Media and food industries : the new politics of food 978-3-319-64101-0, 3319641018, 978-3-319-64100-3

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages iii-x
Introduction: New Food Politics (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 1-25
Front Matter ....Pages 27-27
Resisting ‘Agribusiness Apocalypse’: The Pleasures and Politics of Ethical Food (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 29-51
Food Television and Celebrity Chefs: Lifestyle Branding and Commodified Idyllism (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 53-75
Front Matter ....Pages 77-77
The ‘Social Life’ of Celebrity Brands: Maggie Beer’s Verjuice (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 79-106
Media Tourism and Rural Romance: Constructing Food Television’s ‘Cult Geographies’ (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 107-131
‘It Tastes Better’? Cookbooks, Happy Farmers and Affective Labour (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 133-151
Front Matter ....Pages 153-153
Media, Supermarkets and the Strategic Manufacture of Consumer Trust (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 155-192
Soft-Selling Supermarkets: Food Television and Integrated Advertising (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 193-217
Conclusion: A New Politics of Food? (Michelle Phillipov)....Pages 219-223
Back Matter ....Pages 225-259

Citation preview

M E DI A AN D F O OD I NDU STR IE S The New Politics of Food Michelle Phillipov

Media and Food Industries

Michelle Phillipov

Media and Food Industries The New Politics of Food

Michelle Phillipov School of Social Sciences University of Tasmania Hobart, TAS Australia

ISBN 978-3-319-64100-3 ISBN 978-3-319-64101-0  (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948307 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: cometary Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (‘The New Politics of Food and the Australian Media’, 2014–2016, DE140101412). The University of Tasmania (the School of Social Sciences and the College of Arts and Law, in particular) provided substantial support for this research fellowship. Thanks to Erin Hawley, Katherine Kirkwood, Kate Christ and Jess Loyer for their research assistance in support of this book and the broader activities of the fellowship. I am especially grateful to Erin for her careful management of project logistics (including setting up research interviews, organising events and managing the project website, newfoodpolitics.org). I also would like to thank my colleagues in the Sustainable Food Systems Flagship (especially Fred Gale and Aidan Davison), the Food Values Research Group (especially Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray), Tania Lewis and Mike Goodman, whose collaborative work during the past three years has enriched my thinking about this project. The project would not have been possible without the 40 or so media producers, food producers, retailers, celebrity chefs and television cooking show contestants who gave up their time to speak to me on and off the record about their experiences of being involved in food media. All interviews were conducted in accordance with the conditions of research approval offered by the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania), approval number H0013675. I am grateful also to Palgrave Macmillan, and particularly to Felicity Plester, Sophie Auld and Heloise v

vi  Acknowledgements

Harding for their assistance and oversight on this project. Walter Leggett provided a thorough copy edit of the manuscript, and Juliet Richters supplied the index. And, finally, thanks once again to my husband, Simon Koop, and to my parents, George and Sophie Phillipov, for their support during another lengthy book project—it is, as always, appreciated. Earlier versions of parts of this book appeared in: ‘Escaping to the country: Media, nostalgia and the new food industries’, Popular Communication 14: 111–122; and ‘“Helping Australia grow”: Supermarkets, television cooking shows and the strategic manufacture of consumer trust’, Agriculture and Human Values 33: 587–596.

Contents

1 Introduction: New Food Politics 1 Food Media and Alternative Food Politics 5 Analysing Media and Food Industries 14 Structure of the Book 16 References 20 Part I  Contexts 2 Resisting ‘Agribusiness Apocalypse’: The Pleasures and Politics of Ethical Food 29 Problems and Solutions 32 The Politics of Ethical Consumption 39 Gender and Nostalgia 43 References 49 3 Food Television and Celebrity Chefs: Lifestyle Branding and Commodified Idyllism 53 Escaping to River Cottage 55 A Commodified Idyll 60 The Two Faces of Jamie Oliver 63 Cooking from ‘Scratch’ with Processed Foods 66 Celebrity Brands 72 References 73 vii

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Part II  Connections 4 The ‘Social Life’ of Celebrity Brands: Maggie Beer’s Verjuice 79 The Social Life of Things 82 Verjuice and ‘Brand Maggie’ 86 A Barossa Tradition 96 Cooking with Verjuice 101 References 103 5 Media Tourism and Rural Romance: Constructing Food Television’s ‘Cult Geographies’ 107 Media Pilgrimages 111 A Tasmanian Idyll 114 Farming Gourmet-Style 121 Constructing Cult Geographies 127 References 129 6 ‘It Tastes Better’? Cookbooks, Happy Farmers and Affective Labour 133 The ‘Work’ of Kylie Kwong 136 The Pleasures of Work 139 Passionate Work and the Politics of Representation 149 References 150 Part III  Appropriations 7 Media, Supermarkets and the Strategic Manufacture of Consumer Trust 155 Supermarkets Under Attack 160 Neutralising the Noise: Curtis Stone 171 From PR Coup to “PR Fail”: Jamie Oliver 179 Manufacturing Trust 184 References 186

Contents

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8 Soft-Selling Supermarkets: Food Television and Integrated Advertising 193 Farmer’s Choice 198 Converting Recipes to Riches? 207 The Supermarket Soft Sell 214 References 215 9  Conclusion: A New Politics of Food? 219 References 223 References 225 Index 247

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: New Food Politics

Over the past several decades, growing concern about the standardisation, globalisation and unsustainability of industrial food production has prompted a range of responses designed to transform food systems and ‘reconnect’ producers and consumers in more ethical and sustainable ways. The rise of what scholars have called “alternative food practices” (Goodman 2003), “alternative food networks” (Goodman et al. 2012) or, simply, “alternative food politics” (Campbell 2009) has paralleled the emergence of a burgeoning food media industry similarly interested in the politics of food production and consumption. Their appearance at the same moment in time reflects both the increasing centrality of “life politics” in contemporary culture (Lewis 2012) and new industry imperatives prompted by significant changes in the media and food industries. Food is now a burgeoning entertainment industry, with an ever-growing number of television programmes, websites and social media forums dedicated to cooking and food-related lifestyles. Not all food media is explicitly driven by political concerns—the food media industry is a complex one, characterised by diverse market segments—but in recent years a shared vocabulary has emerged through which ideas about ‘good’ food are typically framed and understood. Across a range of food media genres and platforms, ‘good’ food is represented in quite specific terms. It is typically small-scale, artisanal, ‘authentic’. It exemplifies the qualities of “embeddedness, trust and place” associated with alternative food practices (Goodman 2003: 1). It is food of known provenance, produced ‘ethically’ by people with a deep commitment to their vocation—and, © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_1

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frequently, in idyllic locations. In short, ‘good’ food is (emplaced) “Food from Somewhere”, rather than (industrial) “Food from Nowhere” (see Campbell 2009). These texts utilise discourses that we may associate with alternative food politics and networks, but food media is now thoroughly mainstream.1 Particularly across the anglophone West, food media’s success has been the saviour of several ‘traditional’ media industries, most notably book publishing and television, in which cookbooks have almost single-handedly saved a number of struggling publishing houses (Orr 2012), and food television has retained both audiences and advertisers at a time when overall television viewership is in decline (see Hindman and Wiegand 2008). Food has generated new forms of media engagement through its uptake on social media, photo-sharing sites and apps, among other media forms. Scholars of food and lifestyle media have frequently identified changes in contemporary food media and food politics as primarily consumer-driven and, in particular, as a reflection of the increasing global influence of neoliberal, consumer-oriented modes of citizenship (Miller 2007; Lewis 2008b; Ouellette and Hay 2008). Much of this work has located the popularity and importance of food media within the growing international literatures on ethical consumption, and has considered the ways in which food media presents individual lifestyle ‘choices’ as methods for investing in and articulating ethical, social and civic concerns, particularly those tied to notions of responsible and sustainable consumption (e.g. Lewis 2012; Littler 2008; Bell and Hollows 2011). As a result, much of the literature in this area has focused on the politics and personal food practices of consumers (e.g. de Solier 2013; Johnston and Baumann 2010; Leer and Povlsen 2016), and how these are framed and addressed in media and other texts (e.g. Rousseau 2012b; Bradley 2016; Lavin 2013). Such studies tend to consider the emerging consumer politics surrounding the health, environmental and animal welfare impacts of conventional food systems, as well as the practices of taste, distinction and lifestyle involved in the purchasing, preparation, consumption and mediation of food.

1 I am primarily concerned with how meanings and discourses associated with ‘alternative’ food are mobilised in media texts. Debates about what ‘counts’ as alternative, or how alternative should be defined, have been conducted elsewhere (e.g. Sonnino and Marsden 2006; Follett 2009).

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Few studies have examined the industry dynamics underpinning these media-consumer relationships, or how industry practices are affecting the production and circulation of food media texts. This is significant because the increased media focus on food is driven not just by consumers or new forms of consumption politics, but also by media and food producers, and by economic and political imperatives within the media and food industries. These industry dynamics are shaping the conventions of media texts and of media and food industry relationships. Relationships between media and food industries are not in themselves new. The importance of media-branded toys (Disney, Nickelodeon, Pokémon, etc.) to children’s fast food marketing (Schlosser 2002), or the ubiquitous product placement on daytime cooking shows (de Solier 2005) are just two examples of long-standing media–food industry relationships. What is new is the increasing sophistication and intensification of these relationships, as well as their embrace by both the artisanal and conventional food sectors. Contemporary food media, itself an early adopter of multi-platforming and convergence cultures (Bonner 2009; Jenkins 2006), and a platform for the branded identities of celebrity chefs (Lewis 2010; Powell and Prasad 2010), is now being shaped through both the convergence of media and food industry imperatives and the emergent cultural politics of food. It has become a key platform for enabling the public visibility of discourses and practices of ‘good’ food. Indeed, food media is so central to the expression of popular food politics that it now plays a central role in shaping media and food industry practices, and markets and marketing strategies for both ‘alternative’ and ‘conventional’ food products. Indeed, the powerful affordances of food media’s mainstream ‘reach’ and shared representational strategies are being used equally by those with a genuine, activist commitment to a progressive food politics and by large corporations subject to criticism for their questionable food ethics. This is a book about this new politics of food. While scholarly interest in food media has been growing in recent years, this is the first book to explore how the food media landscape is being shaped by a combination of new consumer politics and media and food industry imperatives. It analyses the textual strategies and industry dynamics underpinning the production of food media texts as a means to show how food media is now impacting the ways in which alternative food politics are enacted and understood. From artisan food products and food tourism experiences that play upon the romance of the rural idyll to the

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brand management strategies of major supermarkets, Media and Food Industries considers how food media representations are changing media and food industry practices, and the visibility and accessibility of contemporary food politics. The representational strategies of food media texts are having an effect on the types of politics that are now possible within popular food media, their implications for media and food system actors, and the extent to which they enable or constrain the ways in which we can imagine, and potentially transform, our food systems. While many of the media practices identified in the chapters that follow would be common to food media across the anglophone West, this book addresses these issues of food politics primarily through case studies drawn from the Australian media and food industries. Australia is unique as a site of both a highly successful food media industry and one of the world’s most concentrated food retail markets. International food media formats (such as MasterChef) have broken ratings records in Australia, while successful Australian formats (such as My Kitchen Rules) have been franchised across the world. Indeed, Australia has been experiencing a “foodie boom” since the 1990s, with commercial and public broadcasters alike focusing on primetime food programming (de Solier 2008: 66). Food media appeals most strongly to what the industry would refer to as the “AB” demographic: the “members of the educated cosmopolitan classes, with the cultural and economic capital to put stylized food production and consumption to work in the production of the self ” (de Solier 2008: 69). Texts that feature hard-working rural artisans in idyllic surrounds have proven especially popular. Australia also has an unusually concentrated food retail sector, with just two supermarket chains controlling more than two-thirds of the grocery market. This has given Australian supermarkets considerable market power to reshape food systems in line with retail interests, while their sponsorship of the most successful food media texts (including both MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules) has given them significant media presence and agenda-setting capacity. As a result, debates about food politics are especially urgent in the Australian context. But this book is not just about Australia. The relatively contained operational scale and compact networks governing the production of food media texts also means that the imperatives underpinning, and the consequences of, media and food industry relationships are often more clearly visible in Australian food media than they are in contexts where media and food industries are larger and more complex.

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While Australian food media is a product of specifically Australian circumstances, it is also a product of international contexts. As such, case studies throughout the book have been chosen for their capacity to reflect trends in both food media texts and in media and food industries that would be recognisable to readers across the anglophone West. The Australian experience offers especially clear case studies of the various textual and political questions that arise when traditionally activist concerns about food are brought into contact with the commercial imperatives of the media and food industries and with the production conventions of food media texts. Three key questions shape the chapters that follow: how is the production and circulation of food media texts being shaped by the needs of media and food industries? What meanings and values with respect to food are being made visible as a result of media–food industry relationships? And what are the implications— both for our food politics and our food systems—of representing food in these ways? Before investigating these questions via media case studies, this Introduction will first outline the history of popular food media and rise of popular food politics, the methods used in the research, and the structure of the book.

Food Media and Alternative Food Politics Food media has a long history. Cookbooks are among the earliest printed books (Mennell 1996: 65). Food programming is one of the oldest genres of radio and television, with content initially aimed at instructing women in cookery and home maintenance (Collins 2009). By the 1980s the emergence of food journalism and food criticism had developed new audiences for food media with their “instruction on enjoyment rather than production—knowledge about, not knowledge of how to” (Miller and McHoul 1998: 47). The more recent expansion and proliferation of politically inflected food media texts draws upon this longer history of pedagogical instruction, but it is also a product of very contemporary circumstances. Specifically, it is the result of two conditions: the intensification of consumer anxieties about food risk, and significant media industry change. The growth of food media during the 1990s occurred alongside a period of peak concern about the risks of industrial agriculture. Outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, colloquially known as mad cow disease), foot-and-mouth disease, and deadly

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foodborne illnesses caused by salmonella and E. coli contamination revealed shocking practices that the industry had previously kept hidden from public view, and highlighted a failure of the UK, European and US governments to ensure the safety of both farm animals and consumers. Persistent energy crises and worries over ‘peak oil’, in addition to concerns about the health and environmental damage caused by synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, galvanised public interest in food system change during this time (Campbell 2015). These crises significantly changed the landscape of food activism. Attempts to find alternatives to global, industrialised supply chains, and ways of eating that reconnect consumers to their food and those who produce it, saw food politics shift from a countercultural to a mainstream middle-class phenomenon, with considerable impacts on the food industry (Belasco 2007). Many of the most wellknown food exposés that revealed the deleterious economic, health and environmental effects of industrial food systems—from Michael Pollan’s writing to documentary films like Food Inc.—appeared during this time. In the decade that followed, “campaigning culinary documentaries” fronted by celebrity chefs exposed additional food systems issues, including animal welfare and seafood sustainability (Hollows and Jones 2010; Bell and Hollows 2011; Bell et al. 2017). The 1990s and 2000s also saw a proliferation of alternative food networks responding to a range of health, environmental and political concerns related to contemporary food systems. These groups were and are heterogeneous, and reflect a range of political projects, but among the most publicly visible of these are the rise of farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture schemes (CSAs), both of which are designed to reconnect producers and consumers and to re-embed consumers within their food systems (Parkins and Craig 2009). The popularity of these and similar initiatives has helped move food politics further from the ‘margins’ to the ‘mainstream’. Despite growing concerns with diversity and food justice in recent years (e.g. Guthman 2007; Goodman et al. 2012; Cadieux and Slocum 2015), it nonetheless remains a disproportionately white, middle-class politics. This is in part due to the significant economic capital required to “eat ethically” (Zimmerman 2015: 46; Goodman 2009), and to the particular political and ideological bases of the most popular practices. Scholars have often pointed to the rise of alternative food networks as responses to Ulrich Beck’s “risk society” (e.g. Clarke et al. 2008; Richards et al. 2011). That is, modern food has come to be seen as a site of risk manufactured through human activity

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(particularly through the application of science and technology) and, unlike “traditional” risks, the risks associated with modern food (such as pollution, toxins and health and environmental risks) are largely invisible (Richards et al. 2011: 33). Although the hazards of industrial food systems tend to disproportionately affect those with limited class and economic capital (see Schlosser 2002), it is frequently the educated middle classes who feel themselves to be most at risk (Ashley et al. 2004: 196). This goes some way to explaining why alternative food networks tend to express middle-class consumers’ commitment to ethical and sustainable food production and to offer ‘solutions’ designed to ameliorate their particular anxieties about food risk (Phillipov 2016a). As well as being disproportionately middle class, many popular alternative food practices also tend to share a faith in the consumer market as a locus for political change. This has contributed to the rise of practices of “ethical consumption”, “radical consumption” and “political consumerism” (among other terms) that construct consumption as a site of citizenship, civic engagement and consumer-based politics (see Lewis and Potter 2011; Littler 2008; Stolle and Micheletti 2013). While largely viewed as a pathway to political participation for people otherwise disengaged from traditional political systems (Barnett et al. 2005), ethical consumption has also been understood to contribute to new types of neoliberal governance designed to “responsibilize” citizens via their consumer practices and to displace questions of social responsibility away from governments and corporations and onto individual lifestyle “choices” (Littler 2011: 33; Lewis 2008b: 227). The ascendancy of the “responsibilized” citizen-consumer has prompted a range of industry responses. From the activities of the Slow Food movement to food labelling and certification schemes designed to appeal to the ethical consumer, there is now a range of products and experiences that reframe the pleasures and politics of food in ways compatible with more sustainable and ethical consumer practices. Often these adopt discourses of nostalgia, deploying resources of ‘tradition’ as a means of reimagining contemporary practices of consumption (see Bramall 2013). There have also been impacts for larger players in the food system, such as major supermarkets, which have taken steps to reform global supply chains and adopt ethical marketing platforms in response to growing consumer concern about the provenance of food and the ethics of food production (Lewis and Huber 2015; Friedberg 2004).

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Across both ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ responses, then, the critique of Big Food, combined with alternative conceptions of ‘good’ eating, has become increasingly coherent. This can be seen especially clearly in popular food media texts, the representational strategies of which have been shaped both by emergent food politics and by changing conditions within the media industries. Accounts of the structural changes to global media industries in the 1980s and 1990s are now well rehearsed (e.g. Hesmondhalgh 2013; Waisbord 2004; Flew 2007). Deregulation of media markets, fragmentation of audiences, declining advertising revenues, and increased competition from online and user-generated media have each posed a range of challenges for ‘traditional’ media industries and have necessitated the development of new media products, formats and strategies. There has been substantial scholarly interest in the particular challenges and opportunities of these changes for the television industry in particular (Waisbord 2004; Lotz 2014; Madger 2009)—and, certainly, food television has been especially successful at navigating this climate of media industry change (see Oren 2013; Hill 2005). Much like the genres of reality and lifestyle television from which it takes its cues (Hill 2005; Waisbord 2004; Bell and Hollows 2005), food programming has proven adaptable to the logic of formatting, which has enabled the production of predictably successful, low-cost programmes that can be sold to global markets and/or customised for particular local markets and contexts (Oren 2013; Ashley et al. 2004: 175; Waisbord 2004: 365, 368). For example, MasterChef, a format originally developed by the BBC and later revived and sold internationally by Endemol Shine Group, is now produced locally in more than 40 countries and various versions of the programme air in over 200 territories internationally. Some have been so successful that they have broken ratings records: the series 2 finale of MasterChef Australia was the most watched nonsporting event since OzTAM television ratings began in 2001 (ABC News 2010). MasterChef also capitalises on format television’s capacity to increase revenues by integrating the television programme with other media products, such as cookbooks, magazines and websites, each carrying the MasterChef brand. As Ouellette and Hay (2008: 472) observe of reality television, food television similarly coordinates a range of media resources, constructing the “‘programme’ in the old sense of broadcast media…[as] the entry point into a broader menu of customizable entertainment”. In the case of MasterChef Australia, this has contributed to a “MasterChef effect” affecting the shopping, cooking and eating habits of

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Australians; supermarkets, for example, experience sales spikes of up to 480% for ingredients that appear on the television show (Sinclair 2010: 32). Even without adopting proprietary formats, food television’s tendency to produce programming with an easily recognisable and replicable set of narratives and genres—what Strange (1998: 301) classifies as the genres of “Cookery-Educative”, “Personality”, “Tour-Educative” and “RawEducative”—means that programmes can be readily adapted to local production contexts with only minor variations and innovations. Individual programmes can travel easily across international borders. For instance, the “Tour-Educative” genre, in which the show’s host travels to a particular location, meets local cooks and food producers, and then prepares dishes inspired by his or her travels, can be reproduced in theoretically endless permutations—from Kylie Kwong: My China and Reza: Spice Prince of India to Follow Donal to Europe and the Hairy Bikers series. However, food television is only one part of a broader expansion in food media over the last few decades. From food blogs and apps to Instagram and “food porn” (Lofgren 2013; Rousseau 2012a; McDonnell 2016), there has been an intensified media focus on food that has been, in part, the result of media’s increasing ‘lifestylisation’ since the 1990s, with its focus on everyday lifestyles, practices and politics (see Bell and Hollows 2005; Lewis 2008a). In relation to food media this has seen the introduction of a range of experts and “cultural intermediaries”, particularly celebrity chefs whose role is to instruct not just in the art of cooking, but also in the art of lifestyle (Powell and Prasad 2010: 113; see also Rousseau 2012b; Moseley 2001; Lewis 2008a). Celebrity chefs, as mediatised lifestyle “experts”, often convey an “ordinary expertise” based around their familiarity, approachability and apparent ‘everydayness’ (Lewis 2010; see also Bonner 2003; Powell and Prasad 2007). These forms of what Christine Barnes (2017) calls “charismatic ordinariness” work to put viewers at ease and locate the celebrity chef within practices of food governance. As well as education in the art of lifestyle, scholars frequently understand food media as a pedagogical site for the acquisition of cultural capital and for the deployment of knowledge and practices of culinary distinction (e.g. de Solier 2005; Johnston and Baumann 2010; Naccarato and Lebesco 2012). Like practices of ethical consumption, food media is often understood as part of a neoliberal reinvention of government, whereby lifestyle media and celebrity ‘experts’ provide “resource[s] for achieving the changing demands

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of citizenship” in late capitalist societies, societies in which ‘good’ citizenship is frequently associated with both self-surveillance and ‘proper’ regimes of consumption (Ouellette and Hay 2008: 31; see also Lewis 2008a). Within this context food media has also been understood as a space in which to work through consumer concerns about the nature of contemporary food production and consumption, particularly as they relate to consumers’ sense of alienation and disconnection from the sources of their food. Tania Lewis (2008b: 232) describes food and lifestyle media texts featuring charismatic celebrity chefs “rediscovering the joys of cooking and eating” as speaking to a broader sense of discontent with the instrumental culture of late modernity, [and reflecting] a concern with re-enchanting the contemporary everyday through promoting less alienated, more engaged modes of consumption.

Heinrich Versteegen (2010: 459–460), a little more bluntly, describes food media’s interest in the connection of food and place as “obviously targeted at the audience’s subliminal anxiety (fuelled by food scares, factory farming, superstore monopolies and other concerns)”, and as reflecting the audience’s desire to vicariously experience “the natural ‘source’ of the food which they fantasise about” and to access a “source of meaningful consumption outside of the self-alienating experiences of their day-to-day reality”. Seen in these terms, the qualities of “embeddedness, trust and place” that are central to alternative food practices (Goodman 2003: 1) become discourses that can be mobilised and worked through via food media. But as well as constructing and directing ‘desirable’ consumer subjectivities and assisting consumers to work through broader food systems issues, cultural intermediaries like celebrity chefs have also been crucial in shaping the institutional structure of markets and the circulation of commodities. As Negus (2002: 504) argues: cultural intermediaries shape both use values and exchange values, and seek to manage how these values are connected with people’s lives through the various techniques of persuasion and marketing and through the construction of markets.

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Celebrity chefs are themselves commodities—what Ashley et al. (2004: 175) refer to as “entertainment package[s]”—that move across media platforms, generating spin-offs and promotional opportunities for branded identities and products. These range from cookbooks, YouTube channels and websites to branded homewares and food products, each of which constructs a particular set of values and lifestyle practices around the image of the celebrity chef (Powell and Prasad 2010: 112). This has allowed celebrity chefs to operate both as a site for the construction of desirable lifestyles and as a focal point for addressing contemporary food systems problems, including healthy school dinners and animal welfare among other issues (Bell and Hollows 2011; Bell et al. 2017; Hollows and Jones 2010; Leggott and Hochscherf 2010). Jamie’s School Dinners, a campaigning culinary documentary in which celebrity chef Jamie Oliver sought to improve British school meals, was an influential early model that used media and celebrity as platforms for political change (Bell et al. 2015). The School Dinners campaign was conducted on a number of fronts, including through online and community initiatives coordinated around the UK Channel 4 television text. So effective was the campaign that it prompted then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to commit an additional £280 million in funding for school meals (BBC News 2005). The British Medical Journal endorsed the show as doing “more for the public health of our children than a corduroy army of health promotion workers or a £100m Saatchi and Saatchi campaign” (Spence 2005: 678). Such campaigns frequently draw upon celebrity chefs’ public profile and “tradab[ility]” developed in other areas of the media industry (Bell and Hollows 2011: 188). For example, British celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has successfully used his persona, developed through his idyllic River Cottage series, as a platform for a range of multimedia campaigns aimed at improving seafood sustainability, home food production, food waste and chicken welfare. His 2008 campaign for free-range chicken, for example, resulted in supermarket shortages of free-range chicken and contributed to free-range sales outstripping intensively reared for the first time in Britain (Johnston 2008). Through offering a set of representational strategies designed to ameliorate concerns about food risk and to re-enchant audiences with experiences of contemporary food production and consumption, food media is not just appealing to consumers. It is equally of interest to the food industry for the opportunities it presents for advertising, marketing, promotion and brand management. Nostalgic images of ‘traditional’

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methods of food production commonly appear in food advertising and on product labels (Jackson et al. 2007; Todd 2009). The desirable “brand capital” of celebrity chefs is often used to promote major supermarkets and mass-produced food products (Lewis and Huber 2015). Declining advertising revenues across the media industries, in conjunction with the growing cynicism of audiences towards conventional advertising, has seen the development of increasingly sophisticated forms of “integrated advertising” that meld advertising with other types of media content (Spurgeon 2013: 72). The various forms that integrated advertising now takes, including integration of brands in storylines, branded tie-ins and other kinds of branded content, have been a great boon both to a media industry seeking alternative sources of revenue and to advertisers looking for new ways to target increasingly media-savvy audiences (Spurgeon 2013: 73). The impacts of this can be seen across the media industries, but the close relationships between advertisers and media producers have been especially successful for reality and lifestyle media— and particularly for food media, where the involvement of food industry sponsors in the production of food media texts has enabled, in the words of one media executive, a “deep[er] level of integration” (qtd. in Meade 2012) than has been typical of other forms of advertising. Early studies of media and food industry relationships—such as junk food promotion to children—usually attributed integrated advertising to the sinister motives of Big Food (e.g. Nestle 2013). While many from both within and outside the academy have been rightly concerned about such food industry branding strategies, the way that media and food industry relationships have developed via the production of popular food media texts has seen the involvement of a variety of food industry players spanning the conventional–artisan spectrum. These relationships are not without their tensions. They have seen the involvement of a range of actors—not only from food and media industries, but also from governments and tourism bodies—seeking to capitalise on the markets and marketing strategies generated through the popularity of food media, and not all of these ultimately share the same agendas or goals. Further, while industry and state actors may not be equally empowered in their relationships with media producers, food media’s interest in the ethics of food production and consumption, and its attempt to diminish the sense of ‘distance’ between producers and consumers has created new opportunities for both artisan food producers and mainstream food retailers.

