This study explores the discourse of cookbooks as intercultural communication through the examina... more This study explores the discourse of cookbooks as intercultural communication through the examination of a corpus of recipes in order to describe their linguistic features and the communicative strategies employed by the authors. The analysis is of recipes from two cookbooks written by two well-known Japanese chefs for an American audience. By nature, cookbooks are a didactic text and accordingly exhibit recognizable features of a manual. That is, recipes include cooking-related lexicon, imperative verbs, and descriptive clauses. However, the recipes from the data also incorporate speech-like elements, such as first person and second person pronouns, and ambiguous and contemporary language. Findings suggest that the written features provide ways to maintain the integrity of the recipe genre while the spoken features provide ways for the authors to align themselves with their foreign readers. Thus, new insights into how writers can relate to their foreign audience through cookbooks, ...
ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered language used in female celebrity chef cookbooks. The... more ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered language used in female celebrity chef cookbooks. The analysis is a case study of three female celebrity chefs from the American cooking channel Food Network: Ree Drummond, Ina Garten, and Giada De Laurentiis. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach of interactional sociolinguistics, sociology, and feminism, this study identifies how the use of seemingly weak women’s language is used to enhance the celebrity chef’s appeal. Discourses of expertise, politeness strategies, and confessions build trust and rapport between the celebrity chef and the audience. This study complicates previous studies on gendered language and argues that women’s language strengthens the power and authority of female celebrity chefs as influential models of womanhood.
This article explores the mediated discourses of food and gender in a multimodal narrative analys... more This article explores the mediated discourses of food and gender in a multimodal narrative analysis of two Food Network instructional cooking shows hosted by female protagonists. Through a discussion of the openings and closings, side-narratives and evaluations, this article shows how multimodality advances the cooking show narrative. In examining the presentation of the women cooks in the context of their homes and family, the analysis illustrates how the mediated context facilitates the transition of women from underappreciated and expected caretakers in the kitchen to confident and empowered agents.
Television cooking shows have grown in popularity within the last two decades. As a media text, t... more Television cooking shows have grown in popularity within the last two decades. As a media text, they reflect the surrounding culture and social practices and elicit various emotional responses in people. As a multimodal text, television shows utilize multiple modes to create meaning. Based on the view of cooking shows as a multimodal texts, this paper draws on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic approach and examines how multimodal elements (linguistic, visual, sound, spatial, gestural) convey the authority of the tv host. In doing so, five different tactics from Van Leeuwen’s legitimation theory – personal, expert, role model, tradition, and conformity – of authority are identified and revealed. This paper provides an analysis of cooking shows that has resulted in a better understanding of the ways in which authority is constructed multimodally, and subsequently contributes to developing applications of multimodal analytical approaches in linguistic, cultural, and communication...
This article raises the important question as to why cooking, a seemingly mundane practice, perfo... more This article raises the important question as to why cooking, a seemingly mundane practice, performs social and cultural functions that go much beyond cooking, cooking instructions, and food preparation, and specifically how it functions in a media context. By integrating theories about inquiry, discourse analysis, gender, and sociolinguistics, the article makes an important contribution to the growing literature on contemporary discourse in the media. The research was conducted on popular television cooking channels, the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and involved close analyses of a sample of instructional cooking shows. The article is an exploration of social and communicative dynamics inherent in cooking, especially from the public discourse of contemporary cooking shows.
Television cooking shows provide a platform for discussion about food, with storytelling emerging... more Television cooking shows provide a platform for discussion about food, with storytelling emerging as a way to share and interpret experiences. Within the last twenty years, interest in food has soared with television channels devoted exclusively to food and cooking, nationally and internationally, reaching millions of viewers. Entertaining and educating simultaneously, cooking show hosts weave storytelling in recipe telling, engaging the viewer and creating an “ordinary” persona. Drawing on Labov's narrative theory and Fairclough's synthetic personalization, the paper analyzes the formal structure of stories and the legitimation strategies of amateur celebrity chefs within the discursive framework of the cooking show event. Specifically, storytelling in instructional cooking shows from the Food Network provides a resource for cooking show hosts to construct themselves as authorities in cooking but at the same time as equals to the viewers.
Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network, 2019
TV cooking shows combine two of our greatest interests: food and language. From Julia Child (the ... more TV cooking shows combine two of our greatest interests: food and language. From Julia Child (the first ‘celebrity chef’ in America) in the 1960s to today’s Guy Fieri and Rachael Ray, TV cooking shows are synonymous with those who present it, and the ‘reality’ of food is as they present it. Food Network, the first American TV channel solely devoted to food and entertaining, has grown from predominantly how-to cooking shows to pioneering new genres, such as travel cooking shows, competition, and talk cooking shows. The result is a mature and ample ‘food discourse’—verbal and nonverbal language about food—that is used by celebrity chefs to teach and engage viewers. Celebrity chefs construct themselves as authorities in cooking but at the same time as authentic and real to viewers. How celebrity chef food discourse shapes what is understood about food in the public and what this means is a leading question.
Television cooking shows provide a space for discourse about food, with storytelling emerging as ... more Television cooking shows provide a space for discourse about food, with storytelling emerging as a way to share and interpret experiences. Entertaining and educating simultaneously, cooking show hosts tell recipes and weave in stories, a form of narrative marked by distinctive linguistic and structural components. Cooking shows offer a kind of ‘super-story’ in that the show itself is a story with a consistent teller from week to week, each episode consists of a plot and a beginning and end, and within each episode are individual stories embedded within the recipe telling. Stories give context to the cooking, giving the act more meaning than just making food. The domestic scenario often revolves around a narrative of cooking demonstrations, for example, while travel cooking shows accompany celebrity chefs on tour as they progress from location to location, presenting viewers with ethnographic experiences of food cultures. Five different frameworks can be applied to analyzing cooking ...
Cooking shows take us to the heart of food discourse, the way we talk about food and relate to on... more Cooking shows take us to the heart of food discourse, the way we talk about food and relate to one another through food. Language structures viewers’ experience and perception of food and of the host themselves, from the viewers’ home kitchen, table, and TV screen to the celebrity chef cooking and plating a dish. While showing how to cook food, cooking show hosts narrate a food discourse, that is, how food and language can help us live fully engaged in our lives. In ‘living food discourse,’ we talk about food in the bigger sense—talking, watching, listening, cooking, and eating food—to create identities and construct societies. This book examined the language of celebrity chefs on TV cooking shows, specifically four linguistic features: recipe telling, storytelling, evaluations, and humor that serve to construct the host as a trusted expert and friend. Viewers learn the language and watch the performance of TV celebrity chefs on America’s food television channel Food Network. The ma...
This chapter describes characteristics of play and humor on cooking shows, illustrating how celeb... more This chapter describes characteristics of play and humor on cooking shows, illustrating how celebrity chefs use language to present cooking as fun. Analyzing the dynamics of “interactional humor” (Tsakona & Chovanec, 2018), this chapter examines humor of two cooking show genres on Food Network that feature talk in interaction: talk cooking shows and travel cooking shows. On the talk cooking show, The Kitchen, five co-hosts chat about food-related news, give cooking and hosting tips, cook, and eat on a set styled like a home with a kitchen, sitting area, and dining table. Their linguistic collaboration is a dynamic communicative event that gives rise to creative and diverse interpretations and meanings linguistically and culinarily. On the travel cooking show, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, host Guy Fieri uses innovative expressions and playful quips to relate to ‘ordinary’ people, including restaurant chefs, owners, and local customers at the featured eatery. Humor is constructed in t...
This chapter brings together the concepts of celebrity chef and language in an analysis of how co... more This chapter brings together the concepts of celebrity chef and language in an analysis of how cooking shows are a form of performance, and celebrity chefs, the actors. Through Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical metaphor, an analysis of impression management and performance is conducted of Food Network Star, a reality competition cooking show that provides instruction to contestants on how to become a celebrity chef on Food Network program. Authenticity, expertise, and self-control are part of the discursive strategies that help contestants perform as celebrity chefs. Building on media concepts of ‘being yourself’ and ‘authenticity’ (Bell & Hollows, 2005; Bennett, 2011; Thornborrow & Van Leeuwen, 2001), the analysis reveals television’s pedagogy and practice of stardom and authenticity.
