected from over 245 involved millennials through an online Qualtrics survey. Results illustrated that millennials are not all the same. Significant differences were found in millennials’ motivations for watching celebrity chefs, the influence of chefs on food habits, and awareness of the chefs’ CSR initiatives based on involvement. Millennial awareness of chef CSR activities is related to chef influence. This study extended understanding of celebrity chef influence on millennials’ by taking different levels of involvement into account and expanding knowledge about motives for celebrity chef engagement. Since millennials differed based on levels of involvement, findings have implications for various types of chef engagement with this generation. Implications are presented for chefs’ CSR activities at the local/regional levels since chefs are often asked to donate resources in their communities. An original contribution of this work is the Celebrity CSR Engagement Classification where four categories emerged based on different celebrity chef influences on food habits: Founders, Supporters, Powerhouses, and Laggards. The classification may be adapted for CSR research about other celebrities besides chefs.

Partaking in Culinary Heritage at Yaxunah, Yucatán during the 2017 Noma Mexico Pop-Up

In spring of 2017, celebrity chef René Redzepi opened a pop-up of his famed restaurant, Noma, on the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. During its run, Noma Mexico worked closely with the town of Yaxunah, a Yucatec-Mayan speaking community in the peninsula’s interior, hiring women to make tortillas and acquiring local ingredients for the restaurant. For us—two archaeologists interested in past and present Maya food and agriculture who have worked in the Yaxunah community for years—this made the 2017 field season a compelling time to engage in culinary heritage. We share on-the-ground perspectives from our work with Yaxunah community members during a decisive spring for rural Yucatán’s globalizing food system. These perspectives offer a candid contribution to this special issue’s archive of community-based and heritage-engaged archaeological work in the Maya area.

Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century ed. by David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith

Reviewed by: Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century ed. by David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith Jacob Steere-Williams David Gentilcore and Matthew Smith, eds. Proteins, Pathologies, and Politics: Dietary Innovation and Disease from the Nineteenth Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. x + 254 pp. Ill. $114.00 (978-1-350-05686-2). [Erratum] In a legislative attempt to curb what many nutritionists and food reformers see as alarming rates of childhood obesity, the United Kingdom last year rolled out the so-called "Sugar Tax," which puts a charge on excessively sugar-sweetened drinks. It was a move ushered in by antisugar campaigns by celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and backed by leading public health experts. But Britain is late to the antisugar party. In the past decade Hungary, Mexico, South Africa, and a host of other countries have introduced tax schemes on sugar-sweetened products. We are in a cultural moment today, it seems, where sugar is anathema to good health. But as Rachel Meach points out in this volume, the antisugar campaign is hardly new, even if it is newly relevant. Take, for example, the recent republishing—and rebranding—of mid-twentieth century British nutritionist John Yudkin's seminal Pure, White and Deadly.1 Yudkin, a self-styled and controversial "slimming expert," was clamoring about the harmful effects of excess sugar consumption from the 1950s, particularly to middle class women. But as Meach cleverly shows, in a post-World War II milieu that prioritized reductionist explanations for the relationship between diet and cardiovascular disease, Yudkin's antisugar claims were dwarfed by American nutritionist Ancel Keys' assertion that fat was the root—and sole cause of cardiovascular disease. Meach's chapter is a shining example of the kind of cutting edge, integrative, and historicist work on the intersections of food history and the history of disease at the heart of this edited volume. Much of the context here is familiar enough. The volume centers on the hundred years from 1850 to 1950, particularly the explosion of the manufactured food industry and the epidemiological transition, the decline of major infectious diseases and the rise of chronic conditions, particularly cancer and cardiovascular disease. Well known to historians of medicine is the emergence of risk-factor epidemiology, and so too are the classic examples of studies on beriberi and pellagra, and the Framingham Heart Study and Keys' Seven Countries Study. Proteins, Pathologies and Politics is organized into three sections, twelve chapters total. Part 1, "Responding to Chronic Disease," features work on three specific diseases, cancer (Agnes Arnold-Forster), diabetes (Kirsten Gardner), and allergies (Matthew Smith). Part 2, "Scientific Discourses" has two chapters on pellagra (Gentilcore and Mircea Scrob), one on the Framingham Study (Maiko Rafael Spiess), and Meach's work on the antisugar movement. The final section, "The Politics of Dietary Change," is more loosely organized, with chapters on the popularization of the calorie in World War I Belgium (Peter Scholliers), public feeding schemes in post-World War I Britain (Bryce Evans), vegetarianism in Italy and [End Page 145] Germany (Francesco Buscemi), milk and child welfare in post-war Italy (Inaudi), and food additives in twentieth century America (Claire Gorden Bettencourt). The central intervention of the volume is self-evident but deeply important, that "the emerging nutritional science of the early twentieth century came wrapped in a moralizing packaging" (p. 4). Where the volume shines is in chapters like Meach's, Arnold-Forster's, and Smith's, where the cultural history of food consumption is situated in changing debates in food science and research on disease. The opening chapter, for example, by Arnold-Forster, is a neat intervention about the largely ignored discourse on cancer in fin-de-siècle Britain, where the debate over cancer's incidence was intimately tied to broader theories of imperial decline. Smith's chapter is a fine addition as well, unpacking colorful and electric twentieth century debates over the relationship between food allergies and mental health. In total many of the chapters go a long way in historicizing Gyorgy Scrinis' concept of "nutritionism," the post–World War II reductive thinking about diet and disease that provides useful context for the explosion of...