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Food media has lent boutique and artisan producers new prominence and visibility. There are now whole genres of cookbooks and television cooking shows, for example, dedicated to profiling and celebrating small producers who do things “the old-fashioned way” (Phillipov 2016a). Changes in the contemporary food media landscape and emergent consumer politics have also enabled (and, sometimes, necessitated) more inventive forms of brand management on the part of the bigger players, especially the major supermarkets, whose practices have suffered increasing scrutiny and critique in recent years. The affordances of food media, including integrated advertising, sponsorship and celebrity endorsement, have become attractive to supermarkets as strategies for managing the reputational damage caused by critiques ranging from popular exposés of supermarket practices (e.g. Blythman 2007) to negative media coverage and formal regulatory oversight resulting from supermarkets’ treatment of farmers and suppliers (Phillipov 2016b). Through their links with popular food media texts, supermarkets are able to gain access to their “foodie” capital (Phillipov 2016b: 593) and investment in progressive food politics. Much food media, then, is now shaped both by conditions within the media industry and by new promotional strategies and brand management techniques on the part of the food industry. As this book will show, food media is a product both of market forces and what Jenkins (2006: 62) would call “affective economics”. For Jenkins, affective economics reflects a profound transformation of the media economy in which media producers elicit the participation and “emotional capital” of audiences in order to ensure deeper investment in, and loyalty to, media products and their sponsors (Jenkins 2006: 70, 92). However, it is increasingly the case that food media texts are produced and circulated not just via the emotional capital and “affective labour” (Hardt and Negri 2004) of audiences, but also that of industry actors, whose work is central to the production of the pleasures associated with (particular kinds of) ‘good’ food. At the convergence of media and food industry imperatives with new consumer politics, food media is constructing a food politics in which food’s meanings are being reworked. This is a politics that is mobilised in quite specific terms. Food media texts frequently play on discourses of ‘connection’, but these discourses are activated in the context of differing industry agendas, each of which can work either to enhance or to obscure this connection. This has implications not just for how industry

14  M. Phillipov

actors might engage with food media, but also for the kind of politics that may be possible in and through food media texts. At a time when media and food industry relationships are intensifying, it is essential to better understand the type of politics that media’s focus on (certain kinds of) food both enables and constrains.

Analysing Media and Food Industries To more fully explicate this new politics of food, Media and Food Industries examines the media and food industry imperatives shaping food media texts, their textual and representational practices, and the particular forms taken by their politics. It does this by combining cultural studies’ methodologies for understanding the power and meaning of media texts (Turner 2003; Phillipov 2013) with media production studies’ insights into the industry dynamics underpinning these texts’ production and circulation (Cottle 2003; Havens et al. 2009). With some exceptions (e.g. van Ryn 2014; Lewis 2008a; Lewis et al. 2016), industry dynamics have been relatively neglected in studies of food and lifestyle media, where scholars have primarily focused on analysis of food media texts and on the personal food practices of consumers. However, integrating textual analysis with analysis of industry practices and imperatives is vital for explicating the mutually constitutive and interpenetrating relationships between market forces, professional practices and cultural forms that are central to the production of contemporary food (and, indeed, all) media texts (see Cottle 2003: 17, 18). For the purposes of this study, this has involved a two-pronged approach combining textual analysis of media texts with interviews with media and food industry personnel. Initially, a large range of food media texts were collected and analysed for key themes, with a small number of representative texts selected to form the case studies that follow. Media and Food Industries takes an unusually broad definition of food media as essentially any food-related media text, with the analysis encompassing television, cookbooks, food writing, advertising, news and social media. Such a wide reach has been essential for illuminating, and disentangling, the complexity of the contemporary media environment. While it has been a tendency of many previous studies to focus primarily on one medium (such as cookbooks or food television), the impact of food media today, and the industry relationships that underpin it, are not confined to single media platforms. This much broader definition of food

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media has enabled the research to capture the complex ways that food politics now circulate in media, the shared representational strategies within and across media platforms, and the industry networks shaping practices across the media landscape as a whole. From the large number of media texts that could potentially have formed the basis for analysis, case studies were chosen for their capacity to reflect new or intensified media–food industry relationships and to capture the breadth of media and food industry practices across the artisan–conventional food spectrum. As such, the case studies represent the two key types of food media text that characterise food’s current cultural resonances and politics: those with a seemingly activist commitment to “Food from Somewhere”; and those designed to manage criticisms of more conventional food industry practices and politics. Each case study typically centres on key ‘anchor’ texts around which other texts and representations circulate. These are often high-profile celebrity chefs or food media texts, which have been selected for their powerful and ongoing role in shaping contemporary food politics and food discourses. With some methodological eclecticism, anchor texts are subjected to close “readings” (Phillipov 2013) of textual representations in order to analyse how meaning and power is produced within the texts, how media–food industry relationships are manifested or obscured at a textual level, how meanings about food circulate within and across different media forms, and the implications of this for popular food politics. In addition to the textual analysis, approximately 40 interviews were conducted with media and food industry personnel, including celebrity chefs, media production staff, television cooking show contestants, and food producers and supermarket representatives involved in food media. Participants were selected based on the case study texts, and were asked about their professional practices and involvement in food media. This was done in order to access information about the production context of food media texts, to build up a more complete picture of “backstage” (Bruun 2016: 134) media practices and strategies, and to more fully explicate industry relationships and networks. Information from the interviews has been used both to enrich the textual analysis through deeper knowledge of the production context and to better understand the experiences of those involved in food media. This material provided access to the contexts that, as Simon Cottle puts it, “give expression to the complexities and contingencies involved” in media production

16  M. Phillipov

(2003: 4), and offered insights into the various practices and strategies adopted by media and food industries, including their moments of alliance and tension. My reliance on what scholars call “exclusive” or “elite” informants did sometimes pose challenges to access—a problem well known to researchers of media industries (see Bruun 2016; Paterson et al. 2016). While most of the media and food industry figures central to the book’s case studies were willing to participate in the research, some information needed to be accessed in other ways. For example, when the Executive Producer of a major television cooking show declined to be involved, knowledge about the programme’s production context was accessed via interviews with production staff and former contestants. Several participants also spoke only on strict condition of anonymity. Given Australia’s tight-knit media industry and highly competitive food industry, some participants worried about the professional risks of publicly revealing ‘trade secrets’ associated with their industries or of appearing to criticise media representations. This has affected how information from the interviews has been used throughout the book. In order not to reveal the identities of those who spoke anonymously participants have, where practical, been identified by role, rather than by name (e.g. as a media producer, supermarket representative, television cooking show contestant, food producer, etc.), and in the form: (role, date of interview [day month year]). In a small number of cases in which the participant is a particularly well-known public figure and they have agreed to speak ‘on the record’, they are also identified by name.

Structure of the Book The book is structured in three parts. Each chapter proceeds as a case study focused on a set of media texts that elucidate a particular aspect of contemporary media and food industry relationships. Case studies are designed to be read individually, but also capture key dimensions of media–food industry involvement and their implications for contemporary food politics. Part 1, Contexts, provides a foundation for the empirically grounded, Australian-based case studies in Parts 2 and 3. It offers an overview of key international contexts and debates centred on two types of media text that have been especially influential in the framing and visibility of popular food politics across the anglophone West: the genre of non-fiction food writing dubbed the “locavore literature” (Chap. 2);

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and television cooking shows fronted by celebrity chefs (Chap. 3). Both chapters analyse a core group of texts—the work of US food writers Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver and Gary Paul Nabhan on the one hand, and the television programmes of British celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the other—to outline the discourses and media practices that provide platforms for the media and food industry relationships that are discussed more fully in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 shows how the locavore literature’s dual impulses of the apocalyptic and the utopian work to produce the ideas about ‘good’ food that have become increasingly coherent in popular food media texts (e.g. local, traditional, old-fashioned, etc.) By locating the locavore literature in relation to changing practices of ethical consumption and the contemporary reshaping of consumer markets around (middle class) interests in ethical food, the chapter demonstrates the productive work of nostalgia in reframing the potentially conservative dimensions of these texts’ invocations of ‘tradition’ as politically progressive ‘choices’. Chapter 3 addresses the symbolic work needed to turn these ideas about ‘good’ food into platforms for new food products and experiences. Focusing on the television programmes of Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, it shows how the success of these two celebrity chefs lies in the alignment of textual representations ‘within’ their media texts with their food businesses ‘outside’ the texts. In the case of Fearnley-Whittingstall, this involves linking his idyllic River Cottage television series to tourist experiences that capture a ‘taste’ of the River Cottage life. In the case of Oliver, it involves the marketing of Jamie Oliver branded food products that capitalise on his food activist credentials established through his campaigning culinary documentaries. Parts 2 and 3 then introduce the book’s empirically grounded case studies, combining analysis of media texts and interviews with media and food industry professionals. Part 2, Connections, focuses on media and food industry relationships within the artisanal and alternative food sectors, while Part 3, Appropriations, focuses on those of the conventional food sector. The chapters in Part 2 examine how the particular set of images and values that Part 1 showed have become closely associated with contemporary food politics—idyllic rural landscapes, hardworking farmers and close-knit artisan food communities that connect producer and consumer—have become a lynchpin of the appeal of alternative food economies in and for media. The alliance between media and food

18  M. Phillipov

industry interests that such images and values suggest presents a range of opportunities and challenges for both media and food industries. These are explored through the media work and food industry activities of three well-known Australian food personalities—Maggie Beer (Chap. 4), Matthew Evans (Chap. 5) and Kylie Kwong (Chap. 6). Chapter 4 engages with the literatures on branding to trace the “social life” (Appadurai 1986) of verjuice, Maggie Beer’s most internationally successful food product, as it moves within and across different media forms. Verjuice is an example of a highly successful marketing strategy that aligns the discourses and values of ‘alternative’ food with the genre conventions of different types of media to distance the product, and Maggie Beer herself, from any commercial connotations. Instead, audiences are invited to use verjuice as an ‘access point’ for affective relationships with Beer and the qualities that she represents. But media and food industry imperatives are not always so closely aligned as they are in the case of Maggie Beer and verjuice. Chapter 5 considers the complex relationships between celebrity chefs, media producers, food industry personnel and other stakeholders (such as government agencies and tourism bodies) that underpin the production and circulation of food media texts. It examines the media tourism practices associated with the popular food television show Gourmet Farmer as an example not just of how food media’s idyllic representations of rural life and investment in food politics are appealing to food and tourism industries seeking to associate themselves with similar values and iconographies, but also of the limits to their effectiveness as marketing tools. Through discussion of the experiences of food and tourism industry figures involved in the production of Gourmet Farmer, Chap. 5 reveals some of the challenges in attempting to shape meanings beyond the parameters established by the media text. Chapter 6 also seeks to better understand the experiences of food producers involved in food media, and extends this discussion to consider in more detail the political implications of food media’s common tropes and representational strategies. Through analysis of Kylie Kwong’s cookbook, It Tastes Better: Over 100 New Recipes Using My Favourite Seasonal Produce, and the discourses of “affective labour” (Hardt and Negri 2004) that it invokes, the chapter explores how food media’s particular representations of ‘good’ food, and its promotion of a ‘connection’ to those who produce it, are not just highly pleasurable; they also work to construct food producers and the nature of foodwork in particular ways.

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It argues that It Tastes Better is an example of an increasingly coherent set of representations in food media that, although governed by a seemingly genuine food politics and a desire to show audiences where their food comes from, has the potential to, paradoxically, limit our understanding of food production, restrict what a contemporary food politics can ‘do’, and, as we will see in Part 3, produce representations that may be open to appropriation for quite different ends. The chapters in Part 3 explore some of these ‘appropriations’. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the media strategies of Australia’s highly concentrated supermarket retail sector as examples of the ‘conventional’ food sector’s increasing engagement with popular food politics—both as a response to changing consumer demands and as a brand management strategy designed to ameliorate criticism of ‘conventional’ food systems practices. Part 3 considers, in particular, how Australia’s two major supermarkets have adopted the language and iconographies of contemporary food politics through both conventional (Chap. 7) and integrated (Chap. 8) advertising. Chapter 7 begins by outlining the criticisms experienced by Australian supermarkets since 2010, with a focus on the media coverage of the retailers’ (allegedly poor) treatment of their farmers and suppliers. It then considers the retailers’ relationships with celebrity chefs Curtis Stone and Jamie Oliver as strategies to draw upon the “ethical capital” (Lewis and Huber 2015) they developed through other areas of the food and media industries in order to boost the public image of Australia’s two major supermarkets. Chapter 7 reveals both the affordances and the limits of aligning supermarket brands with high-profile celebrity chefs and the representational strategies of food media as strategies for image management. Chapter 8 then addresses these issues in relation to supermarkets’ integrated advertising on the primetime food television programmes My Kitchen Rules (MKR) and Recipe to Riches. These programmes are examples of how integrated advertising and sponsorship are now being used by supermarkets to address criticisms of their treatment of farmers (in the case of MKR) and suppliers (in the case of Recipe to Riches). With MKR much more effective than Recipes to Riches in enlisting both audiences and television contestants in replicating core brand messages, these cases highlight how some political discourses can be successfully adopted by larger players with a questionable investment in alternative food politics.

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Food media’s ‘mainstreaming’ of contemporary food politics, and the alliances between the media and food industries that this enables, have considerable power to both shape dominant discourses about food and to provide opportunities for the artisan and alternative food sectors to increase awareness of their products and production practices. But this politics is also potentially complicated and undermined by major supermarkets’ adoption of the very activist discourses designed to challenge their control of the food system. As such, the Conclusion addresses the book’s final question: is the intensified media focus on food ultimately helping or hindering changes to discourses of food politics and to our food system as a whole?

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22  M. Phillipov Friedberg, Susanne. 2004. The ethical complex of corporate food power. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 513–531. Goodman, David. 2003. The quality ‘turn’ and alternative food practices: Reflections and agenda. Journal of Rural Studies 19: 1–7. Goodman, David, Melanie DuPuis, and Michael K. Goodman. 2012. Alternative food networks: Knowledge, practice, politics. London: Routledge. Goodman, Michael K. 2009. Contemporary food matters? A review essay. International Planning Studies 14: 437–442. Guthman, Julie, et al. 2007. Can’t stomach it: How Michael Pollan et al. made me want to eat Cheetos. Gastronomica 7: 75–79. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin Books. Havens, Tim, Amanda D. Lotz, and Serra Tinic. 2009. Critical media industry studies: A research approach. Communication, Culture & Critique 2: 234–253. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2013. The cultural industries, 3rd ed. London: Sage. Hill, Annette. 2005. Reality TV: Audiences and popular factual television. London: Routledge. Hindman, Douglas Blanks, and Kenneth Wiegand. 2008. The Big Three’s prime-time decline: A technological and social context. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 52: 119–135. Hollows, Joanne, and Steve Jones. 2010. ‘At least he’s doing something’: Moral entrepreneurship and individual responsibility in Jamie’s Ministry of Food. European Journal of Cultural Studies 13: 307–322. Jackson, Peter, Polly Russell, and Neil Ward. 2007. The appropriation of ‘alternative’ discourses by ‘mainstream’ food retailers. In Alternative food geographies: Representation and practice, ed. Damian Maye, Lewis Holloway, and Moya Kneafsey, 309–330. Sydney: Elsevier. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. Johnston, Ian. 2008. Campaign leads to free range chicken shortage. The Telegraph, April 13. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1584952/ Campaign-leads-to-free-range-chicken-shortage.html. Accessed 27 Jan 2017. Johnston, Josee, and Shyon Baumann. 2010. Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape. New York: Routledge. Lavin, Chad. 2013. Eating anxiety: The perils of food politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leer, Jonatan, and Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (eds.). 2016. Food and media: Practices, distinctions and heterotopias. London: Routledge. Leggott, James, and Tobias Hochscherf. 2010. From the kitchen to 10 Downing Street: Jamie’s School Dinners and the politics of reality cooking. In The tube has spoken: Reality TV and history, ed. Julie Anne Taddeo and Ken Dvorak, 47–64. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

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Lewis, Tania. 2008a. Smart living: Lifestyle media and popular expertise. New York: Peter Lang. Lewis, Tania. 2008b. Transforming citizens? Green politics and ethical consumption on lifestyle television. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22: 227–240. Lewis, Tania. 2010. Branding, celebritization and the lifestyle expert. Cultural Studies 24: 580–598. Lewis, Tania. 2012. ‘There grows the neighbourhood’: Green citizenship, creativity and life politics on eco-TV. International Journal of Cultural Studies 15: 315–326. Lewis, Tania, and Alison Huber. 2015. A revolution in an eggcup? Supermarket wars, celebrity chefs and ethical consumption. Food, Culture & Society 18: 289–307. Lewis, Tania, Fran Martin, and Wanning Sun. 2016. Telemodernities: Television and transforming lives in Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. Lewis, Tania, and Emily Potter. 2011. Introducing ethical consumption. In Ethical consumption: A critical introduction, ed. Tania Lewis and Emily Potter, 3–24. London: Routledge. Littler, Jo. 2008. Radical consumption: Shopping for change in contemporary culture. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Littler, Jo. 2011. What’s wrong with ethical consumption? In Ethical consumption: A critical introduction, ed. Tania Lewis and Emily Potter, 27–39. London: Routledge. Lofgren, Jennifer. 2013. Food blogging and food-related media convergence. M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 16. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/638. Accessed Feb 2017. Lotz, Amanda D. 2014. The television will be revolutionized, 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press. Madger, Ted. 2009. Television 2.0: The business of American television in transition. In Reality TV: Making television culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, 149–156. New York: New York University Press. McDonnell, Erin Metz. 2016. Food porn: The conspicuous consumption of food in the age of digital reproduction. In Food, media and contemporary culture: The edible image, ed. Peri Bradley, 239–265. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Meade, Amanda. 2012. Masterchef cooks up ‘elegant’ mix of sponsors. The Australian, April 2: 28. Mennell, Stephen. 1996. All manners of food: Eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the present, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Miller, Toby. 2007. Cultural citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, consumerism and television in a neoliberal age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

24  M. Phillipov Miller, Toby, and Alec McHoul. 1998. Popular culture and everyday life. London: Sage. Moseley, Rachel. 2001. ‘Real lads do cook…But some things are still hard to talk about’: The gendering of 8–9. European Journal of Cultural Studies 4: 32–39. Naccarato, Peter, and Kathleen Lebesco. 2012. Culinary capital. London: Berg. Negus, Keith. 2002. The work of cultural intermediaries and the enduring distance between production and consumption. Cultural Studies 16: 501–515. Nestle, Marion. 2013. Food politics: How the food industry influences nutrition and health. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oren, Tasha. 2013. On the line: Format, cooking and competition as television values. Critical Studies in Television 8: 20–35. Orr, Gillian. 2012. Sweet taste of sales success: Why are cookbooks selling better than ever? The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/foodand-drink/features/sweet-taste-of-sales-success-why-are-cookbooks-sellingbetter-than-ever-8113937.html. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. Ouellette, Laurie, and James Hay. 2008. Better living through reality TV: Television and post-welfare citizenship. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Parkins, Wendy, and Geoffrey Craig. 2009. Culture and the politics of alternative food networks. Food, Culture & Society 12: 77–103. Paterson, Chris, David Lee, Anamik Saha, and Anna Zoellner. 2016. Production research: Continuity and transformation. In Advancing media production research: Shifting sites, methods, and politics, ed. Chris Paterson, David Lee, Anamik Saha, and Anna Zoellner, 3–19. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Phillipov, Michelle. 2013. In defense of textual analysis: Resisting methodological hegemony in media and cultural studies. Critical Studies in Media Communication 30: 209–223. Phillipov, Michelle. 2016a. Escaping to the country: Media, nostalgia, and the new food industries. Popular Communication 14: 111–122. Phillipov, Michelle. 2016b. ‘Helping Australia grow’: Supermarkets, television cooking shows and the strategic manufacture of consumer trust. Agriculture and Human Values 33: 587–596. Powell, Helen, and Sylvie Prasad. 2007. Life swap: Celebrity expert as lifestyle adviser. In Makeover television: Realities remodelled, ed. Dana Heller, 56–66. London: I.B. Taurus. Powell, Helen, and Sylvie Prasad. 2010. ‘As seen on TV’. The celebrity expert: How taste is shaped by lifestyle media. Cultural Politics 6: 111–124. Richards, Carol, Geoffrey Lawrence, and David Burch. 2011. Supermarkets and agro-industrial foods. Food, Culture & Society 14: 29–47. Rousseau, Signe. 2012a. Food and social media: You are what you tweet. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Rousseau, Signe. 2012b. Food media: Celebrity chefs and the politics of everyday interference. London: Berg.

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Schlosser, Eric. 2002. Fast food nation: What the all-American meal is doing to the world. London: Penguin. Sinclair, Lara. 2010. MasterChef sparks Coles sales surge. The Australian, June 21: 32. Sonnino, Roberta, and Terry Marsden. 2006. Beyond the divide: rethinking relationships between alternative and conventional food networks in Europe. Journal of Economic Geography 6: 181–199. Spence, Des. 2005. Jamie’s school dinners (review). British Medical Journal 330: 678. Spurgeon, Christina. 2013. Regulated integrated advertising. In The Routledge companion to advertising and promotional culture, ed. Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West, 71–82. New York: Routledge. Stolle, Dietlind, and Michele Micheletti. 2013. Political consumerism: Global responsibility in action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strange, Nikki. 1998. Perform, educate, entertain: Ingredients of the cookery programme genre. In The television studies book, ed. Christine Geraghty and David Lusted, 301–312. London: Arnold. Todd, Anne Marie. 2009. Happy cows and passionate beefscapes: Nature as landscape and lifestyle in food advertisements. In Critical pedagogies of consumption, ed. Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren, 169–179. New York: Routledge. Turner, Graeme. 2003. British cultural studies: An introduction. New York: Routledge. van Ryn, Luke. 2014. The political ecology of practices at work in MasterChef Australia. Published in proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Annual Conference, Swinburne University, Victoria, 9–11 July. http://www.anzca.net/documents/2014-confpapers/785-anzca14-van-ryn/file.html. Accessed Mar 2015 Versteegen, Heinrich. 2010. Armchair epicures: The proliferation of food programmes on British TV. In The pleasures and horrors of eating: The cultural history of eating in Anglophone literature, ed. Marion Gymnich and Norbert Lennartz, 447–464. Goettingen: V&R Unipress. Waisbord, Silvio. 2004. McTV: Understanding the global popularity of television formats. Television & New Media 5: 359–383. Zimmerman, Heidi. 2015. Caring for the middle class soul: Ambivalence, ethical eating and the Michael Pollan phenomenon. Food, Culture & Society 18: 31–50.

PART I

Contexts

CHAPTER 2

Resisting ‘Agribusiness Apocalypse’: The Pleasures and Politics of Ethical Food

The chapters in Part 1 provide an overview of key food politics discourses and debates to provide a broader international context for the case studies in Parts 2 and 3. This chapter locates international debates about food politics in relation to the literatures on ‘ethical’ food, and, in particular, their reframing of food politics in terms of ethical consumption, pleasure and alternative hedonism. It does this via a close reading of the tropes and techniques of a group of popular texts that have been influential in putting questions of food politics on the popular agenda: the non-fiction food writing often called “locavore literature” for its tendency to privilege local eating as a solution to the problems of global industrial food production (Lavin 2013: 102). Many of the tropes adopted by the locavore literature—the revelations of the horrors of industrial food systems, the utopian visions of powerful ‘connections’ with local food producers and places—are now typical of how food systems problems and solutions are expressed across a range of popular media and cultural forms. Through an analysis of the textual strategies and critiques associated with three of its best-selling texts, this chapter examines the genre as a broader example of food media’s (and food politics’) attempted reconciliation of simultaneously progressive and reactionary impulses, and how this works to construct encounters with (particular types of ) food as pleasurable, affective experiences that are appealing for both media and food industries. The chapter focuses on the work of US writers Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver and Gary Paul Nabhan through an examination © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_2

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of three of their most internationally successful books: The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan 2006); Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating (Kingsolver 2007); and Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods (Nabhan 2002). These have been chosen because the terms in which food politics is articulated and mobilised by each of these texts are typical of contemporary food media texts. In particular, such texts are exemplary of the tropes through which food media seeks to resolve its sometimes-competing progressive and reactionary ideologies (particularly those related to class, gender and nostalgia) through their combination of personal stories with broader political criticism. A closer examination of their discursive approaches is thus revealing not just of how political questions and concerns are constructed as appealing in such texts, but also in those featured in the case studies throughout the following chapters. As Michael Pollan’s (2006: 289) rephrasing of Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests, the locavore literature, like other contemporary food texts, constructs certain foods as not only “good to eat, but [also] good to think”. Investing food with particular types of meaning (i.e. making it “good to think”) is not only a key dimension of these texts’ cultural work, but it is also part of how popular food texts come to be located within a broader reframing and reshaping of popular food politics, the industry effects of which will become more apparent as the book progresses. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Coming Home to Eat and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle each combine memoir and autobiography with investigative journalism to advance a case for local eating as a means to ameliorate the significant food system crises associated with contemporary industrial agriculture. The Omnivore’s Dilemma does this by tracing the origin of four meals—a fast food, a ‘big organic’, a grass-fed organic, and a hunted and gathered meal—to reveal the “true costs” (Pollan 2006: 410) of ingredients as they are transformed from paddock to plate. Coming Home to Eat and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle catalogue each author’s attempt to eat locally for a calendar year, using ingredients that they have either grown or gathered themselves or have purchased from someone they know personally. All of these books have spent time on the New York Times’ Bestsellers List. They have also proven to be a significant driver of consumer action: people frequently name Michael Pollan, for example, as a key motivational figure shaping their food production and consumption practices (Click and Ridberg 2010).

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Unsurprisingly, then, much of the existing scholarship has centred on the question of whether such texts, given their tendency to locate political potential in individual consumer ‘choices’, have the capacity to effect real transformation in our food system (e.g. Lavin 2013; Guthman 2007; Pilgeram and Meeuf 2015; DeLind 2011). However, rather than contributing to further debate about whether or not consumer choice is an effective motor of political change, I begin from the premise that the power of the locavore literature (and other popular food media texts) lies not so much in its capacity to change the food system, but in the way that it reflects substantial changes to the food industry that have already occurred over the past several decades. These include the rise of farmers’ markets and other initiatives that express (middle class) consumers’ desire for connection to the sources of their food and, as subsequent chapters will show, the emergence of new alliances between food producers, food products and media texts designed to capitalise on a growing interest in the provenance of food and the ethics of food production. But before addressing these issues more fully, this chapter first details the textual strategies used by the locavore literature to represent the problems of, and propose solutions for, contemporary food systems. I begin by outlining how popular food narratives advance a critique of conventional food systems by contrasting dystopian images of contemporary agribusiness with alternatives framed in largely utopian terms. This shows how these alternatives invest (certain kinds of ) food with meaning and significance by drawing on notions of tradition, trust and connection. The chapter then reframes the persistent criticism that the locavore literature’s emphasis on consumer ‘choice’ reflects a “retreat from politics” (Lavin 2013: 103) by locating these debates within the contexts of changing markets and within the growing literatures on ethical consumption. In particular, I do this by exploring the imaginative possibilities associated with alternative hedonism and nostalgia, and consider how these can be used as resources to reframe aspects of these texts’ potentially conservative politics, especially those with respect to class and gender. This provides a foundation for discussions in subsequent chapters about the appeal of contemporary food politics to media and food industries, the cultural work these politics perform, and how media and food industry relationships are reflecting and responding to changing discourses, values and practices.

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Problems and Solutions In the locavore literature the problems of contemporary food systems are typically conceived as a problem of knowledge: industrial agriculture is sustained by “an almost heroic act of not knowing” what is involved (Pollan 2006: 84); supermarkets’ cornucopia of unseasonable fruits and vegetables persist because eaters lack knowledge of how and when food plants grow (Kingsolver 2007); environmentally and socially destructive food practices endure because of an absence of deeper understanding of our ecological systems (Nabhan 2002). Most mention the need for legislative change, but the primary goal of these texts is to provide the necessary knowledge and impetus for consumers to reconnect with their food and those who produce it; buying local, growing one’s own, and supporting farmers’ markets are the cornerstones of the authors’ vision for a new, ‘better’ food system. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Coming Home to Eat and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle each offer a vision for an alternative food system that is structured by the “polar forces” of the apocalyptic and the utopian (Mikulak 2013: 11). This is frequently articulated via images of what Michael Newbury (2012: 87) calls “agribusiness apocalypse”—a sinister ‘Other’ against which ‘good’ food practices can be constructed—contrasted with idyllic pastoral scenes invoking notions of tradition, authenticity and pleasure. Even beyond the texts in question, these tropes of the apocalyptic and the utopian are now used so widely in popular food media that even more strongly optimistic texts, such as River Cottage or Gourmet Farmer (see Chaps. 3, 5), often implicitly rely upon audiences’ (and industry’s) familiarity with critiques of more dystopian food systems. As such, the locavore literature’s dual impulses of the apocalyptic and the utopian are worth outlining in some detail. Apocalyptic imagery appears in all three texts, but it looms largest in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the first third of which details at length the problems of industrial agriculture. Pollan canvasses issues ranging from the effects of government subsidies on farmers to the health and environmental impacts of industrial diets, but among the most powerful are his descriptions of the devastating consequences of America’s vast monocultures of corn and beef cattle. He invests corn with a sinister agency as he traces its role in constructing his fast food meal. Having colonised vast areas of land, our stomachs and our bodies,1 it appears in almost all 1 Pollan notes that corn is unique in that its carbon isotopes can be clearly identified in human remains. “When you look at the isotope ratios,” said scientist Todd Dawson, “we North Americans look like corn chips with legs” (qtd. in Pollan 2006: 23).