This study explores the discourse of cookbooks as intercultural communication through the examina... more This study explores the discourse of cookbooks as intercultural communication through the examination of a corpus of recipes in order to describe their linguistic features and the communicative strategies employed by the authors. The analysis is of recipes from two cookbooks written by two well-known Japanese chefs for an American audience. By nature, cookbooks are a didactic text and accordingly exhibit recognizable features of a manual. That is, recipes include cooking-related lexicon, imperative verbs, and descriptive clauses. However, the recipes from the data also incorporate speech-like elements, such as first person and second person pronouns, and ambiguous and contemporary language. Findings suggest that the written features provide ways to maintain the integrity of the recipe genre while the spoken features provide ways for the authors to align themselves with their foreign readers. Thus, new insights into how writers can relate to their foreign audience through cookbooks, ...
ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered language used in female celebrity chef cookbooks. The... more ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered language used in female celebrity chef cookbooks. The analysis is a case study of three female celebrity chefs from the American cooking channel Food Network: Ree Drummond, Ina Garten, and Giada De Laurentiis. Relying on an interdisciplinary approach of interactional sociolinguistics, sociology, and feminism, this study identifies how the use of seemingly weak women’s language is used to enhance the celebrity chef’s appeal. Discourses of expertise, politeness strategies, and confessions build trust and rapport between the celebrity chef and the audience. This study complicates previous studies on gendered language and argues that women’s language strengthens the power and authority of female celebrity chefs as influential models of womanhood.
This article explores the mediated discourses of food and gender in a multimodal narrative analys... more This article explores the mediated discourses of food and gender in a multimodal narrative analysis of two Food Network instructional cooking shows hosted by female protagonists. Through a discussion of the openings and closings, side-narratives and evaluations, this article shows how multimodality advances the cooking show narrative. In examining the presentation of the women cooks in the context of their homes and family, the analysis illustrates how the mediated context facilitates the transition of women from underappreciated and expected caretakers in the kitchen to confident and empowered agents.
Television cooking shows have grown in popularity within the last two decades. As a media text, t... more Television cooking shows have grown in popularity within the last two decades. As a media text, they reflect the surrounding culture and social practices and elicit various emotional responses in people. As a multimodal text, television shows utilize multiple modes to create meaning. Based on the view of cooking shows as a multimodal texts, this paper draws on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic approach and examines how multimodal elements (linguistic, visual, sound, spatial, gestural) convey the authority of the tv host. In doing so, five different tactics from Van Leeuwen’s legitimation theory – personal, expert, role model, tradition, and conformity – of authority are identified and revealed. This paper provides an analysis of cooking shows that has resulted in a better understanding of the ways in which authority is constructed multimodally, and subsequently contributes to developing applications of multimodal analytical approaches in linguistic, cultural, and communication...
This article raises the important question as to why cooking, a seemingly mundane practice, perfo... more This article raises the important question as to why cooking, a seemingly mundane practice, performs social and cultural functions that go much beyond cooking, cooking instructions, and food preparation, and specifically how it functions in a media context. By integrating theories about inquiry, discourse analysis, gender, and sociolinguistics, the article makes an important contribution to the growing literature on contemporary discourse in the media. The research was conducted on popular television cooking channels, the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and involved close analyses of a sample of instructional cooking shows. The article is an exploration of social and communicative dynamics inherent in cooking, especially from the public discourse of contemporary cooking shows.
Television cooking shows provide a platform for discussion about food, with storytelling emerging... more Television cooking shows provide a platform for discussion about food, with storytelling emerging as a way to share and interpret experiences. Within the last twenty years, interest in food has soared with television channels devoted exclusively to food and cooking, nationally and internationally, reaching millions of viewers. Entertaining and educating simultaneously, cooking show hosts weave storytelling in recipe telling, engaging the viewer and creating an “ordinary” persona. Drawing on Labov's narrative theory and Fairclough's synthetic personalization, the paper analyzes the formal structure of stories and the legitimation strategies of amateur celebrity chefs within the discursive framework of the cooking show event. Specifically, storytelling in instructional cooking shows from the Food Network provides a resource for cooking show hosts to construct themselves as authorities in cooking but at the same time as equals to the viewers.
Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network, 2019
TV cooking shows combine two of our greatest interests: food and language. From Julia Child (the ... more TV cooking shows combine two of our greatest interests: food and language. From Julia Child (the first ‘celebrity chef’ in America) in the 1960s to today’s Guy Fieri and Rachael Ray, TV cooking shows are synonymous with those who present it, and the ‘reality’ of food is as they present it. Food Network, the first American TV channel solely devoted to food and entertaining, has grown from predominantly how-to cooking shows to pioneering new genres, such as travel cooking shows, competition, and talk cooking shows. The result is a mature and ample ‘food discourse’—verbal and nonverbal language about food—that is used by celebrity chefs to teach and engage viewers. Celebrity chefs construct themselves as authorities in cooking but at the same time as authentic and real to viewers. How celebrity chef food discourse shapes what is understood about food in the public and what this means is a leading question.
Television cooking shows provide a space for discourse about food, with storytelling emerging as ... more Television cooking shows provide a space for discourse about food, with storytelling emerging as a way to share and interpret experiences. Entertaining and educating simultaneously, cooking show hosts tell recipes and weave in stories, a form of narrative marked by distinctive linguistic and structural components. Cooking shows offer a kind of ‘super-story’ in that the show itself is a story with a consistent teller from week to week, each episode consists of a plot and a beginning and end, and within each episode are individual stories embedded within the recipe telling. Stories give context to the cooking, giving the act more meaning than just making food. The domestic scenario often revolves around a narrative of cooking demonstrations, for example, while travel cooking shows accompany celebrity chefs on tour as they progress from location to location, presenting viewers with ethnographic experiences of food cultures. Five different frameworks can be applied to analyzing cooking ...
Cooking shows take us to the heart of food discourse, the way we talk about food and relate to on... more Cooking shows take us to the heart of food discourse, the way we talk about food and relate to one another through food. Language structures viewers’ experience and perception of food and of the host themselves, from the viewers’ home kitchen, table, and TV screen to the celebrity chef cooking and plating a dish. While showing how to cook food, cooking show hosts narrate a food discourse, that is, how food and language can help us live fully engaged in our lives. In ‘living food discourse,’ we talk about food in the bigger sense—talking, watching, listening, cooking, and eating food—to create identities and construct societies. This book examined the language of celebrity chefs on TV cooking shows, specifically four linguistic features: recipe telling, storytelling, evaluations, and humor that serve to construct the host as a trusted expert and friend. Viewers learn the language and watch the performance of TV celebrity chefs on America’s food television channel Food Network. The ma...
This chapter describes characteristics of play and humor on cooking shows, illustrating how celeb... more This chapter describes characteristics of play and humor on cooking shows, illustrating how celebrity chefs use language to present cooking as fun. Analyzing the dynamics of “interactional humor” (Tsakona & Chovanec, 2018), this chapter examines humor of two cooking show genres on Food Network that feature talk in interaction: talk cooking shows and travel cooking shows. On the talk cooking show, The Kitchen, five co-hosts chat about food-related news, give cooking and hosting tips, cook, and eat on a set styled like a home with a kitchen, sitting area, and dining table. Their linguistic collaboration is a dynamic communicative event that gives rise to creative and diverse interpretations and meanings linguistically and culinarily. On the travel cooking show, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, host Guy Fieri uses innovative expressions and playful quips to relate to ‘ordinary’ people, including restaurant chefs, owners, and local customers at the featured eatery. Humor is constructed in t...
This chapter brings together the concepts of celebrity chef and language in an analysis of how co... more This chapter brings together the concepts of celebrity chef and language in an analysis of how cooking shows are a form of performance, and celebrity chefs, the actors. Through Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical metaphor, an analysis of impression management and performance is conducted of Food Network Star, a reality competition cooking show that provides instruction to contestants on how to become a celebrity chef on Food Network program. Authenticity, expertise, and self-control are part of the discursive strategies that help contestants perform as celebrity chefs. Building on media concepts of ‘being yourself’ and ‘authenticity’ (Bell & Hollows, 2005; Bennett, 2011; Thornborrow & Van Leeuwen, 2001), the analysis reveals television’s pedagogy and practice of stardom and authenticity.
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