Bloopers and backstage talk on TV cooking shows

AbstractTelevision instructional cooking shows provide a platform for discussion around the performance of self, with bloopers and backstage scenes revealing the best qualities of the celebrity chef’s personality despite the risk of face loss. Bloopers are short clips of mistakes that are typically removed from the media narrative. Often embarrassing and humorous, bloopers are moments when the celebrity chef’s performance is flawed with cooking errors or misspoken words. Drawing on Goffman’s concepts of ‘backstage’ and ‘frontstage,’ this paper analyzes bloopers on five American instructional cooking shows: The French Chef with Julia Child, considered one of the first celebrity chefs on television, and four contemporary how-to cooking shows from Food Network. These shows present cases of bloopers that occur in live and edited scenes, during the cooking demonstration, and pre- and post-filming. While a form of backstage discourse, bloopers support frontstage performance by heightening the celebrity chef’s unique attributes. Bloopers provide an outlet for play on frontstage as well.

TOO MANY COOKS: TRUSTING NEW VOICES IN ONLINE CULINARY ADVICE

Digital technology is becoming increasingly enmeshed in the everyday practices of cooking and eating (see Lewis 2018; Kirkwood 2018). In negotiating the increasingly complex web of culinary information online users need to remain vigilant about the voices and perspectives they turn to for food and nutrition advice.
 In examining which online sources are trustworthy, this paper adds to the scholarship that highlights how the growing industrialisation of food negatively impacted food literacy (Pollan 2006; Vileisis 2008). In relation to digital food media, Lewis (2018, 214) argues that “food citizens increasingly require a critical media literacy…”. This is important considering that consumers are more likely to turn to the media than nutrition professionals for advice (Contois and Day 2018, 16).
 This paper builds on Lewis’ (2018) calls for greater critical media literacy Through textual analysis of online news and popular commentary, this paper examines the two Australian case studies of Australian celebrity chef Pete Evans and fraudulent wellness advocate Belle Gibson. These examples highlight risks associated with online culinary information and provide contrasting perspectives on credibility and trustworthiness. Evans leverages mainstream media exposure and experience as a chef to establish credibility for his online channels where he explores his alternative culinary views more extensively. Gibson’s reputation meanwhile was established through achieving grassroots fame online for supposedly beating cancer through shunning conventional treatments. Understanding how trustworthiness or authority is established and negotiated, and particularly how these characteristics work between legacy and online media are important in developing critical media literacy around food.

Meet the First Authors.

Meet the First Authors.

The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano by Terence Scully (review)