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of the ingredients of Pollan’s fast food meal: in his burger bun, the meat patty, the ketchup, the soda, and in a range of other binders, emulsifiers and fillers. Corn is presented not as something to eat, but as a substance that provides “building blocks” from which food manufacturers “assemble” a great many processed foods (Pollan 2006: 86). This includes not only the products of the fast food industry, but also those of the supermarket, where an apparently dazzling variety of product choice masks the fact that many of the products are simply various configurations of corn. What is most shocking about corn’s remarkable capacity to insinuate itself into the food supply is how it has assisted food manufacturers and food scientists to find increasingly creative ways to incorporate America’s surplus of cheap corn into its citizens’ everyday diets, resulting in an epidemic of obesity and diet-related diseases, an impoverished food culture, and a range of negative environmental and animal welfare consequences. The paradigmatic example of the latter is the CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation), a result of using surplus corn to produce cheap meat. The horrors of the cattle feedlot invoke the abject, in the Kristevan sense of the term, where matter out of place “disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva 1982: 4). For Pollan, the feedlot’s putrid landscapes, unhygienic conditions and deadly foodborne pathogens are primarily problems of corn and of shit. The cattle’s corn-based diet, combined with a cramped and unsanitary living environment, causes them to suffer a range of gruesome diseases that make them “go off their feed, pant and salivate excessively, paw and scratch their bellies, and eat dirt”, and makes them susceptible to diarrhoea, ulcers, bloat, rumenitis, liver disease, pneumonia, coccidiosis, enterotoxaemia and feedlot polio (Pollan 2006: 78). At the centre of Pollan’s account of the feedlot is steer number 534, the animal he purchased as a calf in order to observe its full lifecycle from birth to fast food hamburger. The enormous amount of waste that CAFOs produce gives steer number 534 blood-shot eyes as he stands and sleeps in a pile of his own and others’ manure. But this vast amount of shit is not only a problem for the animals’ quality of life, it also becomes a serious health risk to consumers once the animal enters the slaughterhouse. The unsanitary conditions in which the animals live, and the extreme speed at which slaughterhouse workers are required to operate, mean that manure from the animal hides inevitably falls onto the meat. Some of this shit contains E. coli 0157:H7, an especially virulent

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pathogen that thrives in the cramped conditions of the CAFO and which can be deadly even in very small quantities. Due to the vast quantities of hamburger meat produced by individual slaughterhouses, contaminated meat can easily become widely dispersed in the food supply, causing lethal outbreaks of foodborne illness. In opposition to the repulsive and stomach-churning conditions of the CAFO and the slaughterhouse, Pollan offers an alternative method of farming and food production, one centred around idyllic pastoral imagery and animals’ ‘natural’ predilections. While Pollan’s final meal of hunted and gathered foods stands as the ultimate expression of a ‘natural’ food system, his acknowledgement that this is an ultimately impractical form of sustenance for most people means that Omnivore’s most powerful visions of an alternative food system come from Polyface Farm, the mixed farm operated by self-described “Christian-conservativelibertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” Joel Salatin (qtd. in Pollan 2006: 125). Pollan sees in Polyface’s practices a real, viable alternative industrialised food, and his descriptions of Salatin’s farm invoke the storybook wholesomeness of traditional farm life—a powerful rural idyllism that is also central to many of the other texts discussed in this book. The ‘natural’ processes that were a source of abject horror in Pollan’s account of the feedlot and the slaughterhouse—the bodily wastes that pile up in CAFOs—are reframed as positive sources of nourishment on Salatin’s farm. Pollan describes how Salatin’s beef cattle are regularly moved onto fresh pastures to allow the egg-laying hens, broiler chickens and turkeys to move in, clean up grubs and parasites in the cowpats and distribute the manure. During the winter, when the cattle live inside, Salatin does not muck out the barn; instead, he leaves the manure in place, covering it with a layer of straw or woodchips every few days, along with a handful of corn. This fermenting corn becomes a source of delight for his pigs who aerate the manure at winter’s end. In contrast to Pollan’s earlier descriptions of the repulsiveness of animal hides caked in manure, Polyface Farm’s respect for the natural predilections of the animals results in cartoonish depictions of happy animals writhing in shit: Buried to their butts in composting manure, a bobbing sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails, there were the happiest pigs I’d ever seen. (Pollan 2006: 218)

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Pollan’s direct observation of the happiness of animals that he ultimately eats as part of his third meal, the grass-fed organic, is something that enhances his eating pleasure—pleasure that is an important dimension of the text’s food politics. For Pollan, Polyface meat is not only ethically ‘right’: his new knowledge of its production also grants access to revelatory eating experiences. When he accepts Salatin’s offer to slaughter his own chicken in Polyface Farm’s open-air chicken processing facility, he finds it both deeply affecting and a ‘gold standard’ of food system transparency. But Polyface’s transparency does not just ameliorate Pollan’s animal welfare concerns: his Polyface chicken, eaten with a full knowledge of the life the bird had lived and the conditions under which it died, provides a sublime meal of unparalleled deliciousness. “The chicken was out of this world,” he said. “The skin had turned the colour of mahogany and the texture of parchment, almost like a Peking duck, and the meat itself was moist, dense, and almost shockingly flavourful” (Pollan 2006: 271). Images of agribusiness apocalypse are less detailed in both Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Coming Home to Eat. Although their narratives are nonetheless structured by a shared vocabulary of food system crisis, specific details of the problems of industrial food systems take up less space in these texts than their proposed solutions. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle food system crisis is sometimes an opportunity for comic relief. For example, in Kingsolver’s discussion of industrial turkey production, the practice of breeding turkeys for their size and docility leads to accounts of turkeys so big they are unable to mate without human intervention and so stupid they can drown by looking up at the rain. It is in her partner Steven Hopp’s short vignettes interspersed throughout the book that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’s dystopianism becomes most apparent; by canvassing issues such as the industrial food system’s unsustainable reliance on fossil fuels, the horrific animal welfare conditions of CAFOs, and the perils of GM (genetic modification), these vignettes offer a powerful indictment of the unviability of ‘the conventional way’ and provide a foil for Kingsolver’s more ethical and sustainable alternatives. In Coming Home to Eat negative impacts of conventional food systems are revealed through Nabhan’s realisations of how unsustainable his own reliance on industrial food has become. When he cleans out his pantry at the commencement of his locavore experiment, he is shocked to discover how much processed food he has kept in his kitchen, the vast distances it has travelled and how much of it was produced by the

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world’s ten largest food companies—global food giants that are now part of the 100 largest economies in the world. Later in the book Nabhan tells of the devastating epidemic of diet-related diseases in O’odham communities caused by a diet of processed foods, and of the negative ecological impacts of the technologies used to produce this food, especially GM. Among his most memorable images of agribusiness apocalypse are those that, as for Pollan, invoke the abject to describe contemporary changes to how food is grown and eaten. During his travels in southern Minnesota, for example, Nabhan (2002: 158) expresses sorrow at how industrial-scale food production has pushed families from their farms, resulting in “unpeopled farms stretch[ing]…as far as our eyes could see”. The farms offer a visual analogue to the repulsive products of the industrial food system, with deliberate allusions to decay and degeneracy: at dusk, they take on a “sickly greenish cast, the color of moldy Spam” (Nabhan 2002: 158). For Kingsolver (2007: 3), the solution is to move from Arizona to Appalachia, a place constructed as a paradise “where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground”; for Nabhan, it is to eat the traditional foods of his desert home. Nabhan’s commitment to indigenous food traditions means that Coming Home to Eat is less invested in pastoral imagery than either Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but it shares with the other texts a commitment to ‘traditional’ forms of food provisioning as a means of redeeming the food system, forging connections between producers and consumers, and ameliorating consumers’ alienation from the sources of their food. It also prioritises pleasure as a valuable by-product of food system connection and trust. For example, eating food of known provenance is what comforts Nabhan following his step-father’s death and what fortifies him to support his mother in her grief. His enjoyment of this food also deepens his spiritual connection to the land. Nabhan vividly describes cooking with freshly picked native greens that “so buzzed with their recent photosynthetic surge that [his] meal sizzled with sunshine” (Nabhan 2002: 142). He also describes the pleasures of the slowness enforced by his locavore diet; by slowing down and paying attention to the land around him, he is for the first time able to notice a nearby hackberry tree with unusually delicious fruit and discovers an apricot variety that exists nowhere else in the Americas. He is also able to build deeper relationships with his Native American neighbours, culminating in a desert walk celebrating

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local food traditions and involving a cathartic ritual destruction of the cheap white bread that had caused so much disease and heartbreak for Native American communities. Just as Nabhan’s commitment to local eating is predicated on forging stronger connections with his O’odham friends, their land and their traditions, for Kingsolver it is her relationships with local farmers that are understood as an important precondition for healing damaged food systems. In Animal Vegetable, Miracle “local” is the definition of transparency, trustworthiness and community: it is a “handshake deal in a community gathering place…. It [is] an open-door policy on the fields, where neighborhood buyers are welcome to come have a look, and pick their food from the vine” (Kingsolver 2007: 123). As well as allowing her to build relationships with her local community, eating locally gives Kingsolver access to a dazzling array of foods unavailable to the ordinary supermarket shopper. Her locavore diet is not the deprivation she imagined it might be, but is a gateway to satisfying abundance. Kingsolver spends a great deal of time in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle listing the colours and varieties of her locally purchased and home-grown produce: the many types of heirloom potato and tomato; the bounty of the summer harvest; the diversity of their wintertime diet. Descriptions of heirloom turkey so delicious it tastes of lobster, and the family’s enjoyment of otherwise exotic dishes like asparagus and morel mushroom pudding, not only see Kingsolver “groan[ing] with pleasure” (Kingsolver 2007: 22), but also offer real pleasures for the reader who is invited to imagine participating in a similarly abundant and gratifying food system. Even the hard work of gardening, the details of which Kingsolver outlines at length in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, are transmuted into a pleasure at the end of a long day of desk work. Gardening is what allows Kingsolver to decompress after a stressful day; it is also what allows her to connect with the plants that feed her. These plants are bestowed with an anthropomorphic subjectivity through which they express human emotions like gratitude. She describes the routine maintenance of her tomato vines as a communion between herself and the plants: “Holding the soft, viny limbs as tender as babies’ wrists, I train them to their trellises, tidy the mulch at their feet, inhale the oxygen of their thanks” (Kingsolver 2007: 177). The utopian fervour with which Kingsolver describes her local eating experiences extends not just to her connections with the natural world, but also to her family relationships. Unlike Coming Home to Eat and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which the authors

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recount some resistance from their families, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is littered with almost absurdly wholesome depictions of impeccably behaved children who embrace the experiment to the full. From stories of laughter as the family makes mozzarella together to images of her youngest daughter hugging a special treat of tangerines to her chest with “bliss lighting her cheeks” (Kingsolver 2007: 287), Kingsolver’s children display the same gratitude for the experience as the plants. This seemingly unreflexive idyllism (Goodman 2009: 441) is perhaps one of the reasons that some critics see Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’s nostalgic pastoralism as essentially conservative—as reflecting a desire to ‘return’ to a purer, simpler time of family togetherness and locallyrun businesses, rather than any real attempt to remake the future (e.g. Mikulak 2013: 107, 110). Such criticisms do not apply to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle alone. While the utopian solutions proposed by all three food texts mobilise ideas of tradition, trust and transparency to construct a food politics attuned to the pleasures of food production and consumption, this is a food politics that has been subject to significant criticism. Many food scholars see the locavore literature’s faith in individual consumer choice as a motor of food system change as reflecting, at best, an emptying out of the political dimensions of popular food activism and, at worst, a worrying and reactionary conservatism. Because their politics is one that frequently replaces collective political action with consumer choice, authors are often insufficiently attentive to structural power. This means that their ‘solutions’ to the problems of industrial food frequently rely on a troubling nostalgia for white, patriarchal forms of community and social organisation (Pilgeram and Meeuf 2015; Zimmerman 2015). These are indeed problematic aspects of each of these three texts (as well as of some types of media representations of contemporary food politics more broadly). But rather than simply rehearse these critiques again, I want to use them as a platform to think through the cultural work that these texts perform. Given the popularity and cultural impact of contemporary food writing and other popular media texts that utilise similar tropes, we need to not just critique their problematic dimensions, but also ask how, and in what ways, nostalgic reimagining of ‘tradition’ and ‘the local’ comes to be constructed as a reasonable and appealing solution to significant food systems problems. In other words, we need to ask questions not only about food politics or food justice, as some food studies scholars expect (e.g. Guthman 2007; Goodman

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et al. 2012), but also about the pleasures and affects that are mobilised within and by these texts, and the effects and opportunities of this for media and food industries ‘outside’ the text. The locavore literature may indeed imagine social change primarily in terms of the consumer market and individual food choices, but these texts are also shaping and being shaped by a proliferation of meanings within the market about how food politics can be practised, enabled and made thinkable, and they need to be taken seriously.

The Politics of Ethical Consumption The most sustained critiques of the locavore literature are of its particular construction of the political subject and its framing of what ‘counts’ as political engagement. Critics argue that the texts’ exhortations to readers to consume differently reflect a wholesale adoption of the logic of neoliberalism in which ‘citizens’ are transformed into (self-governing, individualised) ‘consumers’ who are invited to locate their political activities primarily in relation to the market, rather than in relation to other forms of collective political participation (see Lavin 2013; Guthman 2007; Pilgeram and Meeuf 2015; DeLind 2011). Chad Lavin’s (2013: 94) critiques, in which he argues that texts like The Omnivore’s Dilemma represent an investment in “postpolitical fantasies” that reflect a “wholesale colonization of the political imaginary by the logic of the market”, are typical of food studies’ misgivings about the locavore literature. They suggest that this literature’s encouragement to consumers to ‘vote with your fork’ ignores structural barriers to food access (Young 2014), and implies that major food systems issues can be solved through altered personal practice (DeLind 2011: 276). Instead of suggesting that it is necessary to “alter the structural features of the food system, so that all might come to eat better” (Guthman 2007: 78), the argument that we produce the food system we ‘want’ through our consumption choices frequently constructs those who make the ‘wrong’ choices either as lacking the ‘right’ knowledge and instruction (DeLind 2011: 276) or as morally deficient (Lynch and Giles 2013: 489). For the liberal middle-class subject who is already well-schooled in these ‘right’ choices (Zimmerman 2015: 45), the kind of politics that is offered by these texts is often seen as “perhaps too easy” as they offer a “worrying (a)politics of taste” that is insufficiently reflexive about their own positions of privilege within the food system (Goodman 2009: 441, 442). Indeed, calls to “pay the full

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karmic price of a meal” and to eat with “full consciousness” of where it has come from (Pollan 2006: 9) are predicated on the reader already occupying a privileged position from which these costs are neither seen nor felt (Zimmerman 2015: 46). Certainly, class privilege does assist in making ‘ethical’ consumption choices easier. The large literatures on ethical consumption, radical consumption and political consumerism that have emerged in recent years have examined both the classed dimension of ethical consumption practices and the work of these practices in constructing ethical consumercitizens (e.g. Lewis and Potter 2011; Littler 2008; Stolle and Micheletti 2013). While critics of popular food writing often see the turn to consumption as a “retreat from politics” (Lavin 2013: 103), scholars of ethical consumption tend to view consumer activities as legitimate methods for investing in ethical, social and civic concerns (e.g. Lewis 2012; Littler 2008). In particular, ethical consumption is seen as offering alternative pathways to political participation for people who no longer value traditional political investments (Barnett et al. 2005). While not underplaying the impact of structural constraints, scholars show how, in its focus on environmentalism, anti-materialism and sustainable lifestyles, ethical consumption implicates life politics in a growing sense of connection between personal life choices and community, national and global concerns (Lewis and Potter 2011: 7–8, 10), even if this is a politics that disproportionately hails a white, middle-class subject. The changing consumer preferences and practices that are occurring as a result of the growing interest in ethical consumption are significant not only for their impact on contemporary debates about what ‘counts’ as political, but also for the way that they have reshaped sections of the consumer market in line with ethical and social values. In the USA, for example, the number of farmers’ markets increased more than four-fold between 1994 and 2013 (Campbell 2015: 209); similar impacts are being felt elsewhere across the anglophone West (Dodds et al. 2014; Guthrie et al. 2006). Indeed, farmers’ markets and other previously ‘alternative’ food practices have been so successful that they have placed upward pressure on conventional retail, leading to growth in ‘mainstream’ sales of organic and local foods (Campbell 2015: 209). Animal, Vegetable, Miracle explicitly acknowledges these changes to the contemporary food economy. In 1997, when Kingsolver first gave up eating meat from CAFOs, it effectively meant becoming vegetarian. Now ‘ethical meat’ is so widely available (to middle-class consumers, at least)

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that it has made it possible for her to feel comfortable eating meat again (Kingsolver 2007: 228). As a result, the type of action that these texts ask of readers may appear to be “easy” (Goodman 2009: 442) because, in many ways, it now is. Popular food texts may be framed as a call for change to our food systems, but the changes that they encourage (e.g. choose local, ethical, organic, etc.) are achievable precisely because they are now so widely available to the middle-class, urban consumers that are their target audience. In other words, the locavore literature did not so much ‘invent’ the citizen-consumer as reflect its currency, appeal and power. As such, this literature’s appeals to ‘consume differently’ must be understood within the context of the changing consumer markets that both precede and animate these texts. That they largely limit food systems action to individual consumer ‘choices’ may indeed be problematic, but if we ask not only whether or not these are the ‘right’ politics, but also consider their political and cultural effects, it is possible to locate texts within a much broader proliferation of meaning about the pleasures and politics of food. These meanings are not limited to contemporary food writing alone. As we will see in subsequent chapters, the examples discussed here are just one set of popular texts that are shaping the cultural ‘work’ that food does. But in these texts, we can see an especially clear manifesto for forms of pleasurable consumption that combine ethical and sustainability concerns with a nostalgia for ‘tradition’ and ‘connection’ to one’s food. In doing so, they simultaneously contribute to the prominence and popularity of food systems critique and reflect the increasing mainstream availability of alternative food practices. They may well do this by locating political solutions within ‘the market’, yet we need not see ‘the market’ as a single universal market but as a combination of highly diversified markets, each with different goals (see Rebrovick 2015: 685). It is in these markets that the effects of ethical consumer discourses and practices are being most keenly felt. Like other food media, contemporary food writing frames its politics within the realm of consumption in part because it is the problem of consumption that these texts seek to address and reimagine. Heidi Zimmerman (2015: 33) has argued that popular food texts may align with the imperatives of neoliberal citizenship, but they also offer lifestyle instruction—a “technology of the self”—that seeks to manage some of the deep ambivalences experienced by the liberal, professional middle classes about their attachment to unsustainable forms of capitalist

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consumption. These texts, she argues, help readers to manage “attachments to the trappings of middle-class life as they bump up against worries about the environmental destruction that such trappings entail” (Zimmerman 2015: 38). They also reflect the influence of a broader lifestyle industry through which appropriate lifestyle management is constructed as a site of both responsibility and pleasure for the ‘good’, self-governing subject (Lewis 2008: 13; Miller 2007: 143). Through communicating pleasurable versions of austerity that promote changed consumption practices (see Bramall 2013), these texts offer tools to curb unfettered consumerism without the need to give up the luxuries and privileges of middle-class comforts. In doing so they grant access to what Kate Soper (2004: 112) has called an “alternative hedonism”, in which notions of the “good life” become linked to environmental and sustainability concerns. The alternative hedonist, motivated by the need to develop a more ecologically sustainable use of resources, adopts an altered conception of what it is to enjoy a “high” standard of living by embracing “new modes of thinking about human pleasure and self-realization”, primarily within the realm of consumption (Soper 2008: 571). The consumption practices associated with alternative hedonism are frequently expressed within the capitalist market, but they also involve more-than-market affects. For example, when Kingsolver (2007: 22) says that food is one of the rare realms in which “the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure”, or when Pollan (2006: 11) declares that the pleasures of eating are “deepened by knowing” where the food has come from and how it is produced, they are engaging in an affective encounter with food that binds political investments in what Michael Mikulak (2013: 116) calls a “productive assemblage of pleasure and critique”. The authors’ rapturous experiences when they eat ethically produced food are an example of the alternative hedonist’s reframing of specific types of consumption as pleasure, rather than as deprivation. Throughout the locavore literature, readers are exhorted to choose ethically not just because it is morally right, but also because it ‘tastes better’. This is a tendency also repeated throughout popular food media (indeed, It Tastes Better is the title of the cookbook on ethical and sustainable eating that is the subject of Chap. 6). It is in part how food media’s utopian impulses work to form new connections between eaters, food producers and the food itself, by presenting ethical consumption as an appealing alternative to the consumption practices currently encouraged by conventional industrial food systems.

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As a number of critics have noted, the capacity to make ethically ‘right’ choices has a gendered, as a well as a classed, dimension. This is because the practices of ethical consumption typically encouraged by much contemporary food media—buying direct from farmers, growing one’s own, cooking from scratch, avoiding the overly processed foods of the industrial food industry—necessarily involve a significant investment of time and effort. Given the traditionally gendered nature of foodwork, critics argue, it is likely that a disproportionate burden of eating ethically would fall to women (see Phillips 2009; Stănescu 2010; Portman 2014; Johnston 2016). This is indeed a concerning aspect of the gender politics of all three texts. It is one worth looking at in more detail because these representations of gender also offer opportunities to reframe and reimagine potentially reactionary impulses as part of a progressive politics. In the section below, I begin with a critique of the texts’ conservative dimensions before considering their potential for other types of meaning-making and interpretation. In short, I suggest, we need not understand ‘traditional’ representations of gender as simply a desire to return to the past, but rather as a means of responding to a set of very contemporary concerns about food production and consumption that, in turn, create opportunities for new media and food industry responses.

Gender and Nostalgia Gender politics are perhaps most explicitly problematic in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver (2007: 127) describes feminism as the “great hoodwink of my generation”. By trading homemaking for careers, she says, women gave up “the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of family routines, the creative task of moulding our families’ tastes and zest for life” in exchange for “the minivan and the Lunchable” (Kingsolver 2007: 127, 128). While Kingsolver is not sentimental about pre-feminist domestic drudgery, and while she does insist the participation in domestic tasks is required of men, with the exception of the bread making performed by her partner Steven Hopp, food provisioning is disproportionately women’s work throughout the book. Kingsolver and her adult daughter Camille appear to do the majority of the cooking for the family, and Kingsolver regularly encourages women to see food preparation as a “creative opportunity, rather than a chore” (Kingsolver 2007: 127). This includes not just cooking, but also preserving and canning, which is presented as an opportunity for women to get together

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to “discuss…[their] stuff” in ways not dissimilar to “your average book group” (Kingsolver 2007: 201). Gendered narratives are less central to either Coming Home to Eat or The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but they do display an equally problematic gender politics. Although Pollan connects ideas about ‘good’ food to traditional notions of gender more explicitly in subsequent books (see Portman 2014: 12),2 his apocalyptic visions of industrial corn production gender corn as feminine—it is a “welfare queen” pushing out the (male) family farmer in favour of corporate interests. The world of alternative food in The Omnivore’s Dilemma is one made up entirely of men. Pollan speaks to almost no women, and the greatest praise and prominence is reserved for a farmer so attached to traditional gender roles that in the past he has refused to employ women as farm workers or interns (Stănescu 2010: 20). Nabhan more directly acknowledges the gendered dimension of food labour, but he responds with intolerance and insensitivity when the women in his life do not uncritically embrace his locavore experiment. When Nabhan’s partner, Laurie, a nurse who spends her days dealing with bodily trauma, declines to participate in the slaughter of their turkeys, he criticises her for “shirking” her responsibilities (Nabhan 2002: 195). When his mother refuses to cook a week’s worth of her own mother’s meals for Nabhan because she did not want to emotionally “go back” to a time when she suffered repeated illnesses as a result of her impoverished diet, he is remarkably unreflexive about the historical and structural differences attached to local eating. Nabhan can see his mother’s resistance only as a failure to see the ‘true’ enlightenment that he has found. He does not see “‘back’ as someplace that progress has allowed [us] to escape from”, but rather “imagine[s]…life as a looping and relooping, circling back to pick up something that we have forgotten, something that we desperately need for our health and our happiness” (Nabhan 2002: 259). As a result, he does not seem to recognise that his mother, who lived through the ‘past’ that Nabhan is attempting to recapture, may experience these food practices differently, and see them as granting neither

2 For example, in In Defense of Food, Pollan (2008: 148, 3) tells readers not to eat “anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” and that “culture…, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother”.

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health nor happiness. When he visits his mother following the death of her partner, he is appalled by her reliance on convenience foods, and sneers at the notion that no longer needing to “‘slave away’ for hours in the kitchen or in the barn” might be a liberation for her (Nabhan 2002: 61). Instead, he sees it as something that has encouraged his mother and her partner to become “insatiable consumers” sitting in front of the TV, “convinced that there would always be producers of anything they needed out there somewhere” (Nabhan 2002: 61). Although he suggests that “Chuck could rest in peace, for his widow would never again be constrained by labouring in the food chain that had imprisoned his own mother most of her life” (Nabhan 2002: 61), it is said with some degree of scepticism that women’s foodwork does indeed constitute “imprisonment”. However, despite insensitivities with respect to gender in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Coming Home to Eat, it is significant that the majority of the foodwork we see in these texts is performed by men. Almost all of the shopping, gathering, preparing and cooking in Coming Home to Eat is done by Nabhan, who regularly cooks for family, friends and neighbours. This is much the same in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which Pollan engages in all dimensions of food provisioning from paddock to plate, as his desire to eat “with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake” (Pollan 2006: 11) includes personal responsibility for transforming raw ingredients into cooked meals. Although women occasionally cook in Coming Home to Eat, they are virtually absent from the kitchen in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. When Pollan cooks his third, grass-fed organic meal for his friends Mark and Liz, it is not Liz who assists him in the kitchen to prepare the two-course meal (although she is acknowledged to be an excellent cook), but Liz’s 12-year-old son. Although, as critics suggest, the burden of ethical eating may well fall to women ‘in practice’, the locavore literature nonetheless provides narrative and imaginative resources to envision food practices unconstrained by such ‘real life’ structural limitations. It has frequently been noted that media and popular cultural representations of men’s foodwork tend to present cooking as a form of “leisurely entertainment” (Swenson 2009: 41) or “aestheticized leisure” (Ashley et al. 2004: 183) done for pleasure— for special occasions, for example, or as part of a broader construction of lifestyle (Moseley 2001)—rather than as part of the daily responsibility for feeding oneself and/or one’s family. In Coming Home to Eat and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, men’s food provisioning is located somewhere

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between the two poles of cooking-as-daily-grind and cooking-as-fun. Pollan very deliberately genders everyday food provisioning as masculine when he discusses the additional demands of time, effort and work required by local eating. The “local food shopper”, he says, “will need to put some work into sourcing his food—into learning who grows the best lamb in his area, or the best sweet corn. And then he will have to become reacquainted with his kitchen” (Pollan 2006: 259, emphases added). Men are encouraged to see these time-consuming activities of sourcing and preparing ‘ethical’ food not as ‘work’, but as a daily leisure activity in which “finding, preparing, and preserving food [is seen] as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore” (Pollan 2006: 259). While nostalgia for ‘old-fashioned’ forms of food production and consumption may animate contemporary food writing narratives, by placing men at the centre of what can traditionally be considered ‘women’s work’, these texts do not simply advocate a return to the past, but rather broaden the scope of who can (and should) participate in food sourcing and preparation. The centrality of men in both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Coming Home to Eat reconceives daily food preparation as a form of recreation and as a (politically progressive) ‘choice’ in ways that both mitigate their sometimes-problematic gender politics and offer spaces of pleasurable fantasy that make their demands potentially more acceptable to their audience of middle-class, professional readers. The prominence of women’s kitchen labour in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle means that the imaginative work of gendered representations is slightly different in Kingsolver’s case. Like Nabhan and Pollan, Kingsolver does not advocate a return to traditional forms of feminine foodwork. But rather than focusing on men’s involvement in food preparation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle seeks to rehabilitate food provisioning as distinct from other kinds of domestic drudgery. By reframing cooking as a “creative opportunity, rather than a chore” (Kingsolver 2007: 127) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle attempts to make available to women some of the “aestheticized leisure” (Ashley et al. 2004: 183) that is typically the preserve of men. In Kingsolver’s case, not only does this involve active participation in the special occasion cookery—the cooking for parties and holidays, the cooking with and for guests—that dominates popular cultural representations of men’s cooking-as-leisure, it also involves reimagining ordinary domestic foodwork as a similar site of leisure and desirable lifestyle. Kingsolver’s idyllic accounts of communing with her plants in the garden, or her children’s gratitude for the gift of

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‘real’ food, construct the home as a utopian space from which eaters can escape industrial food and foster deeper connections to their family and their food. While it is indeed possible to read the pleasures of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as laughably quaint, we need only see them as especially problematic if we interpret the text’s scenarios as literal manifestos to action, rather than as opportunities for fantasy and experimentation. In her analysis of Nigella Lawson’s cookbook, How to Be a Domestic Goddess, Joanne Hollows argues that the domestic goddess is not a person that readers are literally invited to “be”, but rather a fantasy figure that they are encouraged to “feel like”; that is, as a nostalgic reimagining of the 1950s “housewife”, the domestic goddess is an identity position primarily available in fantasy (Hollows 2003: 188). In the case of Nigella Lawson, Hollows suggests that the fantasy of the housewife can be appealing to middle-class women who feel the time scarcity caused by the dual burden of paid work and a “domestic division of labour prov[ing] relatively resistant to change” (Hollows 2003: 190). The fantasy of the domestic goddess also serves a similar purpose in women’s downshifting narratives, a genre of which Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a part. In these cases, Hollows (2006: 108) says: the pressure to ‘have it all’ and the problems of achieving a ‘work-life balance’ are magically resolved through a process of relocation as urban femininities are abandoned in favour of rural femininities, which seem imbued with the balm of the ‘rural idyll’.

