Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization

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Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization examines the growing popularity of food and travel television and its implications for how we understand the relationship between food, place, and identity. Attending to programs such as Bizarre Foods, Bizarre Foods America, The Pioneer Woman, Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, Man vs. Food, and No Reservations, Casey Ryan Kelly critically examines the emerging rhetoric of culinary television, attending to how American audiences are invited to understand the cultural and economic significance of global foodways. This book shows how food television exoticizes foreign cultures, erases global poverty, and contributes to myths of American exceptionalism. It takes television seriously as a site for the reproduction of cultural and economic mythology where representations of food and consumption become the commonsense of cultural difference and economic success.

Reviews

Kellys incisive analysis demonstrates that taste represents a cultural fault line, one wrought with assumptions about clean, dirty, the self, and other. A must-read for those grappling with the complex intersection of rhetoric and foodways. -- Justin Eckstein, Pacific Lutheran University
Food Television and Othernessin the Age of Globalization asks important questions about the ways identity is mediated through food in the swirl of contradictory globalization. Kelly helps us see how food shapes the historical relations between culture and power in ways that both tantalize and threaten. This is a compelling work of media criticism. -- Donovan Conley, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
In Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization, Professor Kelly does much more than offer a critique of food based television programming. Kelly explores the very nature of representation through careful, diligent, and close examinations of contemporary food based television. In so doing, Kelly explores the very production of meaning centered around Western audiences and offers an essential read for those interested in, or concerned about, the struggles inherent in shared social experiences. -- Derek Buescher, University of Puget Sound

Author Bio

Casey Ryan Kelly is associate professor of critical communication and media studies at Butler University.