Reviewed by: The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano by Terence Scully Doreen Alvarez Saar Terence Scully. The Neapolitan Recipe Collection: Cuoco Napoletano. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 2015. 256 p. While The Neapolitan Recipe Collection's target audience is food historians, particularly those of the late medieval period, this collection offers anyone interested in food many amuse-bouche about late medieval cookery and medieval society. This critical edition of an Italian manuscript (held in the Morgan Library) penned by an unknown cook of the late medieval period includes an astonishing array of scholarly apparatus including discussions of the manuscript, the textual questions, and the cookery of the period. Editor/translator Terence Scully demonstrates a wide range of scholarly skills: clearly, his passion is in the history of cuisine since his other works include The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages and Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes and Modern Adaptations. As an avid but amateur cook and a dabbler in things foodie, I was drawn to this volume because so few works on cooking of another period and in another country provide English translations of the recipes. Thus, I could dip into Cuoco Napoletano for delightful tidbits about medieval lore while theoretically enabling myself to reproduce a medieval Italian dish. Like a well-planned meal, the book had a depth of complexity and certain surprises. I had believed that the chefs of this period were unlettered since the skill of writing was limited to the upper reaches of society and the clergy; however, this manuscript was written by a cook who could not only write and read but was cognizant of, and working from, other sources about cookery. In fact, as Sculley tells us, knowledge of gastronomy is "most developed for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries throughout Europe" where collections of recipes exist in "all of the major European languages." These collections, of course, were developed for the aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie who had the capacity to employ both professional cooks and the battery of supporting workers. Sculley also describes four traditions of recipe collections in Italian: this one owes most of its formulations to the work of Maestro Martino, the greatest chef and cookbook author, called by many both the first modern and the first celebrity chef. Martino's Liber [End Page 230] de arte coquinaria is a standard of late medieval gastronomical literature. According to Scully, our unnamed author drew upon these recipes as well as on Catalan sources likely because of the influence in Naples of various portions of the Borgia family (whose origins were in Valencia) and secondarily because of the reign of Ferrante, the King of Naples and the son of Alfonso V of Aragon. Like most of us, I do not have a very accurate historical sense in that I make assumptions about the past based on my experience of the present. This text disabused me of many. Vinegar is such a staple of the modern kitchen that any cook relies upon the quality of the product; however, vinegar was of variable quality in the early medieval period and the cook had to know how to judge it. Despite my assumptions, sugar rather than honey was the favored sweetener in the kitchens of the aristocracy. Snails were considered a dish for the well-to-do. Most chefs had to have a repertoire of dishes for the ill and sickly: the lack of a significant number in this manuscript is unusual and indicates the relative wealth of the cook's employers. While ravioli and macaroni were known in other parts of Europe at this time (even in England!), the eggplant was unknown beyond Italy and Spain. Our cook is aware of recipes that originate well beyond Naples: in addition to dishes originating in other parts of Italy ("Roman Macaroni,"[which is differentiated from Sicilian macaroni] and "Florentine-Style Goat Kid in a Baking Dish"), he records "French-Style Tremolette," "Aragonese Sops," "Slavic Cooking Sauce" and "German-Style Scrambled Eggs." While one thinks of the spectrum of color as a constant, there are colors that were particular to this period (and used as important achievements of the kitchen) including "gaudy-green...

The role of the celebrity chef

The celebrity chef is a phenomenon of contemporary popular culture that shows no sign of decreasing in interest, as reflected in the boom in TV cookery programmes and a number of bestselling cookery books and chef biographies and autobiographies. This has contributed to the professionalization of the industry and to a growing influence of the celebrity chef on consumer food habits and choices. This article makes an original contribution to the literature on chefs by identifying the various roles played by the celebrity chef: the media performer, the writer, the entrepreneur, the role model, and finally the rebel. Implications for practice are drawn.

Increasing Language Learner’s Confidence in Speaking English through a Role Play Activity, “Celebrity Chef”

Confidence is crucial in language learning as language learners are able to communicate confidently despite having restricted number of L2 resources. Using an open-ended question, an action research was conducted to discover the opinion of 30 Culinary first semester students of UiTM Penang branch regarding the activity, “Celebrity Chef” in terms of increasing their confidence in speaking English through an interview after the activity. It was found that the students admitted that such activity was helpful in improving their confidence in using English as the they in majority revealed being confident to speak in this language after being involved in the activity.

Tweeting with the Stars: Automated Text Analysis of the Effect of Celebrity Social Media Communications on Consumer Word of Mouth

Prior research has focused on analyzing the content and intent of celebrity social media communications. By observing that the linguistic style of such celebrity communications drives consumer word of mouth, the main goal of the current research is to broaden this limited perspective. An automated text analysis of narrative/analytical, internally/externally focused, and negative/positive emotional styles in tweets by celebrity chefs, personal trainers, and fashion bloggers was conducted to this effect. The findings are threefold. First, across celebrity categories externally focused, narrative styles are more effective in terms of word of mouth. Second, emotional styles are not effective. Third, angry outbursts are an exception; they are effective drivers of word of mouth for personal trainers. As such, this research furthers scholarly and practitioner understanding of the state-the-art of celebrity social media communication: the effect of tweets' linguistic styles on consumer word of mouth.