For Hollows, pleasurable fantasies of housewifery are an attempt to resolve the contradictions of modern femininity by enabling readers to experiment with identities otherwise unavailable within the constraints of everyday life, and which may, in fact, be undesirable in ‘reality’ (Hollows 2003: 190, 2006: 113). Seen in these terms, the pleasures of escape from the urban industrial food desert into a place of delicious variety and abundance that we see in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Coming Home to Eat can be seen as the pleasures of fantasy, at least for the majority of readers who would be unlikely to make similar commitments to their own self-sufficiency. The locavore literature frequently frames its seasonal eating narratives as a ‘how to’ guide for those interested in adopting something similar (e.g. Kingsolver 2007: 20), but in practice it interpellates a much wider range of readers than their experiments in

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self-sufficiency would perhaps suggest. Kingsolver does this explicitly, telling the reader that “it’s not necessary to live on a food-producing farm to participate in this culture” of ‘real’ food; instead, “know[ing] that such farms exist, understand[ing] something about what they do, and consider[ing] oneself basically in their court” is all that is needed (Kingsolver 2007: 20–21). Indeed, the repeated refrain in these texts that doing something, even if just visiting a farmers’ market or growing a pot of herbs on the windowsill, is a positive step towards a greater connection to one’s food system serves to hail a wider range of subjects beyond card-carrying downshifters. The locavore literature, like other food media, can be read not as a series of manifestos for literal encounters with food, but rather for affective encounters. These texts harness the imaginative possibilities of fantasy, pleasure and nostalgia to invest (certain kinds of) food with associations of meaningfulness, trust, connection and place. That readers can now so easily express these affective relationships through consumer markets that accommodate ethical consumption values is undoubtedly part of their appeal. But to see these relationships as only about the market, rather than as also about the generation of meaning, is to miss something important about the cultural work of these texts. These texts are not simply about recommending practical solutions to the problems of the food system. They also offer means of rethinking the politics of food in ways that tie affects to meanings and experiences, rather than to specific practices. That their imaginative possibilities have already been harnessed by various sectors of the consumer market suggests that these texts can be seen not so much as manifestos for food system change, but as manifestos of food system change. The ways in which the key themes of the locavore literature (utopianism, nostalgia, tradition, ‘the local’, the pastoral idyll, etc.) reappear and are reworked across a range of food media texts highlight their capacities as both market and imaginative resources. The next chapter explores this further via an examination of another key international context that has significantly shaped contemporary discourses of food politics: the international celebrity chef. As we will see, the celebrity chef is illustrative of how media and food industries adapt and respond to changing politics with respect to food, in this case through much more thoroughgoing media and food industry partnerships.

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References Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor. 2004. Food and cultural studies. London: Routledge. Barnett, Clive, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke, and Alice Malpass. 2005. The political ethics of consumerism. Consumer Policy Review 15: 45–51. Bramall, Rebecca. 2013. The cultural politics of austerity: Past and present in austere times. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Campbell, Hugh. 2015. Spurlock’s vomit and visible food utopias: Enacting a positive politics of food. In Food utopias: Reimagining citizenship, ethics and community, ed. Paul V. Stock, Michael Carolan, and Christopher Rosin, 195–215. London: Routledge. Click, Melissa A., and Ronit Ridberg. 2010. Saving food: Food preservation as alternative food activism. Environmental Communication 4: 301–317. DeLind, Laura B. 2011. Are local food and the local food movement taking us where we want to go? Or are we hitching our wagons to the wrong stars? Agriculture and Human Values 28: 273–283. Dodds, Rachel, Mark Holmes, Vichukan Arunsopha, Nicole Chin, Trang Le, Samantha Maung, and Mimi Shum. 2014. Consumer choice and farmers’ markets. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27: 397–416. Goodman, Michael K. 2009. Contemporary food matters? A review essay. International Planning Studies 14: 437–442. Goodman, David, Melanie DuPuis, and Michael K. Goodman. 2012. Alternative food networks: Knowledge, practice, politics. London: Routledge. Guthman, Julie, et al. 2007. Can’t stomach it: How Michael Pollan et al. made me want to eat Cheetos. Gastronomica 7: 75–79. Guthrie, John, Anna Guthrie, and Rob Lawson. 2006. Farmers’ markets: The small business counter-revolution in food production and retailing. British Food Journal 108: 560–573. Hollows, Joanne. 2003. Feeling like a domestic goddess: Postfeminism and cooking. European Journal of Cultural Studies 6: 179–202. Hollows, Joanne. 2006. Can I go home yet? Feminism, post-feminism and domesticity. In Feminism in popular culture, ed. Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley, 97–118. Oxford: Berg. Johnston, Emily Lind. 2016. Agrarian dreams and neoliberal futures in life writing of the alternative food movement. Food and Foodways 24: 9–29. Kingsolver, Barbara. 2007. Animal, vegetable, miracle: Our year of seasonal ­eating. Great Britain: Faber and Faber. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lavin, Chad. 2013. Eating anxiety: The perils of food politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

50  M. Phillipov Lewis, Tania. 2008. Smart living: Lifestyle media and popular expertise. New York: Peter Lang. Lewis, Tania. 2012. ‘There grows the neighbourhood’: Green citizenship, creativity and life politics on eco-TV. International Journal of Cultural Studies 15: 315–326. Lewis, Tania, and Emily Potter. 2011. Introducing ethical consumption. In Ethical consumption: A critical introduction, ed. Tania Lewis and Emily Potter, 3–24. London: Routledge. Littler, Jo. 2008. Radical consumption: Shopping for change in contemporary culture. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Lynch, Megan, and Audrey Giles. 2013. Let them eat organic cake: Discourses in sustainable food initiatives. Food, Culture & Society 16: 479–493. Mikulak, Michael. 2013. The politics of the pantry: Stories, food, and social change. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Miller, Toby. 2007. Cultural citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, consumerism and television in a neoliberal age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Moseley, Rachel. 2001. ‘Real lads do cook…But some things are still hard to talk about’: The gendering of 8–9. European Journal of Cultural Studies 4: 32–39. Nabhan, Gary Paul. 2002. Coming home to eat: The pleasures and politics of local foods. New York: W.W. Norton. Newbury, Michael. 2012. Fast zombie/slow zombie: Food writing, horror movies, and agribusiness apocalypse. American Literary History 24: 87–114. Phillips, Siobhan. 2009. What we talk about when we talk about food. The Hudson Review 62: 189–209. Pilgeram, Ryanne, and Russell Meeuf. 2015. Good food, good intentions: Where pro-sustainability arguments get stale in US food documentaries. Environmental Communication 9: 100–117. Pollan, Michael. 2006. The omnivore’s dilemma: A natural history of four meals. London: Penguin. Pollan, Michael. 2008. In defence of food. London: Penguin Books. Portman, Anne. 2014. Mother nature has it right: Local food advocacy and the appeal to the ‘natural’. Ethics and the Environment 19: 1–30. Rebrovick, Tripp. 2015. The politics of diet: ‘Eco-dietetics’, neoliberalism, and the history of dietetic discourses. Political Research Quarterly 68: 678–689. Soper, Kate. 2004. Rethinking the ‘good life’: The consumer as citizen. Capitalism Nature Socialism 15: 111–116. Soper, Kate. 2008. Alternative hedonism, cultural theory and the role of aesthetic revisioning. Cultural Studies 22: 567–587. Stănescu, Vasile. 2010. ‘Green’ eggs and ham? The myth of sustainable meat and the danger of the local. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 8: 8–32. Stolle, Dietlind, and Michele Micheletti. 2013. Political consumerism: Global responsibility in action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Swenson, Rebecca. 2009. Domestic divo? Televised treatments of masculinity, femininity and food. Critical Studies in Media Communication 26: 36–53. Young, Katherine E. 2014. Adorno, gastronomic authenticity, and the politics of eating well. New Political Science 36: 387–405. Zimmerman, Heidi. 2015. Caring for the middle class soul: Ambivalence, ethical eating and the Michael Pollan phenomenon. Food, Culture & Society 18: 31–50.

CHAPTER 3

Food Television and Celebrity Chefs: Lifestyle Branding and Commodified Idyllism

The international celebrity chef has become a powerful figure in both reflecting and constructing the changing landscape of popular food politics. As a hybrid media–food industry figure, they are exemplars of the sophisticated alliances between media and food industries that are shaping the prominence and visibility of particular kinds of meanings and values with respect to food. Scholars have frequently pointed to the cultural work undertaken by celebrity chefs as figures who embody desirable and ethical lifestyles, and as “experts” whose work helps to shape ‘good’ self-governing subjects—particularly those that look to the market as the key cultural and economic space in which to enact these lifestyles (Lewis 2008; Rousseau 2012). Some have understood the celebrity chef’s role in this process as a “politics of…interference” leading to a “polic[ing]” of people’s everyday food choices (Rousseau 2012: xi). Others have framed popular food media as an important space for the construction of personal and political projects (e.g. Lewis and Potter 2011; Hollows and Jones 2010), and have emphasised celebrity chefs’ role as both cultural and political intermediaries (Powell and Prasad 2010). This dual role as cultural and political intermediaries has also helped to construct celebrity chefs as powerful lifestyle brands that move within and across media and food industries, and between media and nonmedia forms (Lewis 2010). Through their personas and presentational forms, they variously communicate, or assume knowledge of, a food politics governed by the discourses of the apocalyptic and the utopian, as outlined in Chap. 2. As well as ‘selling’ desirable and ethical lifestyles, © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_3

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these brands perform a significant amount of cultural work to channel food politics’ more-than-market affects (see Chap. 2) into successful food businesses. In doing so, the media and food industry activities of celebrity chefs simultaneously reflect both real political commitments and more strategic communications designed to create platforms for celebrity-branded identities and products that draw upon many of the political positions, personas and tropes outlined more fully in the previous chapter. This chapter considers the branding strategies and media and food industry activities of two internationally well-known celebrity chefs: Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It focuses in particular on the symbolic work involved in constructing celebrity food brands that link media representations to broader food businesses and which simultaneously draw upon the chefs’ cultural and political identities. I am focusing on British celebrity chefs because they have tended to exert a disproportionate influence on the conventions of international food media and on the nature of its food and cultural politics (Versteegen 2010: 447). Whereas elsewhere in the world many of the most popular food television programmes have appeared on commercial networks, Britain’s best-known programmes and celebrity chefs originated from public service broadcasters the BBC and Channel 4. The need “to inform, educate and entertain” being central to both networks’ ethos (Scholes 2011: 47) has meant that British food television and British television chefs have tended to move beyond cookery instruction to emphasise food as a platform for lifestyle-based identities, activist agendas and political change earlier and more frequently than they have in other parts of the world (Versteegen 2010: 447). Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, then, offer influential early examples of the construction of celebrity brands that leverage lifestyle and political discourses within media texts into broader cultural, political and economic impacts ‘outside’ the text—in this case, by linking food media’s textual conventions (including its investments in nostalgia, ‘tradition’, ethical consumption, etc.) to the extra-textual food businesses that emerge from them. The two chefs are worth considering together, given the shared nature of some of their histories and concerns: they both began their careers at London’s River Café, for example, and have each led successful campaigns for animal welfare and food sustainability. But while they do have some shared audiences, their campaigns have also been executed with different strategies and impacts in mind—and this

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has shaped both the conventions of their media texts and the different ways in which they have used their celebrity identities and investments in food politics to build broader food brands. They illustrate the power of celebrity chefs to move across media and food industries, and to use their media profiles to manage the reception of extra-textual food businesses inflected by both political and lifestyle concerns. As this chapter will show, although popular food politics often presents the commercial market as a key site of political action, translating mediated discourses of food politics into a successful food business demands careful cultural and symbolic work on the part of the celebrity chef. This chapter begins with the media and food industry work of Fearnley-Whittingstall, and examines how the nostalgic appeal and rural idyllism of River Cottage’s ‘downshifting’ narrative become vehicles for food tourism experiences that play upon the romance of the River Cottage life. It then considers the work of Oliver, and shows how the marketing of his Jamie Oliver branded supermarket products is intricately bound up with the (sometimes contradictory) meanings associated with his reputations for both lifestyle-based cookery and ‘healthy’ food activism. Both cases illustrate the negotiations required to manage the tensions and affordances enabled by the celebrity brand as it converts the media discourses and political positions described in this and the previous chapter into (seemingly) practical, market-based ‘solutions’ to food systems problems.

Escaping to River Cottage Fearnley-Whittingstall first rose to prominence when he was fired from London’s River Café, after which he turned to a career in food writing and, later, television. He is best known internationally for the River Cottage television series, which began with Escape to River Cottage in 1999. The show details Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ‘downshifting’ from London to a small farm in Dorset, southwest England, to develop a deeper connection to his food. The River Cottage series has been a ratings hit for broadcaster Channel 4, and in contrast to Jamie Oliver’s wider demographic appeal, is especially popular among high-income upper- and middle-class viewers (see Barnes 2017). The year of its emergence, 1999, was a time of heightened concern about the practices of industrial food production, with the UK experiencing a number of highprofile food scares throughout the 1990s following outbreaks of BSE,

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foot-and-mouth disease, salmonella and E. coli contamination. Unlike the locavore literature, which contrasts images of agribusiness apocalypse with more bucolic alternatives (see Chap. 2), River Cottage skips straight to the utopian. In a climate of concern and fear about the risks of industrial farming systems, Escape to River Cottage offered a pleasurable and uplifting solution: adopting ‘traditional’ food production methods that avoid the worst excesses of contemporary food systems. River Cottage presents rural self-sufficiency as the ‘solution’ to the problems and anxieties of contemporary food production. But in contrast to the highly politicised nature of some of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s other work—such as his activist journalism (Fearnley-Whittingstall 2007), River Cottage cookbooks,1 and campaigning culinary documentaries (Bell and Hollows 2011)—the practices of the industrial food system that underpin Fearnley-Whittingstall’s motivation to find more desirable alternatives are simply invisible on the River Cottage television programme. Instead, its politics frequently rely on a well-rehearsed repertoire of rural idyllic imagery that constructs ‘the country’ as a site of rescue and purification from the ravages of urban, industrial life. In the opening scene of Escape to River Cottage, FearnleyWhittingstall describes his “dream to escape the urban sprawl, find a little place in the country, and live off the fat of the land, thriving on whatever [he] can grow, gather or catch”. This hope to “thrive” in the countryside, as opposed to merely surviving in London’s urban sprawl, is qualified more specifically in the opening titles of River Cottage—Spring as a need to “reconnect” with the sights, smells and tastes of home-grown food now that “so much of what we eat comes wrapped in plastic from the supermarket”. In the River Cottage opening titles, a cartoon Hugh drives his laden red convertible through a congested, polluted, noisy urban landscape. His frazzled and unhappy countenance immediately changes as he enters the rural countryside, depicted as a place of bright colours, bird song, butterflies and cheerful cartoon animals. The first 1 For example, in The River Cottage Cook Book, Fearnley-Whittingstall (2001: 6) outlines his political motivation for writing it:

This book is written with a strong awareness that our current food production system leaves a lot to be desired… I don’t like that and I know more and more people who feel the same way. This book is therefore also aimed at helping those who care about such things make informed choices. It’s political, because if there are enough of us we can also start to change the way things are done.

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episode of Escape to River Cottage shows Fearnley-Whittingstall lazily snoozing outdoors in his hammock, further emphasising the country as a place of escape from a formerly harried urban life. Moreover, as he travels around the countryside, Fearnley-Whittingstall never seems to encounter any ‘conventional’ farmers or large-scale agribusinesses. Instead, the Dorset countryside is presented as populated only by happy, fulfilled farmers operating small, family-run farms. In contrast to Fearnley-Whittingstall’s later programmes, such as Hugh’s Chicken Run that encourages viewers to change their purchasing behaviour through an exposé of factory farming conditions, the politics of River Cottage rests on the invisibility of industrial foodwork, through which small-scale food production is presented as pleasurable, honest, “utterly rewarding and unalienated labour” (Bell and Hollows 2011: 182) that is completely disengaged from corporate values and economies. In this, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s attitudes reflect a commitment to the qualities of embeddedness, trust and place that are characteristic of the alternative food sector more broadly (Goodman 2003: 1), and through which his connection to the sources of his food and the places in which it is produced affords him pleasures and rewards unavailable to those relying on corporate food systems. While such investments in the rural idyll are neither new nor unique to food television—after all, there is a long literary and cultural history of imagining the countryside as a place of escape and respite for urban dwellers (see Burchardt 2002; Bell 2006)—River Cottage’s depiction of the country as an arcadia of simple pleasures and unalienated labour is nonetheless typical of other lifestyle media texts that are also structured around a similar urban/rural opposition (see Thomas 2008: 686). Indeed, it is now a common trope in food media texts, one that is increasingly used to promote both alternative and conventional foods. Like the locavore literature, River Cottage invokes nostalgic images— in this case, nostalgic images of a rural idyll—to speak to the needs and concerns of the present. River Cottage reflects a similar investment in an “alternative hedonism” (Soper 2004: 112), but here the conception of the “good life” is predicated on what Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig (2011: 189) refer to as the pleasures of “slow living”: a desire not just to consume more ethically and sustainably but also experience time differently. For Fearnley-Whittingstall, the pleasures of self-sufficiency reside not just in producing better-tasting, more ethically sound food, but also

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in his ability to take his time with food preparation. In Escape to River Cottage, he remarks on his new, utterly unhurried existence, reflecting on the “complete bliss” of rising early to tend his vegetables, enjoy his pigs and contemplate the pleasures of a day ahead “devoted almost entirely to [his] stomach”. His work throughout the series is also regularly punctuated with stints relaxing in his hammock and time to sit and watch his animals frolic and play. In contrast to other television cooking shows— Jamie Oliver’s in particular—where devices like blenders, food processers and microwaves are used regularly to save time and make the recipes more accessible to busy home cooks juggling meal preparation during the working week, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s preference is for ‘old-fashioned’ cookery methods and dishes. In Escape to River Cottage, he sets aside a whole day to prepare brawn, a recipe that involves six hours of simmering, laboriously picking meat and skin from bones, and setting in a weighted terrine dish. Much of his cooking is performed without the assistance of modern appliances and kitchen equipment. With his period country kitchen featuring a wood burning stove and cast iron (rather than modern non-stick) cookware, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s retro kitchen fit-out aesthetically links the food preparation on River Cottage to many of the culinary symbols of a peasant agrarian existence, invoking nostalgia for an earlier, simpler time before modern food processing and electric devices. Fearnley-Whittingstall’s ability to access the leisurely lifestyles of times gone by must necessarily be read within the contexts of his own widely known elite class position, and the particularly classed histories of British rural land ownership and access to rural spaces (see Thompson 1993). With his double-barrelled surname and education at Eton and Oxford, Fearnley-Whittingstall is associated with a powerful elite of political and business figures—indeed, the Daily Mail once referred to Eton as “the School that runs Britain” (qtd. in Bell and Hollows 2011: 181). His clear class privilege potentially risks some of the show’s pleasures by positioning Fearnley-Whittingstall as disconnected from the realities of the much more limited choices that characterise the lives of most ordinary people. However, this is an issue that is carefully managed via the conventions of the River Cottage series. For example, FearnleyWhittingstall’s ironic, self-mocking sensibility and willingness to be the butt of jokes (for example, he describes himself as a “champion tosser” during a pancake flipping contest in River Cottage Forever), as well as his willingness to be a student as well as a teacher (see Bell and Hollows

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2011: 183), learning self-sufficiency skills from landed gentry and proletarian scrumpy makers alike, helps to de-emphasise some of the privileges afforded by his class background. But while some of the connotations of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s class identity may be diminished on River Cottage, they are not completely elided. In fact, they are actually an important dimension of the show’s politics. It is precisely because Fearnley-Whittingstall cannot help but maintain some associations with class privilege that the foodwork featured on River Cottage can be presented as a lifestyle ‘choice’ compatible with politically progressive identities. Just as a preponderance of privileged, educated men undertaking (traditionally feminine) foodwork serves to mitigate some of the problematic gender politics of the locavore literature (see Chap. 2), Fearnley-Whittingstall’s class privilege is part of what helps River Cottage to resignify ‘old-fashioned’ food practices, such as cooking from scratch without the assistance of modern appliances, as part of a romantic construction of an imagined “good life”, rather than the economic and technological necessity—and obligatory domestic drudgery—that they have traditionally been (and continue to be) for many women. The fact that traditional practices of foodwork can be presented in this way, as a genuine ‘choice’, helps to reframe these activities not as a burdensome duty, but as a symbol of a freely chosen political intervention. As we also saw in Chap. 2, it is this, along with a relentless emphasis on pleasure, that enables the politics of texts like River Cottage to be presented more palatably to their educated, middle-class audiences. But although River Cottage has an aspirational dimension—FearnleyWhittingstall maintains that growing and preparing food to eat is something that anyone can (and should) do—its viewing pleasures need not rest on the assumption that the average viewer will maintain the same level of involvement with their own food production. In fact, it is ­precisely because the activities on the series are out of reach for most people that the River Cottage series, and the broader businesses that the series represents, can tap into the emerging markets for food-based commodities and experiences that amplify the nostalgia and escapism of the rural idyll.

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A Commodified Idyll Although the River Cottage series is initially framed as an experiment in self-sufficiency—one man’s attempt to achieve his dream of producing his own food—as the series progresses, the focus increasingly turns to Fearnley-Whittingstall’s farm not simply as a private smallholding, but ultimately as a business enterprise. In fact, by the River Cottage seasonal specials, Spring, Autumn, Summer’s Here and Winter’s on the Way, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s initial smallholding experiment is very visibly a business empire. No longer set within the small gamekeeper’s cottage and its surrounding grounds that was the River Cottage of the early series, the more recent series are filmed at the more expansive River Cottage HQ, the site of a cookery school, chef’s school, function centre and restaurant. Moreover, while the earlier series focused primarily on Fearnley-Whittingstall preparing food for private consumption—with occasional help from friends and neighbours—the more recent programmes feature a range of professionally employed River Cottage staff. For example, the large vegetable garden at River Cottage HQ is now tended by a team of professional gardeners, while Gill Meller, Head Chef at River Cottage HQ, and Tim Maddams, former Head Chef at the River Cottage Canteen in Axminster, also play increasingly prominent roles in the series, presenting their own recipes and preparing dining events at the River Cottage eateries. Others, such as John Wright and Pam Corbin, who initially appeared simply as friends helping out Fearnley-Whittingstall in the earlier series, are subsequently presented as professionally employed members of the River Cottage team, authoring books in the River Cottage Handbook collection and hosting their accompanying classes at the River Cottage cooking school. Audiences are invited not only to watch the show, but also to engage with a series of brand extensions. Like other food media ‘entertainment packages’, the River Cottage brand profits from audiences’ engagement with a range of spin-off products and experiences, such as cookbooks, a River Cottage app, River Cottage branded products (including yoghurt and beer), plus River Cottage eateries and food tourism experiences. The cooking school, in particular, is promoted heavily on the basis that participants will be able to meet the personalities and experience the activities that they have enjoyed watching on the River Cottage television shows and reading about in the River Cottage cookbooks. Some, such as the Bread Making and Veg cookery classes, are advertised as featuring

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recipes from Fearnley-Whittingstall’s books, River Cottage Everyday and River Cottage Veg Every Day! respectively. Others, such as John Wright’s foraging classes, are specifically designed to replicate experiences from the television series by taking participants to key locations (the seashore, the forest, the hedgerow) in which Wright has been seen on the show. In the online video advertisements for the cooking school, recognisable faces from the television programme, including Gill Meller, Tim Maddams and Fearnley-Whittingstall himself, are shown endorsing and teaching various cooking classes. Testimonials from participants underline their enjoyment at experiencing synergies with the television show: a journalist from BBC Good Food Magazine said she enjoyed the “magic” of being part of a cooking class at “Britain’s most filmed farmhouse”, while another participant said that he had “bought the books, saw the TV shows, [and so] came here. [It was] good to see some of the people you see on television”.2 Lyn Thomas (2008: 696) underscores the “tensions between enterprise and the downshifting narrative in the River Cottage cultural site”, and there is indeed a disjuncture between the simple, pastoral idyll of “the good life” and what is ultimately shown to be a highly successful business venture. But River Cottage also shows how the textual politics and pleasures of alternative food can become platforms for extra-textual businesses in which the pastoral idyll is one of the key commodities available for purchase. The cooking classes are especially reliant on participants’ identification with, and immersion in, the romanticism of River Cottage. In the online advertisements for the four-day cooking class, FearnleyWhittingstall addresses the viewer as if they are a friend he already knows (or, perhaps more accurately, one who already knows him), inviting them to come and “visit” River Cottage, as opposed to merely “enrolling in a class”.3 Because they offer experiences of the television show, the classes make the pastoral idyll and a connection to one’s food temporarily available to middle-class consumers (at least to those who have the economic capital to pay up to £870 for cooking courses), but who may not themselves necessarily wish to commit to growing and producing their own 2 See https://www.rivercottage.net/cookery-courses/classic-cookery/four-days-at-rivercottage, accessed April 2015. 3 Originally accessed at https://www.rivercottage.net/cookery-courses/classic-cookery/ four-days-at-river-cottage, April 2015. Video still available on Vimeo: https://vimeo. com/24304480, accessed April 2017.

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food. Although such activities are likely to be dismissed as merely one of a number of instances of commodified idyllism, packaged for wealthy, middle-class urban dwellers (e.g. Peace 2011), they nonetheless highlight increasingly important synergies and market connections between food media texts and other brand extensions that successfully tap into what Appadurai (1996: 82) has described in a slightly different context as the “desire of learning to link fantasy and nostalgia to the desire for new bundles of commodities”. As the River Cottage television series has progressed, the food experiences that form these “bundles of commodities” have been presented with growing explicitness. For example, filming now regularly occurs in the River Cottage Canteen in Axminster, and more recent episodes feature preparation for functions, such as weddings, at the function centre at River Cottage HQ—both of which are places that can be visited or booked for similar activities that recreate the experiences seen on screen. Importantly, however, while these more recent series foreground professional identities and practices much more explicitly, the actual work involved in these activities is often implicit or invisible. Menus at the Canteen, for example, are frequently chosen through friendly competitions between chefs, rather than as a result of the more pragmatic conditions of running a restaurant. This serves to present the work of running River Cottage HQ as enjoyable, collegial and unhurried—as a space of ‘play’ unconstrained by finances or hard work. Perhaps because it would interrupt the easy pleasures of the bucolic lifestyle that River Cottage represents, the logistics of running the business are simply not a feature of the series’ narrative (Phillipov 2016). Notwithstanding the question of whether or not such an easy-going focus on food-production-as-leisure is effective for galvanising ‘real’ political engagements and investments, River Cottage is an example of how food media’s mechanisms for encouraging audiences to invest in the politics of food and food choices become powerful vehicles for integrated extra-textual business and marketing strategies. River Cottage may present the food produced on the series as a preferable alternative to industrial farming and agriculture, but the specific ways in which this food is represented closely align with the experiences on offer via the show’s brand extensions. In particular, River Cottage’s emphasis on preparing and cooking food in bucolic surroundings in ways that are pleasurable, leisurely and unhurried can be readily parlayed into food tourism activities, cooking school experiences, dinners at the café

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or even wedding receptions that give participants a taste of the River Cottage life. Consequently, while the show may suggest a nostalgia for traditional, pre-industrial food practices, it does not merely offer a ‘rediscovery’ of previously forgotten foods and techniques. That is, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s businesses do not offer a simple retrieval of old artisan products and methods, but instead turn them into saleable products that are derived from the needs and characteristics of the modern, middle-class consumer. While the majority of River Cottage’s audience may simply watch the show on television and not engage with any of its extra-textual businesses, the products and experiences on offer nonetheless connect media texts, political concerns, pleasures and products in ways that are now increasingly used by artisan food businesses seeking to capitalise on the positive, ‘ethical’ credentials of the rural idyll. I will look in more detail at some of the opportunities and tensions this creates for media and food industries in Parts 2 and 3, but first I turn to another example of interconnecting discourses between food media texts and celebrity chefs’ food businesses—this time, a case in which alternative discourses are deployed to sell more ‘mainstream’ food products.

The Two Faces of Jamie Oliver If Fearnley-Whittingstall’s business ventures are focused on offering new experiences within the niche food sector, Jamie Oliver’s products are designed with a much broader appeal in mind. For Oliver, the focus is not so much on the prospect of ‘escape’, but on accommodating at least some of the constraints faced by ‘ordinary’ home cooks. While Oliver is undoubtedly extremely wealthy,4 the fact that his persona has fewer of the upper class connotations of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s allows him to appeal to more demographically diverse audiences. He also has some different challenges than Fearnley-Whittingstall; in contrast to FearnleyWhittingstall’s clear message and consistent persona across his television programmes, Oliver’s career has been frequently understood as one marked by a dramatic shift in his professional identity. Powell and Prasad (2010: 118) describe this shift as Oliver’s transformation from “cultural

4 According to the Sunday Times 2016 Rich List, Oliver is reportedly worth £160m, see http://www.essexlifemag.co.uk/people/who-s-the-top-50-richest-in-essex-1-1641468, accessed April 2017.

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intermediary” to “political intermediary”. Hollows and Jones (2010: 308) characterise it as a transition from “lifestyle expert” to “moral entrepreneur”. But while the cheerful, youthful ‘lad’ we first saw on The Naked Chef might indeed appear to be quite different from the serious (and foul-mouthed) political campaigner of Jamie’s School Dinners, it is this dual identity that has been, somewhat paradoxically, vital to the success of what Oliver himself refers to (only semi-ironically) as “Jamie Oliver Inc.”5 This is not only because Oliver has continued to produce lifestyle-based cooking shows and campaigning culinary documentaries simultaneously, but also because both work together to construct a series of positive brand associations that have been extended to Oliver’s other business activities, including his endorsements of major supermarkets (see Chap. 7) and his Jamie Oliver branded range of food products, which are the focus below. These highlight the careful symbolic work required in the management of celebrity identities that shift between pleasurable lifestyles and more serious politics as they move across media and food industries. Oliver’s first TV series, The Naked Chef, aired on BBC2 in 1999. In contrast to the traditional didactic mode of television cooks like Delia Smith, The Naked Chef reflected the broader ‘lifestyling’ of television that was occurring at the time, through which viewers were offered instruction not simply on how to cook, but also how to deploy food and cooking as part of a broader expression of identity (Moseley 2001). Throughout the series, Oliver is shown zooming about on his Vespa, shopping for food in London’s various speciality shops, drinking coffee in Soho, and cooking for family and friends for a range of special occasions. The ‘naughty’ innuendo of the show’s title, along with Oliver’s “Britpop clothes…[and] Essex-boy patter in which food is ‘pukka’ and ‘wicked’” (Ashley et al. 2004: 175), combined with his emphasis on simple, unadorned food, enabled The Naked Chef to draw upon discourses of both the “new lad” and the “new man” to present cookery as a playful, fun, leisure activity compatible not only with masculine identities but also as an expression of an aspirational lifestyle (Moseley 2001: 39; de Solier 2005: 477). While there are some obvious tensions between Oliver’s clearly affluent lifestyle and claims to working class credibility—for example, much has been made of his ‘mockney’ accent—his

5 See

Jamie’s Great Italian Escape (2005).

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construction of a hybrid identity that combines upwardly mobile consumer with youthful working class lad has been central to the appeal and effectiveness of Oliver’s brand identity (Lewis 2008: 61; Hollows 2003). The range of meanings associated with Oliver was important also for his transition to political campaigner, where he used his programmes to agitate for social and legislative change in relation to food issues. This was especially the case for his best-known activist series, Jamie’s School Dinners, Jamie’s Ministry of Food and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, which attempted to improve health, eating habits and cooking skills in the UK and the USA. These programmes have enjoyed levels of influence that were previously unprecedented for television cooking shows. As mentioned in the Introduction, Jamie’s School Dinners prompted then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to commit to an additional £280 million in funding for school meals (BBC News 2005). But despite their popular success and impact, food television scholars (like those of the locavore literature) have been highly critical of Oliver’s campaigning documentaries. School Dinners, Ministry of Food and Food Revolution have each been critiqued on the grounds of: their inattention to the larger systemic, structural and socioeconomic factors associated with obesity and diet-related ill health in the UK and the USA (Warin 2011; Schee and Kline 2013); their discourses of class pathologisation which suggest that the UK and US working classes are in need of the interventions of nannying middle-class ‘experts’ (Leggott and Hochscherf 2010; Hollows and Jones 2010; Gibson and Dempsey 2015); their minimisation of the complexities of school lunch reform, particularly in the USA (Schee and Kline 2013; Slocum et al. 2011); their use of shaming, particularly of women and mothers (Slocum et al. 2011; Hollows and Jones 2010; Peterson and Turner 2014; Gibson and Dempsey 2015); and their moralising focus on individual “choice” over the wider political economy of the food system (Gibson and Dempsey 2015: 45). But while these criticisms do indeed reflect problematic aspects of all three texts, as we will see below, some of these representational strategies not only assist Oliver to leverage positive brand associations from his activist activities, they are also revealing of the cultural work involved in managing media and food industry relationships across a number of platforms. This is not necessarily to suggest, as others have (e.g. Schee and Kline 2013), that Oliver’s activism is merely a cynical attempt at profit maximisation and that it is not based on any real commitment to social change (although this may well be true). Rather, it is to point to the

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intertwinement of consumer markets and public service issues in Oliver’s food activism (see also Lewis 2008: 61). Oliver’s attempts to situate himself as an agent of change may seem to be a departure from his earlier, more easy-going, pleasure-focused TV series, but his campaigning culinary documentaries nonetheless rely on many of the positive brand associations established early in his career. For Hollows and Jones (2010: 317) these activist series trade on a celebrity identity produced initially by Oliver’s investment in lifestyle, but “recast it as a more serious, a more ‘national’ and, therefore, more symbolically rich asset”. Although Oliver’s more recent brand identity does partly reflect the shift that Hollows and Jones’ choice of the term “recast” suggests, it is also the case that Oliver’s two identities—the playful Essex lad who treats cooking as a “laugh” and the serious political campaigner instigating change in national eating habits—operate simultaneously in ways that serve as effective promotional devices for Jamie Oliver’s celebrity brand and, in particular, for his Jamie Oliver branded food products.

Cooking from ‘Scratch’ with Processed Foods Jamie Oliver’s range of food products includes lines of pestos, pasta sauces, oils, vinegars, spices and seasonings, pasta, frozen fish, soups and meat dishes, among others—all with a vaguely ‘Mediterranean’ feel that many would recognise as characteristic of his distinctive food style.6 Some products, such as the Created With Jamie or Jamie Does Lunch ranges, are created with a supermarket partner and are only available through those outlets. Others, such as his oils, seasonings and sauces, are much more widely available. All feature his name and face prominently on the label. On the most straightforward level, Jamie Oliver branded food products offer easy connections to Oliver’s lifestyle-based identity; indeed, purchasing Oliver’s products offers a straightforward way of adopting his cooking style that need not require his cooking skills or access to the time needed to make the dishes from scratch. Although his lifestyle-based cooking programmes tend to mobilise discourses of accessibility and achievability, much of the lifestyle Oliver represents is out of reach of the ‘ordinary’ viewer (Moseley 2001: 39)—indeed, as

6 For a selection of products, see http://www.jamieoliver.com/shop/, accessed April 2017.

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Ashley et al. (2004: 176) argue, many of the images that appear on programmes like The Naked Chef more closely resemble those of lifestyle advertising, rather than genuine representations of an attainable lifestyle. Consequently, much like watching his television shows or reading his cookbooks, buying Oliver’s branded food products can be seen as one way of gaining access to the Jamie Oliver ‘life’. For example, his products for Woolworths supermarkets range from Created With Jamie Chicken Fillet Smashin’ Chilli Garlic Rosemary and Created With Jamie Skewers Wicked Chicken to Jamie Oliver Yellow Pepper and Pecorino Pesto and Jamie Oliver Aubergine and Olive Pasta Sauce; each of these possess many of the culinary ‘signatures’ familiar to viewers of Oliver’s television series, such as his emphasis on ‘big’ Mediterranean flavours, and language choices in which food is “smashin’” and “wicked”. With only a quick trip to the supermarket needed, and for less than $10 (AUD) for most products, customers have the opportunity to easily and inexpensively recreate Oliver’s distinctive culinary style, and the lifestyle that this style represents, in their own homes. However, this invitation to purchase ‘convenient’ supermarket products rather than make the whole dish oneself potentially sets up some contradictions with Oliver’s position on healthy eating. While Oliver is not entirely averse to using some convenience foods in his meals— Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals, for example, makes regular use of Uncle Ben’s quick-cook rice—in School Dinners, Ministry of Food and Food Revolution, he repeatedly advocates “cooking from scratch instead of opening boxes” as the solution to diet-related public health crises. In fact, the distinctions between “fresh” versus “processed” foods and healthy “cooking” versus unhealthy “reheating” structures the politics of all three series, with interconnections between cooking, effort and care frequently central to each of these distinctions. For example, in the first series of Food Revolution, Oliver visits an elementary school serving homemade nachos for lunch, and remarks: A lot of people think nachos are, like, junk, but if you strip away all the additives and the tins and the packets and the crap and actually do it properly, with love, from scratch and get the vegies in there and have good offer of salad and fruit and stuff like that, you can make them good wholesome food. (emphasis added)

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Cooking “properly”, then, is framed as a matter of cooking without processed “crap”, “with love”, “from scratch”. In this way, cooking is frequently presented as a means to stem the health crises of obesity and diabetes, but the focus is primarily on the act of cooking, not on the ‘healthiness’ of the recipes per se. Indeed, apart from the fact that they contain vegetables, many of Oliver’s recipes in the three programmes tend not to possess many specific signifiers of ‘health’; the school lunches, especially, are frequently homemade versions of previous school foods (such as pizza or nachos), made from scratch without using pre-prepared or pre-cooked products. The result, as Hollows and Jones (2010: 310) argue of Food Revolution, is that the shows rest on an implicit assumption that healthiness is simply a product of home cooking. Indeed, on Food Revolution when Oliver visits the local hospital to learn more about the health impacts of escalating obesity rates, hospital staff agree that cooking and eating homemade food is the key to stemming the obesity crisis—the concern is not specifically with what is eaten, but simply that it is cooked at home. On the face of it, the fact that Oliver could, on the one hand, advocate cooking from scratch and avoiding processed foods as vital for health and, on the other hand, endorse a range of processed supermarket food products, would seem to damage the integrity of both his healthy eating messages and his broader brand image. But what is remarkable is that ambiguities about what ‘counts’ as processed food (and, hence, what counts as ‘cooking from scratch’) in all three of his activist series not only prevent this from becoming a problem for Brand Oliver, they also convert these potentially damaging contradictions into additional positive associations. Jamie Oliver branded food products could potentially be viewed negatively if they were considered to be ‘processed’ foods, but on School Dinners, Ministry of Food and Food Revolution, processed foods are defined in specific, narrow, albeit shifting, ways that enable Oliver to mobilise a critique of processed foods without compromising his own brand identity. This is demonstrated especially clearly in the discourses surrounding poultry and dairy foods, which are the key battlegrounds on School Dinners and Food Revolution respectively. On School Dinners, many of Oliver’s ‘healthy’ school meals are made with chicken—fresh and cooked from scratch—and this is frequently contrasted with the processed poultry products that were previous mainstays of British school lunches. Throughout the series, products such as the Turkey Twizzler,

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a combination of minced turkey, salt and other additives that was used in school meals as an inexpensive alternative to sausage, serve as a symbol not just of everything that is wrong with school dinners, but also of what is wrong with the contemporary Western diet. They are, for Oliver, a key example of the way that traditional whole foods have been increasingly replaced with processed food products “stuffed full of crap”. Upon entering British schools, Oliver is appalled, he says, to learn that the children “know what a Turkey Twizzler is more than a chicken breast or a bit of stewed lamb”. In an attempt to shock the children into thinking more deeply about what goes into their food, he performs a demonstration of how processed poultry products are made. He does this by demonstrating the process of “mechanically reclaimed meat”, which involves removing the chicken breast and legs from a whole chicken (defined as the “good” bits “worth a lot of money”) and pureeing the carcass and other remaining “bad” bits with extra chicken skin, fat, breadcrumbs and other additives to produce a mix used for chicken nuggets and other “reconstituted” poultry products. Rhetorically, Oliver’s concern with these products is the amount of fat, salt and other additives added to the poultry meat, but visually, the focus is not on these additives, but on the unacceptability and undesirability of the chicken carcass itself, the meat of which is depicted as something that should be thrown out, rather than utilised. In doing so, the demonstration divides the chicken into “good” and “bad” parts, and forms judgements about what is acceptable meat and acceptable processing (chicken breast is good, mechanically reclaimed meat is bad). However, the fact that the chicken itself is a product of the industrial food system and that all chicken is ‘processed’ is never acknowledged— even though this is what allows Oliver to buy large quantities of fresh chicken pieces at prices that enable him to stay within the very restrictive budgets allowable for school meals. This distinction between acceptable and unacceptable food processing is further amplified in Food Revolution, where it is explicitly attached to discourses of the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’. If poultry was the key battleground for School Dinners, then dairy products are the key source of conflict in Food Revolution. In particular, Oliver is shocked by the provision of flavoured milk as part of US school lunches. American school children must have milk everyday and in most schools it is offered as a choice of chocolate, strawberry, 1% and skim milks, with the overwhelming majority of children choosing the flavoured milks. As he watches a

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group of elementary school children moving through the lunch line, Oliver remarks, “Really, they’re going for just the flavoured milk. No one is having the natural.” Flavoured milk may contain sugar and other additives, but to describe a product like 1% or skim milk as “natural” elides the significant amount of food processing required to produce all these milk products. In fact, rather than a clearly delineated distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, all the milks in the lunch line are the product of industrial processing, in which they are pasteurised and homogenised, with their fat and nutrient contents modified and standardised. The problem, then, appears not to be food processing per se, but certain types and contexts of food processing: flavoured milk may be beyond the pale, but 1% and skim milks can be accommodated within discourses of the ‘natural’. Consequently, as Slocum et al. (2011: 185) argue, this results in “some forms of processing…becom[ing] naturalized, and thus invisible, while other processing…is denaturalized”. This invisibility of certain types of (‘acceptable’) food processing is assisted by what Oliver’s critics have described as his focus on individual lifestyle ‘choices’ rather than on the agri-food and socioeconomic systems that influence and constrain these choices (see Gibson and Dempsey 2015). Although this neoliberal logic is not unique to Oliver’s programmes (see Introduction, Chap. 2), this lack of engagement with food systems, in particular, is part of what enables unclear or arbitrary definitions of food processing to persist. After all, it is only because there is no acknowledgement that all the food that appears on School Dinners, Ministry of Food and Food Revolution (and, indeed, all of Oliver’s television programmes) is the product of long and complex supply chains that some kinds of food processing can be defined as acceptable while others are not. That Jamie Oliver’s supermarket products do not compromise his brand identity, even given his public pronouncements on the importance of healthy eating and cooking from scratch, is a result of how the types of processing required for these products can also be made to fit within these definitions of the ‘acceptable’—although achieving this does require some careful symbolic work on the part of Brand Oliver. For example, in their presentation and in their demands on the purchaser, Jamie Oliver’s branded products involve careful avoidance of the connotations associated with ‘lazy’ convenience foods. Part of what distinguishes Oliver’s ‘good’ branded processed foods from the ‘bad’ processed food products traditionally served in school lunches and fast

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food takeaways is that they require some cooking, and not just merely the reheating or “opening boxes” that characterise school lunch preparation. This helps to negotiate the potential contradiction between Oliver’s endorsement of cooking from scratch and the reality that his branded food products are pre-packaged and pre-prepared. In order to avoid associations with ‘bad’ reheating and convenience foods, then, most of Oliver’s branded food products require some effort to prepare. This ranges from his Jamie Oliver dried pasta, which can be prepared with even the most basic cooking skills, to his Created With Jamie products, which are usually sold fresh and pre-prepared, but require the actual cooking to be done at home. For example, his Created With Jamie Spiced Lamb Rump Skewers come pre-seasoned and pre-skewered, ready to be cooked at home, while his Created With Jamie Crispy Parmesan and Tomato Smashin’ Chicken Fillets come with premade breadcrumb mix to be applied before cooking. Throughout Ministry of Food and Food Revolution one of the obstacles to cooking from scratch for almost all the people who feature on the programmes is lack of time. The feeling of not having enough time to cook meals regularly for their family is the main reason that most of them admit to relying on a diet of takeaways and processed junk food. Oliver’s subsequent television series, Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals and Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals, attempt to offer a partial solution to this problem of time, but this is also a problem that can be solved implicitly through purchasing his branded food products. Customers still need to put some effort into cooking, but much of the initial preparation, portioning and seasoning is already done for them. Even the name of the product range, “Created With Jamie”, while ostensibly meant to signify Oliver’s partnership with the major supermarket that sells it, also has the additional connotation that the home cook is ‘creating’ these meals ‘with’ Jamie (rather than just passively “opening a box”). Consequently, the customer is able to enjoy Oliver’s positive brand associations established through both his lifestyle and activist programmes—the importance of cooking from scratch, healthy eating, the positive feelings associated with lifestyle cooking—but with the ease and convenience of using prepared supermarket products. Oliver is thus able to leverage positive brand associations from one sphere to another (television to supermarket shopping) at the same time as he diminishes potential avenues for critique. By implicitly drawing upon the ambiguities surrounding what counts as food processing and cooking from

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scratch established in his television series, Jamie Oliver branded food products do not compromise Oliver’s message that home cooking is best, but instead draw upon his political associations at the same time as purporting to make cooking easier and quicker and the Jamie Oliver ‘style’ more accessible and achievable for ordinary home cooks.

Celebrity Brands Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s and Jamie Oliver’s different ways of leveraging television cooking shows and their ancillary texts into broader business ventures illustrate how political concerns become platforms for new food industry opportunities that merge media practices and celebrity branding strategies with contemporary concerns about food systems and food provisioning. They also highlight the symbolic work needed to ensure that these extra-textual food products and experiences are compatible with both the narrative and representational conventions of the ‘anchor’ media texts and the brand identities of their celebrity chef hosts. In the case of Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage’s focus on escaping to a rural utopia is closely paralleled with food tourism experiences that give participants a taste of the River Cottage life and assist them to (temporarily) avoid their own enmeshment in industrial food systems. In Oliver’s case, a televisual focus on the pleasures of home cooking and the politics of ‘healthy’ eating is complemented by Jamie Oliver branded food products that grant access to the Jamie Oliver ‘lifestyle’ and the connotations of health, care and effort that this lifestyle confers, as well as making the experience of cooking more accessible to home cooks lacking the time, energy, and perhaps skills, to cook entirely from scratch. With the particularities of these business ventures closely reflected in the textual conventions of the celebrity chefs’ television shows, these cases show how food television and its associated food businesses intertwine to produce new food products and experiences as ‘solutions’ to a range of contemporary food and food systems problems. This requires careful negotiation on the part of celebrity chefs, as they work to manage any potential tensions between celebrity brands, textual representations and extra-textual food businesses. Although it has been frequently argued that the ascendancy of neoliberal subjectivities and of practices of ethical consumption has contributed to the hegemony of marketbased solutions to food systems problems (see Chap. 2), celebrity chefs

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highlight both the challenges and opportunities associated with turning political concerns into food industry products. In the examples of Oliver and Fearnley-Whittingstall, we have seen a relatively successful juggling of the chefs’ seemingly genuine commitments to a progressive food politics with commercial business and branding strategies—a success due, in part, to the fact that their businesses each offer resources for engaging consumers in both political and affective encounters with food. As we move into the case studies in Parts 2 and 3, we will see how the combination of political, media and food industry imperatives is further helping to shape how these encounters are imagined and enacted in relation to both ‘alternative’ (Part 2) and ‘conventional’ (Part 3) foods. Part 2 begins by looking in more detail at the promotional strategies of celebrity brands, particularly their capacity to construct food’s political and affective dimensions across multiple media platforms. Across the case studies in the chapters that follow, we will see a range of media and food industries seeking to capitalise on the growing consumer interest in connection to ‘Food from Somewhere’, each with varying implications.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ashley, Bob, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor. 2004. Food and cultural studies. London: Routledge. Barnes, Christine. 2017. Mediating good food and moments of possibility with Jamie Oliver: Problematizing celebrity chefs as talking labels. Geoforum 84: 169–178. BBC News. 2005. TV chef welcomes £280m meals plan. BBC News, March 30. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4391695.stm. Accessed 1 Feb 2015. Bell, David. 2006. Variations on the rural idyll. In Handbook of rural studies, ed. Paul Cloke, Terry Marsden, and Patrick Mooney, 149–161. London: Sage. Bell, David, and Joanne Hollows. 2011. From River Cottage to Chicken Run: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the class politics of ethical consumption. Celebrity Studies 2: 178–191. Burchardt, Jeremy. 2002. Paradise lost: Rural idyll and social change in England since 1800. London: Tauris. de Solier, Isabelle. 2005. TV dinners: Culinary television, education and distinction. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 19: 465–481.

74  M. Phillipov Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. 2001. The River Cottage cook book. London: Houghton and Stoughton. Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. 2007. Hugh fearlessly eats it all: Dispatches from the gastronomic frontline. London: Bloomsbury. Gibson, Kristina E., and Sarah E. Dempsey. 2015. Make good choices, kid: Biopolitics of children’s bodies and school lunch reform in Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Children’s Geographies 13: 44–58. Goodman, David. 2003. The quality ‘turn’ and alternative food practices: Reflections and agenda. Journal of Rural Studies 19: 1–7. Hollows, Joanne. 2003. Oliver’s twist: Leisure, labour and domestic masculinity in The Naked Chef. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6: 229–248. Hollows, Joanne, and Steve Jones. 2010. ‘At least he’s doing something’: Moral entrepreneurship and individual responsibility in Jamie’s Ministry of Food. European Journal of Cultural Studies 13: 307–322. Leggott, James, and Tobias Hochscherf. 2010. From the kitchen to 10 Downing Street: Jamie’s School Dinners and the politics of reality cooking. In The tube has spoken: Reality TV and history, ed. Julie Anne Taddeo and Ken Dvorak, 47–64. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Lewis, Tania. 2008. Smart living: Lifestyle media and popular expertise. New York: Peter Lang. Lewis, Tania. 2010. Branding, celebritization and the lifestyle expert. Cultural Studies 24: 580–598. Lewis, Tania, and Emily Potter. 2011. Introducing ethical consumption. In Ethical consumption: A critical introduction, ed. Tania Lewis and Emily Potter, 3–24. London: Routledge. Moseley, Rachel. 2001. ‘Real lads do cook…But some things are still hard to talk about’: The gendering of 8–9. European Journal of Cultural Studies 4: 32–39. Parkins, Wendy, and Geoffrey Craig. 2011. Slow living and the temporalities of sustainable consumption. In Ethical consumption: A critical introduction, ed. Tania Lewis and Emily Potter. London: Routledge. Peace, Adrian. 2011. Barossa dreaming: Imagining place and constituting cuisine in contemporary Australia. Anthropological Forum 21: 23–42. Peterson, Tina L., and Katherine Leonard Turner. 2014. ‘Extravagance and folly’ versus ‘proper food’: Domestic scientists, celebrity chefs, and the ongoing food reform movement. The Journal of Popular Culture 47: 817–837. Phillipov, Michelle. 2016. Escaping to the country: Media, nostalgia, and the new food industries. Popular Communication 14: 111–122. Powell, Helen, and Sylvie Prasad. 2010. ‘As seen on TV.’ The celebrity expert: How taste is shaped by lifestyle media. Cultural Politics 6: 111–124. Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Food media: Celebrity chefs and the politics of everyday interference. London: Berg.

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Schee, Carolyn Vander, and Kip Kline. 2013. Neoliberal exploitation in reality television: Youth, health and the spectacle of celebrity ‘concern’. Journal of Youth Studies 16: 565–578. Scholes, Lucy. 2011. A slave to the stove? The TV celebrity chef abandons the kitchen: Lifestyle TV, domesticity and gender. Critical Quarterly 53: 44–59. Slocum, Rachel, Jerry Shannon, Kirsten Valentine Cadieux, and Matthew Beckman. 2011. ‘Properly, with love, from scratch’: Jamie Oliver’s food revolution. Radical History Review 110: 178–191. Soper, Kate. 2004. Rethinking the ‘good life’: The consumer as citizen. Capitalism Nature Socialism 15: 111–116. Thomas, Lyn. 2008. Alternative realities: Downshifting narratives in contemporary lifestyle television. Cultural Studies 22: 680–699. Thompson, E.P. 1993. Customs in common. London: Penguin. Versteegen, Heinrich. 2010. Armchair epicures: The proliferation of food programmes on British TV. In The pleasures and horrors of eating: The cultural history of eating in Anglophone literature, ed. Marion Gymnich and Norbert Lennartz, 447–464. Goettingen: VandR Unipress. Warin, Megan. 2011. Foucault’s progeny: Jamie Oliver and the art of governing obesity. Social Theory & Health 9: 24–40.