The supplement at the… sau(r)ce: on Jamie Oliver’s (dis)placed global brand identity

Amid the constantly augmenting gastronomic capital of celebrity chefs, this study scrutinizes from a critical discourse analytic (CDA) angle how the Jamie Oliver brand 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, as well as how they 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 one. 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.

In Case You Haven't Heard…

Fans around the world marked what would have been the 63rd birthday of celebrity chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain June 25. Amid those celebrations, and motivated by Bourdain's suicide last June, organizers of a grassroots movement in Sacramento restaurants are expanding their efforts to foster a kitchen culture that supports the mental health of its workers, The Sacramento Bee reported June 25. Head chef Patrick Mulvaney of Mulvaney's B&L in midtown Sacramento said Bourdain's suicide in part inspired “I Got Your Back,” a movement that pushes for open discussion and easy access to professional mental health resources in the service community — through simple measures piloted at B&L. In the next two months, “I Got Your Back” will pilot in 22 restaurants in Sacramento, with hopes to go statewide — and even national. In a business as grueling as the restaurant industry, such support is badly needed, Mulvaney said. From standing in front of a grill on a 100‐degree day to managing 200 guests in one night, the fast‐paced, stressful environment can take a dangerous toll on mental health. Workers turn to drugs and drinking to alleviate stress.

Creando la frontera culinaria: un examen crítico de las narrativas de los chefs peruanos sobre alimentos perdidos/descubiertos

This article examines the narratives of lost and discovered foods prominent Peruvian chefs employ to frame their work as chefs and to promote Peruvian food more generally. It argues that many foods framed as recently lost/discovered were not lost but instead unknown, unvalued, or neglected by elite consumers. Tales of lost foods obscure the work of the many people who have produced and consumed these foods, while tales of discovery exalt white, male, elite chefs as protagonists with the vision and expertise to see value in “undervalued” ingredients and dishes. Linking contemporary Peruvian chef’s narratives about their work and Peru as a culinary frontier to heroic tales of Enlightenment thinkers and eighteenth-century travelers, the article shows how the same metaphors of vision, travel, and masculinity that wove their way through early heroic stories of discovery also define contemporary tales of Peruvian chefs seeking out novel ingredients. It argues that even as Peru’s emerging class of celebrity chefs work to subvert colonial culinary hierarchies that hold up European cuisines as exemplars of gastronomic excellence, they ultimately reproduce colonial relationships of power through their narratives of discovery that frame chefs as the arbiters of “good food” and erase the labor of the actors who actively produced and consumed the foods prior to their discovery.

Ana Tominc (2017). The Discursive Construction of Class and Lifestyle: Celebrity chef cookbooks in post-socialist Slovenia

This article reviews The Discursive Construction of Class and Lifestyle: Celebrity chef cookbooks in post-socialist Slovenia 978-9027206664£44

Book review: Ana Tominc, The Discursive Construction of Class and Lifestyle: Celebrity Chef Cookbooks in Post-Socialist Slovenia

Book review: Ana Tominc, <i>The Discursive Construction of Class and Lifestyle: Celebrity Chef Cookbooks in Post-Socialist Slovenia</i>

Philosophical tenets in the construction of culinary discourse: The case of British celebrity chefs’ websites

The study investigates the websites of ten British celebrity chefs, ranging between the age of 38 and 82. They were chosen to be a representative sample in terms of gender, age and, above all, culinary personas. Using the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and the Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) approaches, the study examines the paragraphs that precede the recipes in order to understand the attitude towards food that makes the chefs easily recognizable as specific culinary personas. The ways in which the chefs linguistically construct food-related discourse are interpreted according to four philosophical stances that correspond to four approaches to food found in Ancient Greek philosophers, namely Hedonism, Epicureanism, Platonism, and Asceticism. The analysis reveals that celebrity chefs show a predominant Epicurean approach, at the same time combining elements from the other ideologies. The chefs are also found to shape discourse in ways that challenge the hegemonic, gendered ideologies around food and cooking by positioning themselves as positive role models for a healthy, and yet pleasurable, food experience.

Celebrity Chefs and New Meat Consumption Norms: Seeking Questions, Not Answers

Celebrity Chefs and New Meat Consumption Norms: Seeking Questions, Not Answers