PART II

Connections

CHAPTER 4

The ‘Social Life’ of Celebrity Brands: Maggie Beer’s Verjuice

This chapter extends Chap. 3’s work on celebrity brands by further exploring how the adoption of many of the food discourses outlined in Part 1 (nostalgia, ‘tradition’, ‘authenticity’, etc.) draws the celebrity brand into a complex web of meanings that play upon food’s pleasurable and political resonances. It highlights how the celebrity brand, constructed within and across multiple media platforms, becomes an important intermediary in producer–consumer relationships, and shows how successful brands frequently adopt the language (if not always the practices) of alternative food networks to construct this relationship as one of meaningful ‘connection’, rather than merely economic exchange. To do this, the chapter focuses on the media work and food industry practices of Maggie Beer, one of Australia’s most-loved celebrity food personalities. Beer has built her celebrity profile over a 40-year career of food industry, media and advocacy projects, but she is best known internationally for her range of Maggie Beer branded food products, which are sold in food stores and supermarkets throughout the USA, UK, Europe, Australia and Asia. The chapter focuses on Beer’s relationship with her best-known and most distinctive product, verjuice. Verjuice is the sour juice of unripe grapes, and was widely used in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern peasant culinary traditions before falling out of favour in the nineteenth century. Beer was the first to ‘rediscover’ and commercially produce this almost forgotten condiment. Maggie Beer’s verjuice offers a case study of how direct and indirect promotional strategies align with alternative © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_4

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food discourses in ways that promise affective connections with food personalities, practices and politics. While Maggie Beer’s verjuice forms part of a business with a $21 million turnover (see Changarathil 2016) that, for this reason, perhaps cannot be reasonably classified as ‘alternative’; it is nonetheless an example of how discourses of the alternative can be mobilised in ways that align the identities of producer and product, and offer the promise of an authentic ‘connection’ to celebrity brands and identities. In this, the meanings associated with Maggie Beer and verjuice offer an example of what Henry Jenkins (2006) has referred to as “affective economics”. Within media research, affective economics is frequently discussed in relation to structural changes to the media industries, whereby successful media products are now increasingly reliant on the unpaid, affective labour of audiences (see Jenkins 2006; Hills 2015). It is also useful for explaining current media and food industry practices where, through the fusing of affective discourses and economic imperatives, we are seeing a mediation of economic relationships in terms of their emotional connections and resonances. Beer’s relentless promotion of verjuice has contributed to its status as a ‘signature’ of her distinctive culinary style. As a result, Maggie Beer and verjuice offer an especially strong alignment of the brand identities of producer and product—so much so that the circulation of, and meanings associated with, Maggie Beer’s verjuice have become increasingly bound up with the meanings and brand identity associated with Beer herself. As Donna Lee Brien and Margaret McAllister (2015) note, Beer conveys a consistent set of messages across her cookbooks, newspaper and magazine columns, in interviews and in other public appearances. These include focusing on the value of local foods, making the most of products that would otherwise go to waste, and maintaining direct relationships between producer and consumer. By imbuing verjuice with these values and associations, Beer’s repeated use of the condiment appears not as a cynical exercise in product placement nor as a marketing spin to increase sales; instead, it comes to be presented as a means to generate ‘authentic’ connections between people, products, experiences and places. In doing so, both Beer and verjuice are offered as experiential commodities that can be incorporated into the identities and life-worlds of consumers. To demonstrate how this works more fully, this chapter follows the “social lives” (Appadurai 1986: 3) of both Maggie Beer and verjuice as they move across and between media forms, including news, television,

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advertising, social media and cookbooks. I am using the term “social lives” to capture the way that objects and commodities circulate in the social world to produce meanings and regimes of value (Appadurai 1986: 4). Following the social lives of Maggie Beer and verjuice helps to shed light on some of the strategies used to construct food products as “new media objects” (Lury 2004: 1) that integrate the economic and the affective, and which construct intertextual linkages within and between media, as well as with other physical and virtual spaces (Arvidsson 2006: 247). As I argue below, doing so reveals a set of media representations that draw upon iconographies associated with peasant traditions that originated in the Mediterranean, but which are ‘rediscovered’ and anchored in the Barossa Valley, the South Australian region where Beer is based. This rediscovery and romanticisation of peasant traditions provides resources for the construction of the types of brand identities and stories that have become a hallmark of celebrity-driven food marketing. The appeal of peasant traditions (for middle-class consumers, in particular) has previously been examined in detail (see Duruz 2004; Peace 2006, 2011), but analysing how these traditions circulate via the social lives of verjuice and Maggie Beer offers an insight into how ideas about place and authenticity become meaningful “regimes of value” (Appadurai 1986: 4) that shape both media and food industry activities in particular ways. The processes through which a product as obscure as verjuice became so globally well known, at least in “foodie” circles (see Johnston and Baumann 2010), grant us a better understanding of the media processes through which food products circulate, how they are ascribed meaning and how they ascribe meaning to other cultural practices and industry relationships. I develop this understanding by first examining how verjuice’s circulation across a range of media platforms produces a close alignment between the meanings associated with verjuice and those of ‘Brand Maggie Beer’. I then consider how verjuice’s (and Maggie Beer’s) emplacement within the region of South Australia’s Barossa Valley invokes particular notions of peasant traditions and ideas about authenticity that highlight the complexities of verjuice’s symbolic and corporate economies. Combined, these show how verjuice (and Maggie Beer Products) have adopted an integrated brand strategy that mobilises experiences of affect and connection across all media appearances—connections to the food, to the lifestyles and values it represents, and to Beer herself. But as we will see, while these brand strategies—particularly the

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alignment between Beer and her branded products—are not always compatible with the requirements and constraints of all the media in which Beer appears, in seeking to manage them the media producers involved often (and sometimes inadvertently) provide platforms for key messages about Maggie Beer’s brand and her food politics. The result is a particular food politics that hinges on a shifting set of relationships between producers and consumers, alternative and conventional food systems, real and imagined places, and different media and food industry platforms. In this, it offers a particularly clear case of affective economics at work in which audiences are invited to invest, and imbues the product with meanings and identities that draw from the values and lifestyles offered across various media representations and their politics of fantasy and nostalgia. It is an example of how media and food industry imperatives can successfully align to connect promotional strategies with media practices and consumer politics in ways that satisfy both media and food industry needs.

The Social Life of Things In Global Culture Industry, Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2007) adapt Appadurai’s (1986) work to follow the ‘life course’ of a number of media objects, including feature films, major brands and sporting and artistic events, through their various locations, contexts and meanings. They highlight how, in the context of the contemporary global culture industry, the increasing “mediation of things” and “thingification of media” transforms objects from economic goods and commodities into complex cultural products that move not just through external force, but also immanently, in ways that lend these products new meaning and significance (Lash and Lury 2007: 7, 8). For example, when Tiger Woods wears a Nike-branded cap in his golf tournaments, Nike trades on a series of mediated connections that help create the flows in which Nike products move, but which are not necessarily within Nike’s control (Lash and Lury 2007: 8–9). As Lash and Lury (2007: 18–19) argue, this creates the possibility of investigating the organisation of markets in the global culture industry via a study of the organisation of markets by the objects themselves. This is to consider the markets of the global culture industry as neither pre-given nor static, as neither simply global nor as merely

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local, but as dynamically constituted in the movements, the biographies, of objects. (original emphasis)

For the brand, in particular, this type of movement in and through global media culture is what allows it to enter into social life, summon consumers into a relationship with it, and offer not simply a commodity, but a broader context for consumption (Arvidsson 2005: 244; Arvidsson 2006: 90; Hearn 2008: 199). For Adam Arvidsson (2006: 88), the brand is essentially conservative in its appropriation of political capacities and affects into the service of capitalist accumulation (see also Hearn 2008: 200). But given that Arvidsson (2006: 39) also sees mediatisation as something that extends the capacities of branded objects, some of the brand’s capacities and affects can additionally be seen as “dynamically constituted” (Lash and Lury 2007: 19) through its movement and circulation in media culture. Similar approaches to “follow[ing] the object” (Lash and Lury 2007: 16) have also been used in studies of food products and brands. Studies of the biographies of individual food products as diverse as hummus (Hirsch and Tene 2013), olive oil (Meneley 2004) and lardo di Collonata (Leitch 2000, 2003), while ostensibly focusing on the relationship of these products to food industries and consumer markets, also highlight how the food industry is as much a culture industry as the entertainment industry is—one which is involved in the circulation of cultural, and not just economic, goods. The ‘social lives’ of food products offer insights to the broader politics and practices of food systems, including those associated with the global flows of ‘local’ or ‘traditional’ foods repackaged for cosmopolitan ‘gourmet’ consumers (Leitch 2000, 2003), the tensions and interdependencies between the artisanal and the industrial in the marketing of food products (Hirsch and Tene 2013), and the impacts of values of nostalgia, desire and authenticity on local and transnational food production practices (Meneley 2004). Maggie Beer’s verjuice is similarly revealing of the complexities of contemporary, mediated food politics. Like the case studies explored by Lash and Lury, the global circulation of verjuice relies on a set of mediated connections, the meanings of which are dynamically constituted in its circulation and movement. Following the ‘social lives’ of both verjuice and Brand Maggie Beer through their circulation in local, national and global media forms provides insights to both the cultural meanings of food and the intersecting relationships between the media and

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food industries that are now often central to the successful marketing of food products that play upon the connotations of the ‘alternative’ and the ‘artisan’. Maggie Beer and verjuice offer not only an exemplary case of successful marketing within the niche food sector, whereby the personal characteristics of the producer and those of the product are closely aligned (Sidali et al. 2015: 1191–1192), but also the circulation of Beer and verjuice across a wide range of media forms works to construct both as media objects whose identities mutually shape one another in ways that are crucial to Beer’s success as a food celebrity and a food entrepreneur, and to verjuice’s success as a food product. Each helps us to consider how the mediation of food and food politics can channel affective investments into encounters with food that both produce and rework its meanings and significances. The story of Maggie Beer’s verjuice is well rehearsed in her cookbooks, media appearances, and in magazine and newspaper stories. In 1973, Beer, along with her husband Colin, moved from Sydney to South Australia’s Barossa Valley to become game farmers and vignerons. They soon opened the Pheasant Farm Restaurant to showcase their produce and the produce of the region. In 1991 the restaurant won the Remy Martin Cognac/Australian Gourmet Traveller Restaurant of the Year award, the highest industry award in Australia (Gunders 2008: 121), but Maggie, exhausted after 14 years in the restaurant trade, closed the Pheasant Farm Restaurant and turned her energies to her Farm Shop and the export business through which she sells her Maggie Beer Products range of olive oils, condiments, pâtés, pastes and ice creams. Verjuice formed part of this arsenal of products almost by accident. In 1984 the Beers had a glut of wine grapes they couldn’t sell. From her reading of food writers like Elizabeth David Maggie knew of a French provincial preparation known as verjuice or vertjus—literally green juice. Verjuice was a popular souring agent in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cookery during the Middle Ages before all but disappearing from cookbooks and regional cooking practices in the nineteenth century. Its use was preserved in a few pockets of Europe, where it continued to be produced in the homes of peasants and winemakers, but by the twentieth century it was increasingly unfamiliar to home cooks and professional chefs. Verjuice had never been produced commercially, so

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Beer had not had the opportunity to taste it, nor did she have a benchmark against which to judge the success or failure of her attempts to make it. But Beer’s preference for sour flavours and her commitment to a “waste-not want-not” principle, as part of which she seeks to use “every part of every food source”, led her to enlist friend and winemaker Peter Wall to help her make her own verjuice (Beer 2001a: 2, 4, 8). After a few false starts, these early attempts proved successful with the first batch receiving a positive review in Winestate magazine in 1984 (Beer 2001a: 9). Maggie Beer’s verjuice was originally produced in limited batches and available only to customers of her Pheasant Farm Restaurant, where it was served in a variety of dishes. But following the closing of the restaurant and the expansion of her export kitchen in 1993, verjuice became one of her best-known products, both in Australia and internationally. It has been the subject of two cookbooks (Beer 2001a, 2012a), multiple media appearances, daily demonstrations at Beer’s Farm Shop, international cooking demonstrations (Davenport 2006), and international showcases of Australian food and food products (Mitchell 2005). While Maggie Beer Products does not divulge sales figures (marketing director, 25 August 2015), in 2008 sales were reported to be increasing at a rate of 20–25% per year (White 2008).1 Maggie Beer’s verjuice has also been reported as among the six best-selling condiments at Australian department store David Jones (Tattersall 2010), and was stocked for approximately 10 years at Sainsbury’s supermarkets in the UK (Ripe 2001). Although verjuice is typically understood by Maggie Beer Products as something that appeals principally to “foodie[s]” and is less widely accessible than some of Beer’s other products, a recent survey of Maggie’s Food Club saw verjuice voted members’ favourite Maggie Beer Product (marketing director, 25 August 2015). Verjuice is thus a “re-invented tradition” in the terms used by Tregear (2003): a product, like Cornish Yarg or Extra Mature Welsh Beef, with its origins in widespread artisanal activity, but which has been more recently revived or “invented” as a commercial product (Tregear 2003: 99). Beer’s commercialisation of verjuice has been credited with inspiring others to do the same, including in Australia, the USA, France and South Africa, where a number of small companies and vineyards now produce commercial versions of verjuice (Lawson 2012). 1 Research data gleaned from interviews with media and food industry personnel are cited throughout the book inthe form: “(role of interviewee, date of interview [day month year])”.

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Verjuice and ‘Brand Maggie’ As well as being associated with a growth in commercial verjuice production, Beer is also credited with popularising verjuice’s consumption. For example, UK chefs Yotam Ottolenghi, Skye Gyngell and Nigel Slater have attributed verjuice’s resurgence to Maggie Beer’s “championing” of the product (Ottolenghi 2013), through which she has “worked tirelessly to place [it] back on the culinary map” (Gyngell 2007) and “done more than anyone to bring this ancient ingredient back from oblivion” (Slater 2001). The New York Times has described Beer as a “leader” in the verjuice revival (Willoughby 2010), while The Independent (UK) has called her a “verjuice trailblazer” (Sharp 2010) and the “main person accredited with thrusting verjus [sic] back into the limelight” (Smith 2013). Given verjuice’s obscurity prior to its commercialisation by Beer, many consumers are likely to have been introduced to this product via Maggie Beer Products. Although verjuice was a recreation of a traditional artisan recipe, the fact that it had never been produced commercially, almost never appeared in contemporary cookbooks, and that most of Beer’s consumers were unlikely to have tried it previously, allowed it to function like a “floating” or “empty” signifier: a signifier detached from a known referent, allowing it to be filled with meaning from “outside” (Lévi-Strauss 1987; Barthes 1977). As a result, the semiotic openness of verjuice has enabled it to be employed not just as a Maggie Beer culinary signature, but also as something that could do particular ‘work’ for Brand Maggie. In Beer’s cookbooks and media interviews, she frequently refers to verjuice as “indispensable” to her cooking (see, for example, Beer 2007: 328). Verjuice can be seen as a natural fit for Beer’s culinary style in a number of ways. Beer’s lack of a sweet tooth means that even in her dessert recipes she tends to focus on savoury flavours brightened and sharpened by acid (Beer 2012a: 1). Verjuice’s origins in Europe and the Middle East mean that it is an ingredient compatible with Beer’s Mediterranean-influenced style of cookery (see Gunders 2008: 122). Its ease of production in the Barossa Valley, one of Australia’s largest wine regions, makes it compatible with Beer’s philosophy of using whatever she has to hand and making the most of the seasonal ingredients “on [her] doorstep” (Beer 2012a: 1). Moreover, verjuice closely fits within the origin story of the business, in which Maggie and Colin were vignerons before they were food producers, allowing Maggie Beer Products

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to retain associations with “grapes…as one of the cornerstones of [the identity of their] business” (Beer, 22 October 2015). As Brien and McAllister (2015: 47) observe of Beer’s cookbooks and food writing, these multiple meanings and significances are “never… presented in marketing terms, where [they] could be read as a kind of spin to enhance sales”; instead, they are presented in the form of a direct relationship between producer and consumer that “functions to make aspects of life more meaningful for both”. Indeed, in the way that Beer talks about her business she carefully distances herself from the marketing dimensions of her brand. Although she acknowledges that she does have a “really great marketing manager”, she discursively separates this manager’s work from her own. She does not promote verjuice, she says, she “just cook[s] with it”, doing only the “things I love” and “never do[ing] anything…just [as] a…commercial decision” (Beer, 22 October 2015). Through a careful avoidance of marketing discourses Beer distances herself from any taint of commercial relationships. Instead, across Beer’s media work, verjuice is offered to consumers as a means of constructing a direct relationship with Beer and accessing her culinary experiences and lifestyles. In doing so, verjuice is presented as more than just compatible with, or complementary to, Beer’s cooking style, it is also presented as its secret. Throughout her cookbooks and other food writing, Beer’s recipes often suggest substitutes for verjuice (typically either lemon juice or vinegar), but verjuice is also said to provide a unique flavour and finish to dishes that cannot be replicated by either ingredient. For example, in Maggie’s Verjuice Cookbook, she describes verjuice as the “most gentle” of the acidulants: “It truly lifts the flavour without dominating,” she says, “and I know no better way to enhance flavour, no better way to make food taste fresh and alive” (Beer 2012a: 1). A hollandaise made with verjuice is described as “without peer”, while deglazing the pan with verjuice to make a quick sauce is described as “the best way I know to give a boost to the flavour of a supermarket chook” (Beer 2007: 331). In fact, verjuice is also the secret to Beer’s conversion to vegetables she previously disliked; she had never liked carrots much as a child, she says, “but when I grew up and started glazing them with nut brown butter and verjuice, I changed my mind” (qtd. in Williams 2011). But verjuice also has a more complex symbolic life. Rather than being simply a flavour-enhancer, verjuice is presented as being at the heart of Beer’s relaxed country lifestyle centred on garden fresh produce and

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laughter-filled meals with family and friends. This is made most explicit in her cookbooks, in which verjuice is presented as the key to making the most of simple ingredients and relaxed outdoor meals. In Maggie’s Verjuice Cookbook, for example, she introduces a recipe for grilled vegetables by saying: We tend to eat outside most weeknights in summer and autumn. Grilling meat and vegetables such as these on the barbeque and serving them with a freshly picked garden salad is the normal order of the day. No matter how rushed a day has been, life is definitely too short not to take the time to enjoy good food every day. This can be as simple as making the most of what is in season, and these grilled vegetables rested in a bath of extra virgin olive oil and verjuice are a perfect example. (Beer 2012a: 21)

Here, verjuice is what helps Beer to make the most of life’s simple pleasures, seasonal ingredients and warm Barossa weather. Through an invocation of idyllic landscapes and lifestyles (see Part 1), verjuice is deployed as part of an affective economy of signs in ways that, in Hills’ terms, “decommoditis[e] the industrial exchange value” (2015: 184) of verjuice in order to emphasise its emotional resonances as a vehicle for pleasurable memories of summer alfresco dining—pleasures that “life is definitely too short” to miss out on. This is done not necessarily for the purposes of selling a branded product—Beer’s cookbooks have little impact on sales of Maggie Beer Products (marketing director, 25 August 2015)—but to construct a particular story of people, products and locations in which Beer, verjuice and the Barossa are interconnected. This connection between imagined places and experiences is also central to Beer’s cookbooks. Books like Maggie’s Harvest (2007), for example, which features recipes using verjuice alongside images of expansive Barossan landscapes, are part of a genre of cookbooks that helped to save an ailing book publishing industry at a time when many predicted the demise of the book in favour of digital alternatives (Orr 2012). In Australia, Lantern Books and its former Publishing Director Julie Gibbs have been at the forefront of this, adopting the strategy of encouraging authors to “curat[e]” their work to produce beautiful-looking books that are an “an extension of who [the author is] and what they stand for” (Gibbs, 20 August 2015). Recipe introductions, like the one from Maggie’s Verjuice Cookbook above, are a typical feature of Lantern Books, which ensures that “recipes aren’t just put in between covers…, there’s

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[always] a context to them” (Gibbs, 20 August 2015). In Beer’s books, the South Australian landscape, particularly that of the Barossa region, provides a key context through which to read her recipes. In Maggie’s Harvest (2007) recipes are interspersed with beautifully shot country landscapes of clear blue skies, hardy, drought-tolerant native plants and the brown-and-green patchworks of farmland that reflect the Barossa’s dry, Mediterranean climate. Even the book’s cover and page stock, both a light gold, convey the colours and character of what Gibbs calls “[Maggie’s] landscape”, the “landscape that all that food and cooking and passion was coming out of” (Gibbs, 20 August 2015). With over a quarter of the recipes in Maggie’s Harvest featuring verjuice,2 this frequent referencing of the condiment in a book designed to appear as an extension of Beer’s personality and values constructs verjuice as something that (like the book itself) emerges out of Beer’s passion, palate and embeddedness in the Barossan climate and landscape. Moreover, by presenting verjuice as something that is, in Beer’s terms, an “absolute necessity” to her cooking (Beer, 22 October 2015), the book symbolically transforms it from a (relatively new) branded product to an everyday staple, much like it was in the Mediterranean several centuries ago. To cook with verjuice, then, is to invest in an economy of signs that does not foreground commercial relationships, but rather offers an ‘access point’ to Beer’s own stories, lifestyle and food values. It is an example of how brands invite consumers to incorporate particular products into their life-worlds and to engage in affective relationships with the brand that “produce something—a feeling, a personal relation, an experience” (Arvidsson 2006: 68). Unlike the global brands discussed by Arvidsson (2006) and Lury (2004), however, Maggie Beer Products are not presented as placeless—as global products without a “fixed origin in a specific territory” (see Lury 2004: 55)—but as specifically anchored in place. This is typical of branding strategies for artisan food products, where the meaning of the artisan brand derives from its capacity to form connections between food identities, products and places (see Phillipov 2016; Gralton and Vanclay 2009). In this case, the primary connection that verjuice invites is to Beer herself. Crucially, however, the connection we are invited to access is not to ‘Maggie Beer, the successful food industry entrepreneur’,

2 Of

the 363 recipes in Maggie’s Harvest, 97 (27%) include verjuice.

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but to ‘Maggie Beer, the ordinary home cook’—the Maggie Beer who escapes the “rush” of daily working life by preparing simple meals with fresh ingredients and carefully selected condiments. This connection to the ordinary and everyday is a key trope through which celebrities’ lifestyle expertise and desirability is mediated in popular texts (see Lewis 2008); in this case, the foregrounding of Beer’s personal identity, and the diminishment of her professional one, helps to bolster both verjuice’s and Maggie Beer’s authenticity by framing any discussion of the product as a personal passion, rather than a commercial promotion. This was especially evident in Beer’s involvement with The Cook and the Chef, a popular programme aired from 2006 to 2009 by the Australian public broadcaster, ABC. Beer’s cookbooks may be filled with recipes using verjuice, but many Australians’ first introduction to this product would most likely have been via this television programme. When we follow the objects of Maggie Beer and verjuice from cookbooks into television appearances, we can see how mediatisation further shapes the capacities of both; this time through an even more explicit emphasis on Beer as a self-taught home cook. The dichotomy of cook and chef is playfully mobilised both through the programme’s title and through the relationship between Beer and her co-host Simon Bryant, then Head Chef at Adelaide’s Hilton restaurant. As Beer puts it on the show’s website: What I am able to do, and perhaps it’s because I’ve never been taught, is to show people how they can get the wow factor out of the simplest of cooking. Whereas what Simon brings to the table, besides his wonderful cheekiness, is his fantastic technique, passion and knowledge of food. (qtd. in Gunders 2008: 121)

While, in practice, the real distinction between Beer and Bryant is not so much in their food knowledge or expertise, but in their approaches to food and cookery—Beer produces “rustic”, home style meals and Bryant produces more refined, “cheffy” dishes (Gunders 2008: 121)— the dichotomy of cook and the chef principally operates as a rhetorical device through which Beer (and not Bryant) becomes the identificatory figure for the audience watching at home. Because Beer’s food is presented as driven by flavour and by “simple” ingredients and equipment— rather than by cheffy techniques or current trends within the restaurant

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industry—it is implicitly framed as more easily accessible to the everyday home cook. In Beer’s cookbooks, it is frequently verjuice that gives a “wow factor” to her “simplest of cooking”. This is also the case on The Cook and the Chef, where many of Beer’s recipes across the four series feature verjuice. But unlike the cookbooks, on The Cook and the Chef, the product is never linked to Maggie Beer Products nor to Beer herself as the producer. This was a consequence of the ABC’s restrictions on advertising, which meant that the programme could not present ingredients in any way that might be interpreted as product placement or commercial promotion. Indeed, given the fact that The Cook and the Chef had been conceptualised around Maggie herself, Beer’s penchant for using verjuice in everything posed a real dilemma for the show’s producers. As the then executive producer put it: We had to spend quite a lot of time looking at the Maggie brand itself, because she was a brand, so we had to look carefully at that. And in fact, there were some products of hers—verjuice being one of them—which were very much her, and at that stage, [verjuice] wasn’t in common use around the place. So we did an intensive search on verjuice to discover that there were a lot of people making it, it just wasn’t a popular component, so therefore we could let her use it. If she had been the only person making verjuice it would have been a real problem for her and us because she uses verjuice in everything, and we would have had to have said, ‘no, you can’t use it’. (18 August 2015)

As a result, at a time when verjuice would have been unfamiliar to many viewers, the fact that it could not be presented in a way that might appear to be commercial promotion meant that very little discussion or explanation of what this ingredient is occurs in the programme. Moreover, while verjuice features in a number of the recipe titles on The Cook and the Chef website, it rarely appears in the on-screen recipe titles of the broadcast episodes. These decisions were primarily made to ensure compliance with the regulations and values of the public broadcaster (media producer, 18 August 2015), but the attempt to avoid any semblance of commercial advertising inadvertently assisted in reinforcing Beer’s strategy of distancing herself and her products from connotations of marketing spin. In fact, The Cook and the Chef assisted the promotion of verjuice and Maggie Beer Products despite—or perhaps because

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of—the fact that it appeared to be the antithesis of commercial promotion. Beer’s association with the “integrity” of the ABC, with its prioritisation of television presenters who are “experts in their field” rather than personalities who are merely “good in front of the camera” (media producer, 18 August 2015), was a powerful one. While, like the cookbooks, The Cook and the Chef did not necessarily have a measurable impact on product sales (marketing director, 25 August 2015), the programme nonetheless contributed to greater consumer awareness of both Beer and her brand (White 2008). If, as Lash and Lury (2007: 8–9) observe, brands trade on a set of mediated connections, the results of which cannot always be anticipated in advance, the successful connections generated by verjuice arose, at least in part, from the compatibilities between the mission of ABC television programming—to produce programmes that inform, educate and entertain3—and Maggie Beer Products’ long-standing approach to the promotion of verjuice. The marketing strategy for verjuice has primarily been to target “foodies” who “are wanting to experiment or be educated about” food (much like the audience for The Cook and the Chef itself, see Lewis 2008: 60), so the emphasis has been on providing information and education to enable people to understand “what [verjuice] is…and what it can bring to your food” (marketing director, 25 August 2015). This is in part why it is verjuice (and also vino cotto), rather than any number of other Maggie Beer Products, that are the focus of daily cooking demonstrations at Beer’s Farm Shop. As Beer put it, verjuice and vino cotto “are the ones that need the most education”. The verjuice demonstrations are especially important because they are “ways of immediately showing how simple it is to use” and because verjuice, in particular, “exemplifies everything that the farm’s about” (Beer, 22 October 2015). This pedagogical approach to verjuice has resulted in a “slow burn” in relation to product sales and brand awareness that is as much a consequence of a limited advertising budget as of deliberate strategy (marketing director, 25 August 2015). Nonetheless, the marketing focus on education and information, rather than conventional advertising, has helped to construct media representations of verjuice as invitations to reap the benefits

3 The ABC’s mission is detailed in the ABC Charter, available from http://about.abc. net.au/how-the-abc-is-run/what-guides-us/legislative-framework/, accessed 1 February 2017.

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of verjuice and to recreate Beer’s signature style, rather than as exercises in commercial promotion. We can also see this when we follow verjuice into Beer’s contributions to newspaper and magazine features. These are examples of how Beer is always “on message” (Brien and McAllister 2015: 47) in her relentless promotion of her products; here, verjuice is frequently the centrepiece of tips for successful and stress-free special occasion cooking. For example, for stress-free dinner parties, Beer recommends relying on simple “favourites”, like her roast chicken with verjuice (Beer 2011). For Australia Day family feasts, she serves yabbies with a verjuice mayonnaise, roast chicken with verjuice, and nectarines set in a verjuice jelly (Savill 2013). Elsewhere, in a “twist” on the classic Australian dish, she offers a “special Australia Day recipe” for pavlova with apricots in a verjuice and honey syrup (Wilkinson 2012). Verjuice also appears in all five dishes of the “deliciously simple” Mother’s Day menu Beer provided to The Australian Women’s Weekly (Beer 2012b). Each of the dishes features the unique flavour profile—the fresh acid flavours, the local Mediterraneaninspired ingredients—associated with Beer’s food. By placing verjuice at the centre of these effortless and ‘special’ dishes, such media appearances provide further mechanisms for naturalising the associations between Beer and verjuice, and for transforming what would otherwise be perceived as product placement into something that closely reflects Beer’s identity and values. Similar strategies are also evident in Beer’s appearances on one of Australia’s most popular reality television cooking programmes, MasterChef Australia. Beer was initially reluctant to be involved with the programme—she was first approached while still filming The Cook and the Chef, and her loyalty to the publicly funded ABC initially made her uncomfortable about involvement with a commercial broadcaster (Dennehy 2015)—but she has been a regular guest on the show since 2011. Given that all her media work must be compatible with her values (Beer, 22 October 2015), her appearances on MasterChef closely reflect Beer’s philosophy of cooking with local and seasonal produce. This has ranged from 2013’s Barossa Week, when she invited the contestants to cook with the ingredients of the locale that she lovingly referred to as “my Barossa”, to 2015’s Mystery Box contest, when she provided contestants with gloves and secateurs with which to harvest garden produce. Verjuice is always central to Beer’s MasterChef appearances. The Roast Chicken with Garlic and Verjuice that she prepared for a 2011

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MasterClass was one of that year’s two most downloaded recipes from MasterChef’s website (Tucker-Evans 2011). One of the lengthiest features involving verjuice occurred during Beer’s 2014 guest appearance in which she set that week’s Mystery Box contest. The Mystery Box competition provides contestants with a group of eight or so ingredients with which they need to prepare a dish. They must use at least one ingredient from the Mystery Box, and can access an additional pantry of basic staples (such as flour, sugar, oil, salt, etc.) with which to complete the dish. Beer’s Mystery Box included verjuice, octopus, parsley, bay leaves, pear, chocolate, caper berries and umeboshi plums. Maggie Beer Products’ vino cotto was also added to the pantry staples.4 As we will see in Chap. 8, this kind of “integrated” advertising (Spurgeon 2013) is a common feature of reality TV and is especially important for shows like MasterChef. In the scheme of MasterChef sponsorships, Maggie Beer Products is relatively minor. This places some restrictions on how the company is able to engage with the show. For example, Maggie Beer Products are not able to feature products on the show that would compete with higher-value brand partners: for example, it cannot feature its stocks on MasterChef while Campbell’s (which produces several lines of stock and soup bases) remains a major sponsor (marketing director, 25 August 2015). But for Maggie Beer Products, brand integration of more specialised products like verjuice and vino cotto is more effective because it is a product placement that closely aligns with the company’s education-centred approach to marketing. As Maggie Beer Products’ then marketing manager put it, MasterChef is an ideal promotional forum for a product like verjuice, because it is a “place… where the viewer…is there, and they’re watching, and they’re wanting to learn—they’re wanting to know more about” food (marketing director, 25 August 2015). The value of this type of integrated advertising to Maggie Beer Products was playfully noted by popular reality TV blog, Reality Ravings, which joked of Maggie Beer’s 2014 Mystery Box episode that, “it is a truth universally acknowledged that if Maggie Beer is a guest judge on MasterChef Australia there will be verjuice” (Reality Raver 2014). In 4 In the following year, when Beer again set a Mystery Box challenge, verjuice was included among the pantry staples. In 2016 she combined this with a promotional tie-in for Food Club members featuring an “all-star Mystery Box Collection of screen worthy favourites”, including verjuice (email to Food Club members, 5 June 2016).

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addition, they noted, “it is clever of Maggie to ensure she does get product placement when she is a guest”, and that “any contestant who was smart realised by [sic] using Maggie’s products would give them a better chance to be one of the five to get their dishes tasted”. Certainly, each of the five dishes tasted in Beer’s 2014 Mystery Box featured either verjuice, vino cotto or both. Kira’s Vino Cotto-Poached Pear with Chocolate Ganache and Scott’s Chocolate Ganache Tart with Plum and Vino Cotto Sauce both showcased vino cotto, while Sarah’s Pan-Seared Octopus with Parsley Farfalle, Emily’s Malaysian Egg Yolk Sponge Cake with Umeboshi-Flavoured Cream and Rachael’s Grilled Octopus on Seared Pears featured, respectively, a verjuice mayonnaise, a verjuice and vino cotto syrup, and a verjuice marinade. Integrated advertising of this sort is typical of reality television cooking shows and, unlike some of Beer’s other media work, her appearances on MasterChef Australia have contributed to notable increases in sales of verjuice and other Maggie Beer Products (marketing director, 25 August 2015). In this, Maggie Beer Products has been a recipient of the oft-remarked upon MasterChef effect (see Introduction). But Beer’s involvement with MasterChef Australia assists her brand beyond (possibly temporary) sales spikes. While MasterChef Australia’s sponsors all benefit from the positive “brand trait transference” (Arsena et al. 2014: 1537) that comes from their associations with the MasterChef brand, Beer’s brand is additionally helped by its association with Beer herself. We can see this in both audience and contestant responses to Beer’s MasterChef Australia appearances. For example, in the Twitter conversation leading up to and during Beer’s MasterChef episodes, there are a large number of tweets expressing viewers’ excitement about seeing Beer on the show, their love for her and, in a surprisingly common sentiment, how much they wish she was their mother, grandmother, aunt or some other ‘maternal’ relative. Indeed, she is often introduced by MasterChef Australia’s judges as “Australia’s favourite aunty” and, in yet another example of the affective labour that has now become central to media representations of ‘alternative’ food production (see Chap. 6), her appearances on the show, like all her other media and public appearances, show her to be lively, jolly and warm, with a clear passion for her work in the food industry. With the exception of guest appearances by celebrity megastars like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, Beer is the MasterChef guest that generates the most excitement and emotionality from contestants. During her 2014 appearance in the Mystery Box contest, Rachael

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became teary as she told Beer that she loves everything she “do[es] and stand[s] for”, and Scott lunged at her for a hug as Beer was leaving the kitchen; these are typical occurrences on a Maggie Beer episode. In the previous year contestant Neha was so overcome with emotion at seeing Maggie that she received a hug from her “idol”. Consequently, Beer’s appearances on MasterChef are not just opportunities to feature her brand on a prominent and popular media platform, but also to reinforce a particular identity for Brand Maggie. Beer’s connotations of warmth and love cast her as a maternal figure whose authenticity and trustworthiness make the constant spruiking of her products appear as a genuine passion for food, rather than simply as a calculated exercise in promotion—which she and her staff say is indeed the case (Beer, 22 October 2015; marketing director, 25 August 2015). The circulation of verjuice across multiple product placements and media platforms is undoubtedly a deliberate marketing strategy designed to make the most of limited funds for paid advertising and promotion (marketing director, 25 August 2015). But following the ‘social life’ of verjuice as it moves across and between different media forms also highlights how brands create meaning through intertextual linkages between products and the brand’s different presences in mediated and ‘real life’ spaces (see Arvidsson 2006: 78). By drawing discursively on the connection and trust associated with alternative food practices, the circulation of Maggie Beer’s verjuice offers consumption as a means to access Maggie’s identity and values, and to blur distinctions between producer and product. The mediated connections produced by and through the circulation of verjuice and Maggie Beer serve as highly effective brand management tools, in part because they both generate and work within a frequently shifting set of meanings associated with individual products and producers (in this case, verjuice and Maggie Beer), and with those associated with alternative and artisan foods more broadly.

A Barossa Tradition A revealing example of these shifting meanings that affect Maggie Beer and verjuice can be found in the fall-out of Beer’s 2014 sanctioning by consumer watchdog the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The issue related to labelling on four Maggie Beer Products, including rosemary and verjuice biscuits, which implied that they were made locally in the Barossa Valley when in fact they were

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produced interstate. The labels used to depict a pheasant with the words “Maggie Beer A Barossa Food Tradition”; they now feature a pheasant with the words “Maggie Beer” in order to comply with the stipulations of the ACCC and to avoid confusion between products produced within and those produced outside the Barossa Valley (ACCC 2014; Boothroyd 2014). Beer immediately apologised following the ACCC ruling, telling Food Magazine that she had never intended to mislead customers that products produced within a “Barossa food tradition” would be exclusively manufactured within the Barossa valley: Everything started here in this Barossa kitchen. We only went interstate when we didn’t have the equipment or technology to do a product that I wanted to put on the market efficiently, and that is honestly the only reason. (Beer qtd. in Boothroyd 2014)

In Celia Lury’s (2004) work on global brands, she argues that branding works precisely to enable the flexibility Beer is describing; by constructing the brand as essentially ‘placeless’, corporations are able to profit from the mobility of production sites. Using Nike as an example, Lury explains: [In global brands] the relations between stages of production are not presented at the interface as occurring in a discrete, sequential or step-by-step fashion…, but are intended to have their effect all at once, in each and every presentation or use of the brand. The commercial advantages to be derived from this is that since the brand’s origins are not visibly tied to specific places of production, the Nike company is able to exercise enormous spatial flexibility in relation to the place of manufacturing of its products. (2004: 55, emphases in original)

Because the identity of Maggie Beer Products was much more strongly grounded in a particular place (the Barossa Valley), it did not possess the same spatial flexibility in relation to its manufacturing. In this sense, deviations to Maggie Beer Products’ place of manufacture would be both a transgression of Australia’s very strict provenance labelling laws and a potentially difficult brand management problem. But what would normally have been a ‘failure’ for global brands had some unexpected consequences for products like Maggie Beer’s that adopt discourses of the artisanal and the alternative. This included the mobilisation of a brand

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identity that could ‘play’ with both the specificities and the ambiguities of place. This complex relationship between Maggie Beer, Maggie Beer Products and the Barossa Valley in part explains how the negative publicity generated by this case did not have the damaging effects on Beer that it might have had for other business or public figures. When the ACCC ruling was announced, media personalities leapt to Beer’s defence. MasterChef Australia judge Gary Mehigan told The Australian Financial Review, “There are a lot more important things to worry about than that” (qtd. in Evans 2014). David Penberthy, a journalist for The Advertiser, the daily newspaper of Beer’s home state of South Australia, described it as “a disgrace that [Beer]…has had her name dragged through the mud by these turbocharged pedants” (Penberthy 2014: 13). In fact, he argues, Maggie Beer’s products are so strongly associated with the Barossa Valley that the notion of “food traditions” cannot be wholly determined by their place of manufacture: You can logically argue that these products do represent a Barossa food tradition, regardless of whether they’re made in Nuriootpa, Townsville or Shanghai. A recipe for rosemary and verjuice biscuits is wholly rooted in the food traditions of the Barossa Valley. To argue otherwise makes as much sense as claiming that lasagne was invented in Mitchell Park because mum made it for tea the other night. (Penberthy 2014: 13)

To describe rosemary and verjuice biscuits as “wholly rooted in the food traditions of the Barossa Valley”, then, is making a claim not just about the origins of the product, but also about the way that the product fits within the broader identity of the region. If, as the chapters in Part 1 demonstrated, particular sites of food production and consumption can be imbued with meanings that are as much imagined as they are real, such claims also raise a number of questions about how Maggie Beer Products are ascribed with, and in turn produce, meaning. In what ways are rosemary and verjuice biscuits rooted in the traditions of the Barossa Valley? How do verjuice biscuits, which are sold commercially by one company, become part of the food traditions of the Barossa Valley as a whole? What are these traditions? Verjuice may be an “invented tradition” in the sense used by Tregear (2003), but its identity as a specifically

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Barossan food tradition is a further result of the ways in which the meanings associated with particular objects or products are dynamically constituted through their movement, circulation and biographies (see Lash and Lury 2007: 19). The meanings in this case form part of a broader imagining of the Barossa as a place where traditional, “slow food” practices have been preserved amid an increasingly globalised “fast food” world (see Peace 2006; Petrini 2001). Although the Barossa Valley is perhaps best known internationally as one of Australia’s major wine regions and the location of some of the nation’s largest wine producers, the popular history of the Barossa Valley, as told by books like Barossa Food (Heuzenroeder 1999), and in tourism promotional materials, describes the region as one settled by German Lutheran migrants in the 1940s who, as a result of the region’s relative isolation and cross-fertilisation with the region’s previous and subsequent English inhabitants, developed a unique food culture that still persists today. As Peace (2011: 23, 25, 51) argues, while the Barossa is in reality an area of “intensely concentrated corporate capitalism” and one of Australia’s rural areas most closely articulated to the global marketplace, representations of the region aimed at visitors and tourists present a “diametrically opposite rural imaginary”. As with other rural idylls in which the practices of industrial food production are simply invisible (see Chap. 3), mediated depictions of the Barossa present the region as a community of close-knit rural artisans, many with deep roots in the region, who have sought to preserve traditional, authentic and time-honoured food production methods by resisting the corrupting influence of modern production techniques and values (Peace 2006: 52, 54). For example, food products sold throughout the region in wineries and providores often feature labels with phrases such as “hand made in the Barossa Valley”, “home made in the Barossa Valley”, “local and traditional”, “using the best ingredients and traditional methods” (see Peace 2011: 29)—and, until recently, “Maggie Beer A Barossa Food Tradition”. This promotion of artisanal (rather than industrial) production, and the celebration of the nostalgia and ‘authenticity’ that artisanal food cultures generate, has become a hallmark of media and popular cultural representations of ‘alternative’ food. While these strategies may serve as part of a popular food politics designed to critique industrial food systems (see Chap. 2), they also have a long history as ‘mainstream’ and artisan food industry marketing tools (see Todd 2009;

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Phillipov 2016). In Maggie Beer Products and verjuice, we can see a case in which these impulses dovetail. As Meneley (2004: 166) argued of Italian olive oil production, connections between popular imaginings of a particular place and political and economic relations are not accidental. Much like the Tuscan olive oil producers who produce, package and market their oil in ways closely related to how it is imagined and desired by international consumers (Meneley 2004: 166), Barossa food products are designed in ways that simultaneously reflect a genuine embeddedness in the region and a strategic construction of the region in line with the fantasies and desires of urban visitors. Speaking in broad terms, Peace (2011: 29) characterises the Barossa of the tourism brochures in similar terms to the pleasures of River Cottage’s extra-textual brand extensions: city dwellers are offered a fantasy of nostalgia and escape to “savour their temporary respite from the city through the simple act of opening a jar of jam or honey, pouring from a bottle of vinegar or cabernet”. Maggie Beer Products’ particular reimagining and repurposing of “Barossa traditions” works to construct a specific set of meanings and affective charges around the products and their politics. Beer acknowledges the German heritage of the region, and uses some traditional German products (such as gruth and lachshinken) in her cookbooks and television recipes, but Beer’s Barossa is primarily constructed as a Mediterranean idyll (Gunders 2008: 122). This is partly due to Beer’s preference for produce and flavours suited to the Mediterranean climate of the Barossa Valley, and partly due to the ways in which ideas about ‘authenticity’ and peasant traditions are mobilised in Beer’s food style and identity. In the case of verjuice in particular, origins in Mediterranean peasant traditions become linked to the contemporary peasant traditions of the Barossa Valley—presented as a last holdout against the incursion of globalised, industrialised food systems. In Cooking with Verjuice, Beer (2001a: 2) explicitly emphasises that her interest in the product was the result of its peasant heritage. She talks of the production of verjuice as a reflection of the practices of “peasant cultures” that avoided food waste, something that appealed to her own practices, sensibilities and ideas about food. At a time when peasant traditions are elsewhere in decline, Beer argues, they continue to be preserved in the Barossa Valley, the home of the “closest thing we…have to a peasant culture in Australia” (Beer 2001b: n.p). As Duruz has argued in a slightly different context, the figure of the ‘peasant’ serves particular

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purposes for contemporary urban dwellers, who encounter the peasant as an imagined ‘other’. “Nurtured by a diet of nostalgic longing, sensual imagery, and material comfort,” she writes, “we shade in the outlines of the ‘other’ to serve a cosmopolitan culinary imaginary” in which meanings and identities associated with “eating like a peasant” take on particular resonances of authenticity and connection for the affluent cosmopolitan consumer (Duruz 2004: 432–433). In the context of verjuice and the Barossa food tradition it represents, verjuice’s ‘authenticity’ takes on a cultural and economic value possible only because the Barossa Valley is not the isolated rural idyll divorced from the global flows of capital that is appears to be in tourism brochures and media discourses. If verjuice is a product that is about connecting to place, about using what is to hand, and about prioritising the particular and the specific over the anonymous and mass produced, it is also bound up with corporate capital. As Leitch argues of the commodification of peasant traditions: These increasing trends towards the objectification and commodification of rural and proletarian nostalgia can be seen as the ironic markers of a global economy concerned as much with the production of signs, memories, and images as it is with the production of distinct objects and commodities. (2000: 105)

Cooking with Verjuice Verjuice’s resonances with the authenticity and nostalgia of peasant food practices, its rootedness in the traditions of an imagined Barossa, its close alignment with Beer’s own brand identity and its wide circulation within media culture offer a space of fantasy and pleasure through which ideas about, and relationships with, food can be repurposed and reconstructed. It highlights the productive work of discourses of nostalgia and the ‘alternative’ in forging connections around celebrity brands and engaging affective investments that shape media and food industry practices in particular ways. Maggie Beer’s verjuice is an example of a successful case of branding that draws upon the resonances and pleasures associated with celebrity brands to imbue products with complex social lives that have significant appeal in/for media industries and audiences. Connecting ideas of authenticity and tradition to verjuice (and other Maggie Beer Products) benefits Maggie Beer’s celebrity brand by

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distancing her products from their commercial connotations. But the values and politics associated with both Maggie Beer and verjuice also tap into a set of widely appealing media discourses that enable its circulation across a range of media representations and genres, including primetime television cooking shows, cookbooks, major newspapers and magazines, online media, product labelling and tourism brochures. These media appearances enhance the brand capital of both Maggie Beer and her products, but they also do other kinds of cultural work. Verjuice is an example of how brands’ enmeshment in media culture produces an affective economy of signs in which ideas of the ‘traditional’ and the ‘alternative’ construct especially strong alignments between the identities of product, producer and place. If, as Lury (2004: 1) argues, the brand is a “platform for the patterning of activity, a mode of organising activities in time and space”, then Maggie Beer Products is a platform for engaging affective relations that signal a series of attachments to, and experiences of, both food and media cultures. That is, Maggie Beer and verjuice are examples of the mobilisation of a particular set of representations that serve as branding strategies within the food industry and which are compatible with how food’s politics and pleasures are represented across a range of food media texts. The combination of the clear brand identity of Maggie Beer and the semiotic openness of verjuice enables a set of mediated connections that satisfy both media and food industry needs. It has been widely noted that brands are built through investments in media culture (see Arvidsson 2005: 245), but Maggie Beer and verjuice are also examples of how investments in brands shape that media culture. Tracing the social life of verjuice not only demonstrates media’s (and consumer’s) receptivity to ‘alternative’ food politics and personas, but also highlights the capacity of celebrity brands to shape the terms in which these are represented. Even though it may be linked to the imagined peasant communities of the Barossa, verjuice’s affective economics produce investments in food and food cultures that are tied not to broader food systems, but to individual personalities. Maggie Beer and verjuice are examples of how ideas about ‘good’ food are frequently linked to celebrity personas who serve as access points for ‘authentic’ connections, food ‘traditions’, and desirable food-related lifestyles. They are instances of highly successful celebrity branding in which compatibility with the dominant modes and genre conventions of media texts offers significant benefits to the celebrity brand—enabling products both to be

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widely circulated in food media and to be strongly defended as authentic food traditions. But while the case of Maggie Beer and verjuice shows how media interest in food politics can produce instances of successful alignment between media and food industry needs, as the next chapter will show, it can also result in more complex and less satisfying relationships between media and food industries.

References ACCC. 2014. Maggie Beer products acknowledges labelling likely to be misleading. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. August 19. https:// www.accc.gov.au/media-release/maggie-beer-products-acknowledges-labelling-likely-to-be-misleading. Accessed 1 Oct 2015. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arsena, Ashley, David H. Silvera, and Mario Pandelaere. 2014. Brand trait transference: When celebrity endorsers acquire brand personality traits. Journal of Business Research 67: 1537–1543. Arvidsson, Adam. 2005. Brands: A critical perspective. Journal of Consumer Culture 5: 235–258. Arvidsson, Adam. 2006. Brands: Meaning and value in media culture. London: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image music text, ed. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. Beer, Maggie. 2001a. Cooking with verjuice. London: Grub Street. Beer, Maggie. 2001b. Maggie’s table. Australia: Penguin Random House. Beer, Maggie. 2007. Maggie’s harvest. Australia: Penguin Books. Beer, Maggie. 2011. Expert dinner party tips. The Chronicle. 5 July: 17. Beer, Maggie. 2012a. Maggie’s verjuice cookbook. Camberwell: Lantern. Beer, Maggie. 2012b. Mother’s Day at Maggie’s table. The Australian Women’s Weekly. 1 May. Boothroyd, Aoife. 2014. Maggie Beer’s labelling lessons from the ACCC. Food & Beverage. https://foodmag.com.au/maggie-beers-labelling-lessons-fromthe-accc/. Accessed 5 Oct 2015. Brien, Donna Lee, and Margaret McAllister. 2015. ‘Sunshine has a taste, you know’: Using regional food memoirs to develop values-based food practices. Locale: The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies 5: 32–57. Changarathil, Valerina. 2016. Revealed: Maggie’s $21 million turnover. The Advertiser. 31 May: 13.

104  M. Phillipov Davenport, Philippa. 2006. Green and very, very pleasant Petersham nurseries is less garden centre, more pleasure gardens. Financial Times. 15 April: 5. Dennehy, Luke. 2015. Why Australian cooking icon Maggie Beer rejected MasterChef when show started. The Advertiser. 23 May. http://www. adelaidenow.com.au/entertainment/television/why-australian-cookingicon-maggie-beer-rejected-masterchef-when-show-started/news-story/ fb69bb7b0f3cd27a8fbb3b0692132e42. Duruz, Jean. 2004. Adventuring and belonging: An appetite for markets. Space and Culture 7: 427–445. Evans, Simon. 2014. Much ado about Maggie Beer labelling. Business Review Weekly. August 25. Gralton, Anna, and Frank Vanclay. 2009. Artisanality and culture in innovative regional agri-food development: Lessons from the Tasmanian artisanal food industry. International Journal of Foresight and Innovation 5: 193–204. Gunders, John. 2008. Professionalism, place, and authenticity in The Cook and the Chef. Emotion, Space and Society 1: 119–126. Gyngell, Skye. 2007. Skye Gyngell: Down on Maggie’s farm. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/skyegyngell-down-on-maggies-farm-431732.html. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. Hearn, Allison. 2008. ‘Meat, mask, burden’: Probing the contours of the branded ‘self’. Journal of Consumer Culture 8: 197–217. Heuzenroeder, Angela. 1999. Barossa food. South Australia: Wakefield Press. Hills, Matt. 2015. Veronica Mars, fandom, and the ‘affective economics’ of crowdfunding poachers. New Media & Society 17: 183–197. Hirsch, Dafna, and Ofra Tene. 2013. Hummus: The making of an Israeli culinary cult. Journal of Consumer Culture 13: 25–45. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. Johnston, Josee, and Shyon Baumann. 2010. Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape. New York: Routledge. Lash, Scott, and Celia Lury. 2007. Global culture industry: The mediation of things. Cambridge: Polity. Lawson, Kirsten. 2012. Reviving a peasant tradition. The Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/restaurants-and-bars/reviving-apeasant-tradition-20120219-1tgnq.html. Accessed 1 Oct 2015. Leitch, Allison. 2000. The social life of Lardo. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1: 103–118. Leitch, Allison. 2003. Slow Food and the politics of pork fat: Italian food and European identity. Ethnos 68: 437–462. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1987/1950. Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss, ed. Felicity Baker. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Lewis, Tania. 2008. Smart living: Lifestyle media and popular expertise. New York: Peter Lang. Lury, Celia. 2004. Brands: The logos of the global economy. London: Routledge. Meneley, Anne. 2004. Extra virgin olive oil and Slow Food. Anthropologica 46: 165–176. Mitchell, Peter. 2005. Gourmet Aussie offerings hit New York. Australian Associated Press. 13 July. Orr, Gillian. 2012. Sweet taste of sales success: Why are cookbooks selling better than ever? The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/foodand-drink/features/sweet-taste-of-sales-success-why-are-cookbooks-sellingbetter-than-ever-8113937.html. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. Ottolenghi, Yotam. 2013. There’s a world of flavour out there, waiting to be discovered. The Guardian. 2 March: 69. Peace, Adrian. 2006. Barossa slow: The representation and rhetoric of Slow Food’s regional cooking. Gastronomica 6: 51–59. Peace, Adrian. 2011. Barossa dreaming: Imagining place and constituting cuisine in contemporary Australia. Anthropological Forum 21: 23–42. Penberty, David. 2014. This is hardly the face of corporate villainy. The Advertiser. 22 August: 13. Petrini, Carlo. 2001. Slow Food: The case for taste. New York: Columbia University. Phillipov, Michelle. 2016. Escaping to the country: Media, nostalgia, and the new food industries. Popular Communication 14: 111–122. Reality Raver. 2014. Masterchef Australia—Maggie Beer and there will be verjuice. Reality Ravings. http://www.realityravings.com/2014/05/19/masterchef-australia-maggie-beer-and-frank-camorra/. Accessed 1 Oct 2015. Ripe, Cherry. 2001. Big bikkies. The Australian. 21 September: 31. Savill, Joanna. 2013. Dinky-di delights. The Age. 22 January: 10. Sharp, Rob. 2010. The real sweet and sour sauce. The Independent. 16 June: 48–49. Sidali, Katia Laura, Elisabeth Kastenholz, and Rossella Bianchi. 2015. Food tourism, niche markets and products in rural tourism: Combining the intimacy model and the experience economy as a rural development strategy. Journal of Sustainable Tourism 23: 1179–1197. Slater, Nigel. 2001. Sweet on sour. The Observer. 6 May: 50. Smith, Rachel. 2013. A-Z of unusual ingredients: Verjus. The Telegraph. 18 December. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinkadvice/10523699/AZ-of-unusual-ingredients-verjus.html. Accessed Sept 2015. Spurgeon, Christina. 2013. Regulated integrated advertising. In The Routledge companion to advertising and promotional culture, ed. Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West, 71–82. New York: Routledge.

106  M. Phillipov Tattersall, Hannah. 2010. Condiments to the chef. The Australian Financial Review. http://www.afr.com/business/retail/fmcg/condiments-to-the-chef20101228-j4z8x. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. Todd, Anne Marie. 2009. Happy cows and passionate beefscapes: Nature as landscape and lifestyle in food advertisements. In Critical pedagogies of consumption, ed. Jennifer A. Sandlin and Peter McLaren, 169–179. New York: Routledge. Tregear, Angela. 2003. From stilton to vimto: Using food history to re-think products in rural development. European Society for Rural Sociology 43: 91–107. Tucker-Evans, Anooska. 2011. Can’t go past a hot chook for dinner. The Sunday Mail. 7 August: 36. White, Lyn. 2008. Maggie Beer posts 20+% sales gains. FoodWeek. 27 June. Wilkinson, Simon. 2012. Pavlova all over. The Advertiser. 25 January: 54. Williams, Richard. 2011. What top chefs hated eating as kids. Sunday Times (Perth). 24 July: 1. Willoughby, John. 2010. Try a little tartness in a medieval staple. The New York Times. 27 October: 9.

CHAPTER 5

Media Tourism and Rural Romance: Constructing Food Television’s ‘Cult Geographies’

As the previous chapter showed, compatibilities between food industry identities and the textual conventions and politics of food media offer effective promotional strategies for ‘Food from Somewhere’ (Campbell 2009). But as food politics has become a regular feature of food media, the specific tropes and discourses through which these politics are articulated signal both opportunities and challenges for media and food industries. This chapter explores some of these challenges in the context of the tourism practices generated by food media texts. It does this via analysis of the television show Gourmet Farmer, a programme that is typical of food texts that frame their politics in pleasurable terms—and, in particular, in the terms of an alternative hedonism (Chap. 2) that grants consumers a sense of connection to food producers and to authentic, emplaced food experiences. While not specifically intended as a means of generating tourism, like Maggie Beer’s ‘imagined’ Barossa (see Chap. 4), Gourmet Farmer’s presentation of particular locales as desirable sites of food production and consumption helps to construct these places as sites of “media pilgrimage” (Couldry 2003) in ways that reshape their meanings in line with ideas about what constitutes ‘good’ food. But Gourmet Farmer is also an example of a text that engages a much more complex range of media, food industry (and other) stakeholders than the texts previously discussed, with each seeking to leverage the positive associations of the television text, but often with quite different ends in mind. The fact that the interests of the industry players are not so closely aligned here as they were in the case of the earlier examples gives rise to a different set of relationships between media © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_5

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and food industry actors that highlight the powerful role of media industry needs in shaping the terms in which ideas about food and food politics are mobilised within media texts. If one of the effects of food media texts is to invite affective investments in food and food politics, then media tourism can be seen as an expression of this affective investment. “Culinary travelogues” (Dunn 2010)—texts that involve travel to exotic and familiar locales—have proliferated on primetime television in recent years. From Jamie’s Great Italian Escape and Rick Stein’s India to the Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain and Australia’s Paddock to Plate, these texts typically profile— and feature recipes showcasing—the local foods, producers and cooking techniques of various regions. As is characteristic of many contemporary food media texts, they do this in ways that emphasise the links between locality and food, and which promote particular ideas about how ‘good’ food should be procured and prepared, and the types of places where this food can be found; they typically convey a nostalgia for traditions of cooking and places of food production that have become endangered by global, industrial food practices. The effectiveness of culinary travelogues in providing a platform for promoting local food producers and food producing regions has also made involvement in such programmes increasingly appealing to a range of food (and tourism) industry professionals (Phillipov 2016b). But while food and tourism industries are increasingly seeking to capitalise on the popularity of food media—and its politics of food provenance, in particular—they typically do this from a position of relatively little influence over the practices of media production. Chapter 3 highlighted an established history of integrating food tourism and food media, with connections between the textual conventions of the River Cottage media franchise and the extra-textual practices of the River Cottage tourist site offering an important early success in media and food industry connection. A key advantage of River Cottage was that the locations viewers were invited to visit were specifically River Cottage locations (e.g. River Cottage HQ, the River Cottage Canteen); this granted the media and food industry arms of the River Cottage franchise an unusual level of control over the translation between media text and tourism experience. In most cases, this level of control is simply not possible. Gourmet Farmer presents one such case. It offers an example of the tensions and challenges produced by the intersecting demands of media industry imperatives, of food and tourism industry promotional

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strategies and of popular food politics. As such, it reveals some of the limits inherent in the representational politics and industry relationships that characterise current forms of mediated food politics. Gourmet Farmer is an SBS television series that tells the story of Matthew Evans, a well-known Sydney food critic who set up a smallholding in the nation’s island state of Tasmania. Like River Cottage was for Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall, Gourmet Farmer is the story both of Evans’ ‘tree change’ from city to country and of his attempt to locate his own food production and consumption within alternative food networks and practices. The series 1 opening titles outline Evans’ “dream…of producing [his] own food, so [he] can know and trust what [he] eat[s]”. This, he says, necessitates either growing the food himself or being “no more than one degree of separation from the person who does”. However, because he is a total novice who must “learn from scratch” how to grow vegetables, raise livestock and operate a working farm, he must travel around the island state to meet and learn from other like-minded Tasmanian food producers in order to implement his new skills back at his own farm, and thus turn it into a viable artisan food business. Gourmet Farmer is one of a suite of programmes produced by independent media production company Essential Media and Entertainment for SBS’s Thursday night food timeslot. It is part of a significant shift towards food and travel programming on the part of SBS, as it seeks to manage its transition from a fully public-funded broadcaster to one operating within a hybrid public–commercial funding model (Davidson 2015). SBS’s investment in food and lifestyle genres has enabled it to take advantage of the benefits of food TV, such as the fixed viewing habits that food television stimulates and the capacity for food programming to be repeated and re-broadcast in both local and international territories (Ashley et al. 2004: 174–175). Gourmet Farmer has been a ratings hit, partly due to the audience generated through successive repeats of earlier seasons (media producer, 9 April 2015). With three seasons to date (and a fourth in production at the time of writing), plus a spin-off programme, Gourmet Farmer Afloat, the show is one of the broadcaster’s most popular series. Indeed, the third series achieved over 700,000 viewers nationally—a sizeable audience by Australian standards, and no small feat for a broadcaster with the nation’s smallest market share (SBS 2013: 69). Gourmet Farmer’s investment in constructing and imagining Tasmania as a ‘foodie’ location closely mirrors the phenomenon Matt Hills (2002: 144) describes as “cult geography”—a process through

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which the affective experiences associated with textual representations come to be mapped onto spatial relations. Much of the existing scholarship of media tourism has tended to focus on the activities of the travellers themselves, but equally important are the perspectives of those on the other side: those who have played a role in (intentionally and unintentionally) generating the media tourism; and those such as local food businesses and government agencies who have been the beneficiaries of increased tourist travel. A focus on these practices and effects of media tourism in relation to Gourmet Farmer highlights the complex relationships between a range of media and food industry actors whose interests converge (but do not always align) through the production and circulation of food media texts. In this case the relationships are between the Gourmet Farmer production team, the food and beverage producers who have appeared on the show, and the various State Government and tourism agencies that have sought to capitalise on the promotional opportunities afforded by the programme. The chapter shows not only how the Tasmania imagined and constructed by Gourmet Farmer has contributed to growth in food-based tourism to the state, but also that while local businesses and government agencies have been largely receptive to this growth they have not been able to benefit from the show’s positive constructions of Tasmania in consistently successful ways. This is because the three groups of industry actors that have come into contact through Gourmet Farmer’s success—media producers, food and beverage producers, and government/tourism representatives—are each invested in constructing and reproducing a similar image of Tasmania as rural idyll, but they do not always share the same goals or agendas with respect to these representations. Their experiences are thus revealing of the productive synergies between governments, media and food industries that can occur within new spaces of contemporary food politics, as well as of the points of tension and contestation between them. Following a discussion of the literatures on media tourism and cult geography, this chapter first examines these issues in relation to the connections (and tensions) between the Gourmet Farmer television show and State Government agencies and tourism operators before considering those between the television show and its featured food and beverage producers. As these sections demonstrate, the promotion of individual producers, food products or locations may not be the intention of programmes like Gourmet Farmer, but these representations can generate media tourism experiences that offer government and tourism

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agencies and local food businesses access to marketing techniques that capitalise on the visibility and power of ‘alternative’ food discourses. Gourmet Farmer is an example of a media text that has engaged a range of actors operating within largely incommensurable industry contexts and with different goals in mind—notably media producers governed by the audience and production logics of the media and television industries, and local businesses and tourism agencies seeking opportunities for exposure and promotion within a successful television show. As we will see, while Gourmet Farmer did indeed contribute to growing interest in Tasmanian food tourism and to expanding markets for artisan food producers, the challenges of forging a shared set of media and food industry interests in this case also highlights some of the limits to popular food media as a platform for food politics. In particular, the programme shows how the representational norms of the media text both had an impact on those involved and helped shape the terms in which food practices and politics might be enacted ‘outside’ the text.

Media Pilgrimages Over the past decade or so a growing body of research has recognised the cultural and economic importance of travel and tourism experiences generated by media texts and franchises. Described variously as film tourism, film-induced tourism, movie tourism and screen tourism (Connell 2012: 1009), this is a phenomenon in which viewers engage in acts of “media pilgrimage” (Couldry 2003) to visit sites and locations they have seen on screen. Much of this work considers this in the context of fictional film and television productions, such as The Lord of the Rings (Tzanelli 2004), The Sopranos (Couldry 2007), Coronation Street (Couldry 2004), The X-Files (Hills 2002), Treme (Parmett 2016), Dracula and James Bond (Reijnders 2011). In each of these cases, audience members travel to film and television sites to enjoy a variety of commodified and non-commodified experiences, including both ‘official’ tours and events and ‘unofficial’ visits to filming locations. For some scholars, the experience of media pilgrimage offers access to the ‘special’ world of media in ways that essentially amplify the boundaries between ‘media’ and the ‘everyday’. For example, Couldry describes the media pilgrimage as “both a real journey across space, and an acting out in space of the constructed ‘distance’ between ‘ordinary world’ and ‘media world’” (2003: 76–77). Others, however, argue that these

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pilgrimages construct “new form[s] of cultural landscape” (Jewell and McKinnon 2008: 153) or “cult geographies” (Hills 2002: 144) that redefine and reimagine particular locations around fan interests. For instance, X-Files fans travelling to Vancouver to seek out filming locations or to re-enact particular scenes also reorder the meaning of the Vancouver cityscape around its relationships to their favourite text (Hills 2002: 147). For Hills (2002: 144), this habitation of textual and extratextual spaces via the act of travel is an important part of fans’ expression of the fan–text relationship, and as a means through which “fans’ affective experience is quite literally mapped onto spatial relations”. That is, fans’ attachment to media texts can become reinscribed within a different domain (that of material space) in ways that produce new relationships, experiences and understandings of place (Hills 2002: 149). While much of the work on media pilgrimage and media tourism has focused primarily on the “cult” fan practices associated with fictional media properties, many of its observations are also applicable to the tourism generated by food media texts. However, unlike the great majority of work on the media tourism associated with fictional texts (which tends to focus on how experiences of fandom are converted into ‘actual’ tourism experiences), food media scholarship has tended to be concerned with vicarious experiences—with what Urry (2002) would call experiences of “post-tourism”. The “post-tourist” is one who encounters virtual experiences of travel, tourism and the “tourist gaze” from the comfort of their living room (Urry 2002: 91). For example, television travelogues, especially those associated with food and cooking, are often seen as offering vicarious experiences of consumption without the need for actual travel (Dunn 2010). Instead, viewers are invited to consume both food and place within a virtual realm, adopting the tourist gaze as a mechanism for visual pleasure and social distinction (Waade and Jørgensen 2010: 84, 97). Damkjær and Waade (2014: 139) refer to this phenomenon as “armchair tourism”; Versteegen (2010: 459) calls it “armchair travel”. While it is indeed likely that the majority of food television audiences will limit their engagement to “armchair” or “post-” tourism, a small number of studies have explored the role of food media texts as an impetus for ‘real’ travel and tourism experiences. For example, studies of British television chef Rick Stein have examined how Stein’s location within, and television portrayals of, the seaside town of Padstow in Cornwall have become significant drivers of tourism to the area. In fact, the town is often colloquially dubbed Padstein or Stein-stow in

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recognition of the significant tourism boost generated by Stein’s promotion of local gastronomy and culture, particularly with respect to the local seafood and fishing industries (Busby et al. 2013: 573, 576). More than just promoting travel, Stein’s prominence has also changed the place-identity of Padstow, reshaping what was once a declining fishing village into both a desirable foodie destination and a hub of sustainable fishing activity. That is, Padstow, like other sites of media pilgrimage or cult geography, has not simply been reimagined within the contexts of fan discourses or fan interests, it has also been transformed in concrete and material ways. Gourmet Farmer has reportedly had similar effects on the southern Tasmanian town of Cygnet. The once-sleepy Cygnet, which features in the opening credits of series 1 as the location of Evans’ new home, has experienced increased interest as both a tourist and ‘tree change’ destination as a direct result of Gourmet Farmer. For example, it was reported in Tasmania’s The Mercury newspaper that fans of the television show can regularly be found in Cygnet shops and eateries, often using these locations to begin their investigations of the whereabouts of Evans’ farm (Reeves 2010: 24). Travel magazine Departures described Gourmet Farmer as having put the “sleepy food bowl [of Cygnet] in the spotlight”, attracting “more curious travellers” seeking out the food of local producers and chefs (Glyde 2014). The Mercury also reported that Cygnet is experiencing a “population and business boom” thanks to the influx of mainland “foodies” generated by Gourmet Farmer (Glaetzer 2012: 11). A surge of interest in the purchase of small landholdings in the Cygnet area has been linked to Gourmet Farmer’s popularity (Chancellor 2010: 6). Sydney’s SunHerald newspaper has promoted Cygnet as a new foodie destination due to the growing number of city folk who have followed Evans in making a “sea/tree/Brie change” to the region (Dobbin 2011: 10). In each of these cases, Gourmet Farmer viewers are engaging in acts of media pilgrimage, travelling to Tasmania (either as temporary visitors or as permanent residents) to seek out experiences and locations they have seen on screen. They are examples of how media properties prompt fans to reimagine locality and lifestyle in ways that both allow them to “enter” the text and enable the text to “leak out” into spatial and cultural practices (see Hills 2002: 151). That is, viewers’ attempts to replicate in their own lives the activities and experiences they have seen on the Gourmet Farmer TV show are resulting in local economies and landscapes being reshaped

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in line with Gourmet Farmer’s imagery, values and narratives. Just as Rick Stein’s media presence is changing the place-identity and economy of Padstow, the points of Gourmet Farmer’s ‘leakage’ into spatial and cultural practice are having similar effects on Cygnet and on Tasmania more broadly, where it is reshaping local food politics and practices in discursive and material ways.

A Tasmanian Idyll To understand the significance of Gourmet Farmer’s representations of Tasmania, the impacts of these representations on local government and industry actors, and the relationships between media and food industries that these representations both enable and constrain, it is important to first contextualise the discourses circulating within and around Gourmet Farmer in relation to those circulating about Tasmania more generally. This is because ‘Tasmania’ itself is a highly contested discursive space. Tasmania ranks at the bottom among Australian states on most dimensions of economic, social and cultural well-being: highest unemployment, lowest incomes, languishing investment, lowest home prices, least educated, lowest literacy, most chronic disease, poorest longevity, most likely to smoke, greatest obesity, highest petty crime, worst domestic violence. (West 2013: 50)

It is also struggling to transition its economy from a reliance on commodity agriculture and traditionally extractive industries, such as forestry, and to orient itself towards high-end, value-added export markets and local industries based around tourism and hospitality, the latter focused on Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage Areas and gourmet food experiences. From Lonely Planet to Gourmet Traveller to The Wall Street Journal,1 Tasmania’s foodie credentials are now recognised internationally, but its transitional economy has produced deep divisions within the state, and these play out both within political decision-making and 1 See, for example: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2802588/stunningcliffs-super-cool-hobart-colourful-convict-past-tasmania-destination-country-make-lonelyplanet-s-10-2015-despite-left-maps-australia.html; http://www.gourmettraveller.com.au/ travel/travel-news-features/2011/2/happening-hobart/; https://www.wsj.com/articles/ SB10001424052702304441304579480040563522048, all accessed March 2017.

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in people’s everyday experience of life in Tasmania (see West 2013; McGaurr 2015).2 Within this context Gourmet Farmer imagines Tasmania along the lines of this new ‘gourmet’ vision for the state. However, it does not do this in ways that engage with Tasmania’s contested histories and contemporary realities, but adopts the nostalgia typical of other contemporary food media texts. On Gourmet Farmer Tasmania is presented not as a place that has only recently sought to grow its high-end, value-added food industries but, like Maggie Beer’s Barossa Valley (see Chap. 4), as one of Australia’s last holdouts of traditional, artisan food production. Like other ‘tree change’ narratives, Gourmet Farmer invokes an apparently timeless pastoral idyll where traditional methods and values have been preserved untainted by industrial food systems (Phillipov 2016a). Series 1, in particular, represents Tasmania as an Arcadian paradise of pristine landscapes and abundant produce. As with many other food media texts that play upon the rural idyll, Tasmania is constructed as a place where ‘traditional’ methods and techniques of food production make possible new tastes and experiences that had been inaccessible to Evans in his former urban existence. For example, his surprise and delight is palpable when he first tastes tree-ripened Tasmanian stone fruit, unpasteurised milk still warm from his own Jersey cow, and his own home-cured prosciutto, a dish so flavourful that the taste “whistles up the back of [his] nose”. Evans’ location on a storybook farm, complete with a charming wooden farm cottage nestled among green rolling hills, further adds to the romance of these experiences. His visits to other food producers also provide opportunities to film Tasmania’s picturesque landscapes—its lush pastures, rugged mountain ranges and windswept coastlines—as well as serving to highlight the equally idyllic lives enjoyed by other Tasmanian farmers and food producers. Although Evans is typically visiting these producers to learn farming and food production techniques, it is their bucolic lifestyles—rather than the hard work of farming—that tends to be emphasised. For example, on a visit to Elgaar Farm, an organic dairy farm in the state’s northwest, Evans enjoys lunch with the dairy’s owners, who tell him that 80% of their work is done in

2 For further discussion of Tasmania at the “tipping point”, see the special issue of Griffith Review (Schultz and Cica 2013).

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the morning, allowing them to relax in the afternoon. Evans remarks, “How amazing—this really is the life”. This focus on the pleasures rather than the hardships or challenges of a life devoted to food production is typical of the conventions of lifestyle television and other food media discussed in chapters elsewhere in this book (and also in previous academic research, see Thomas 2008; Lewis 2008; Bell and Hollows 2011). What is significant in this case is how this construction of Tasmania as a rural idyll is linked not just with food media’s politics of food provenance, but also with other strategies for branding Tasmania as an idyllic location of ‘quality’ food production and consumption. Since the 1990s Tasmania has adopted a “clean, green” branding discourse to capitalise on its “natural advantages” as an island state and to boost global markets for Tasmanian food products by responding to international concerns about food safety and sustainability (Chang and Kristiansen 2006: 103; McGaurr 2012: 47). Today, the clean and green platform remains a lynchpin of state branding and for the initiatives and agencies Brand Tasmania, Discover Tasmania and Tourism Tasmania. But while there is an apparent alignment between the Tasmania represented in Gourmet Farmer and that constructed through state branding initiatives, Gourmet Farmer’s representations of Tasmania occurred largely independently of state government or other agencies. Brand Tasmania funded the pilot, but had no specific involvement in the production itself (industry representative, 10 September 2015). Tourism Tasmania sponsored series 2 and provided some in-kind support to the show’s production (government agency representative, 6 February 2015), but it did not play a role in shaping programme content. This is in part because SBS’s codes of practice not only prohibit brand-funded content, but also restrict its television productions from accepting any money or assistance that could exert (or be perceived as exerting) editorial influence (media producer, 3 February 2015; media producer, 9 April 2015). Nonetheless, for Tourism Tasmania in particular, Gourmet Farmer’s representations of Tasmania as a desirable place to visit and live made it understandably keen to capitalise on the tourism promotion opportunities afforded by the show.3 Specifically, Tourism Tasmania sought 3 Brand Tasmania had no further involvement beyond funding the pilot, as it ultimately saw Gourmet Farmer as appealing only to a very niche market (industry representative, 10 September 2015).

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to leverage what it refers to as “conversions” (government agency representative, 6 February 2015): converting viewers’ enjoyment of the show and their desire or intention to travel to Tasmania into actual visits. Gourmet Farmer was as an ideal platform for this, given the synergies between the show’s vision of Tasmania as a foodie paradise and rural idyll, and the focus on clean, green food that had been the focus of Tasmania’s tourism marketing campaigns in previous years. These campaigns, which emphasised the “proximity of our food to the source, the freshness of our produce…the people, [and] the stories of how that food comes to life” (government agency representative, 6 February 2015), promoted values with respect to food that were also shared by Evans and the Gourmet Farmer’s production team (Matthew Evans, 2 October 2012; media producer, 3 February 2015;). But while there are clear compatibilities in their visions for, and representations of, Tasmania and Tasmanian food, the divergent purposes to which these representations are put reveal key differences in the goals and objectives of the two groups. Tourism Tasmania’s interest in Gourmet Farmer highlights the importance of using a variety of media and messaging techniques in the dissemination of conversion messages (government agency representative, 6 February 2015), but in the absence of a formal brand partnership, such as the kind common to commercial food television broadcasting (see Chap. 8), relationships between Tourism Tasmania and Gourmet Farmer were inevitably piecemeal and not always reciprocated. This in turn created challenges for both groups: for Tourism Tasmania, it sometimes resulted in barriers to capitalising on the promotional opportunities offered by the show; for those involved with the Gourmet Farmer production, it sometimes resulted in a loss of control over the show’s brand and identity in ways that were felt to be potentially damaging both to its pleasures and to its political message. Taken together, these points of tension are revealing of the impediments to transforming affective investments in food politics and fan-generated media tourism into activities engineered by tourism agencies and operators. These points of tension arose most clearly in cases where tourism bodies sought to do more than simply “place a conversion message [i.e. an advertisement for Tasmania] in the ad breaks” of the show and instead offer targeted events and promotions designed to allow fans to replicate in ‘real life’ the experiences they had seen on screen (government agency representative, 6 February 2015). For example, Tourism Tasmania, in partnership with travel company TasVacations, organised two ‘Gourmet

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Farmer’ branded events to coincide with the broadcast of series 2 of the show. Each event was advertised during Gourmet Farmer’s commercial breaks, and each was specifically aimed at attracting mainland tourists to Tasmania. The first event was a ‘Gourmet Farmer Weekend Package’ that included two nights’ accommodation and return transfers to Peppermint Bay, where guests would attend a dinner hosted by Evans and his Gourmet Farmer co-hosts Nick Haddow and Ross O’Meara. The menu was designed in consultation with Gourmet Farmer’s three hosts and was prepared by O’Meara and the chefs at the Peppermint Bay restaurant. The second was a ‘Gourmet Farmer Taste of Tasmania 7 Night Package’, which involved seven nights’ accommodation, seven days’ car hire, a Taste Hobart Tour and a Tamar River Cruise. Like other attempts by local tourist administrations to commodify activities associated with popular television shows for fans-cum-tourists (see Tzanelli and Yar 2014; Couldry 2007), these experiences combined three spaces of tourism: “(1) the space of general tourism, (2) the space of media tourism, and (3) the imaginary action-space ‘within’ the fictional narrative that (2) sometimes generates” (Couldry 2007: 143). That is, these events included regular tourism activities that could be undertaken independently of an interest in Gourmet Farmer (e.g. a Peppermint Bay cruise, a Taste of Hobart Tour), media tourism activities (e.g. the opportunity to meet Gourmet Farmer’s hosts and to see some of the locations in which the show was filmed), and activities that allowed participants to immerse themselves in the textual world of Gourmet Farmer. As examples of the latter, the Peppermint Bay dinner enabled diners to participate in eating experiences they had seen on the show, such as enjoying a terrine made from O’Meara’s wild-shot game and tasting one of Haddow’s new cheeses, both of which featured in Gourmet Farmer episodes. But just as Couldry identified a number of tensions in translating engagement with televisual representations into successful tourism experiences (see Couldry 2007: 145–146), these tensions also existed for these Gourmet Farmer events. For example, the ‘Gourmet Farmer Weekend Package’ and its associated dinner were promoted widely during the Gourmet Farmer television show, during SBS’s general food programming and through several other outlets. This generated a lot of local interest in the event but, unbeknownst to the Gourmet Farmer team, ticket sales for the dinner were prioritised for interstate visitors, contributing to many locals missing out. With around 80% of the

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dinner guests travelling from interstate to attend, the event generated visitation to Tasmania (which was the goal of both Tourism Tasmania and TasVacations), but it damaged perceptions of Evans, his co-hosts and Gourmet Farmer among local audiences. As Evans described it: That was really bad for us…We had no clue until people started to tell us that locals couldn’t come…We wanted people to come from interstate, yes, but [excluding locals like that] is never what we [would] do. (2 October 2012)

This event highlighted the conflicts that can arise as a result of the differing objectives of tourism businesses and agencies, and those of media properties and personalities. In this case, Tourism Tasmania’s and TasVacations’ goal of increased interstate visitation conflicted with Evans’ and his co-hosts’ priorities of promoting Tasmanian food while building relationships with the local community. The ‘Gourmet Farmer Taste of Tasmania 7 Night Package’ was perhaps even more problematic, given that it had no specific association with Gourmet Farmer or its filming locations. Instead, it primarily used the ‘Gourmet Farmer’ name as a branding exercise, seeking to associate Gourmet Farmer’s “culinary cultural capital” (de Solier 2005: 470) with other sites and experiences of Tasmanian food. Although this type of ‘unauthorised’ commodification of media properties is common to the media tourism associated with fictional media texts, and is both accepted and contested to varying degrees (Tzanelli and Yar 2014), the fact that the pleasures and fantasies that emerge within the spaces of media tourism are frequently dependent on the characteristics of the source text (Hills 2002: 149) means that these types of ‘unofficial’ events can be especially problematic in the case of reality lifestyle programmes like Gourmet Farmer, given their investments in particular types of food politics. The ambiguities of a fictional text, such as The X-Files, can often form an important part of its tourist narrative—for example, the quest to discover “secret” filming locations serves to replay the emphasis on “hiddenness” and the search for “truth” prominent in the source text (Hills 2002: 148). In the case of Gourmet Farmer, however, it is the show’s authenticity that is understood as key to its success (media producer, 3 February 2015; media producer, 9 April 2015). Both Gourmet Farmer’s Executive Producer and SBS’s Commissioning Editor described the programme’s realism as integral to the production. The Executive Producer, for example, contrasted Gourmet Farmer with similar programmes

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that have a greater degree of “artificial” storytelling, and said that it is important for the show’s credibility that episodes are constructed around things that Evans is already doing (such as moving to a new farm or building a smoker), rather than scenarios manufactured for the purposes of entertainment (media producer, 3 February 2015). The Commissioning Editor said of Gourmet Farmer’s appeal that: “[Evans]’ transformation is absolutely real and complete and I think people get it. People can see when [things are] real and when [they are] contrived” (media producer, 9 April 2015). As a result of this emphasis on authenticity, events that seek to capitalise on the meanings and values of Gourmet Farmer, but which do not have any official connection to the show or its hosts, can be seen as incompatible with the principles of a programme that is about “knowing and trusting” the sources of one’s food and connecting with those who produce it. Perhaps because of their incompatibility with the affective investments generated by the show, these types of ‘unauthorised’ events and promotions have not tended to be especially successful, and have not been repeated since. Ultimately, the relationships between Gourmet Farmer and local tourism businesses and agencies are not thoroughgoing partnerships, but rather partial exchanges that share some values and imagery, but which ultimately have different goals and agendas. For the show’s producers, Tasmania’s rural idyll serves as a source of pleasurable entertainment, escapism and aspiration (media producer, 9 April 2015), and also as a platform for education about contemporary food politics (Matthew Evans, 2 October 2015; media producer, 3 February 2015). Visitation to the state may be an outcome, but it is not their aim. For state government and tourism bodies, they may be similarly invested in the discourses of the ‘new’ Tasmania as a locus of high quality, artisan food, but their primary goal is to leverage the show’s pleasures into tourism experiences. This has resulted in attempts by Tourism Tasmania, TasVacations and others to shape the meanings of the Gourmet Farmer text in particular ways, and largely independently of the show or its production contexts. While this has resulted in some successes—it is widely agreed that Gourmet Farmer has had a “huge” impact on tourism to Tasmania (government agency representative, 6 February 2015)—attempts to commodify the Gourmet Farmer experience can be less successful if these efforts are perceived to be at odds with the show’s key messages and values.

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With the goals of the Gourmet Farmer television production and agencies like Tourism Tasmania often operating at cross purposes, it is perhaps unsurprising that attempts to leverage tourism “conversions” from Gourmet Farmer’s rural idyll would have varying results. But while the high value placed on Gourmet Farmer’s authenticity is potentially a problem for state tourism agencies and operators seeking to commodify its locations and experiences, this same authenticity and commitment to an alternative food politics is potentially a boon to the small food and beverage producers who feature on the show.

Farming Gourmet-Style With Evans visiting at least one, and up to ten or more, artisan food and beverage producers per episode, off-farm visits form an important part of the show’s narrative, as is typical of these types of culinary travelogues. Evans’ visits cover the spectrum of primary production, valueadding, retail, and food experiences, including producers and retailers of meat and livestock, cheese, honey, beer, whisky, cider, fruit trees and sushi, plus a rural cooking school. The featured producers not only help Evans learn the practical skills of farming, but also operate as a significant source of idyllic representations of Tasmania as a place of unique ‘paddock to plate’ food experiences. Food and beverage producers are selected to appear on the show based on a combination of Evans’ recommendations and research conducted by the Gourmet Farmer production team. Those that are selected are those that are most compatible with the show’s style of storytelling and with SBS’s requirements regarding balance and diversity (media producer, 3 February 2015). The producers also needed to ensure that they offered “interesting stories” and that their food philosophy was in alignment with Evans’ (media producer, 3 February 2015). Interesting stories for the Gourmet Farmer production team were those that primarily conformed to a nostalgic rural idyll, which, in the words of the Executive Producer, constituted “unique stories of farming where the farmer is being restored to his or her position as a steward of the land” (media producer, 3 February 2015). Given Gourmet Farmer’s focus on the importance of connecting to the source of one’s food, the compatibility of values between Evans and the featured food producers, and with the particular stories of farming presented, is part of what enables Evans’ visits to food and

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beverage producers in and around the state to form an important expression of this connection. For their part, the food and beverage producers often described Gourmet Farmer’s food politics as an important factor in determining their own involvement in the show. Moreover, the fact that most had little to no advertising budget meant that the promotional potential of a nationally known programme with a significant viewing audience was also very welcome. In the words of one beverage producer, this is the kind of promotional opportunity that “you [just] don’t say no to” (20 February 2015). Like the state tourism agencies and operators, these food and beverage producers are invested in constructing and representing Tasmania as a similar kind of ‘cult geography’ to the one depicted on Gourmet Farmer, but differences in the goals and agendas of these two groups also resulted in moments of conflict and tension, just as they did for state government and tourism industry actors. Profiles of local producers are now a common feature of a range of food media, and they are appealing both as a source of cheap talent for media producers and as a “direct marketing” opportunity for the artisan food industries (Phillipov 2016b: 590). But in this case, in part as a result of the absence of formal brand partnerships between SBS/Essential Media and the food and beverage producers, individual producers had quite different experiences of their involvement with the show. These differences stemmed largely from the nature of their relationship with the media production. Most of the food and beverage producers who appeared on Gourmet Farmer reported increased customer interest following their episode broadcasts. For example, a honey producer said that he received more interest than he had the capacity to handle, including a surge in interstate visitors unexpectedly turning up at his farm gate and processing facility hoping for a tour (food producer, 13 February 2015). Similarly, a beverage producer said that he always knew when his series 1 episode had been re-broadcast because of the spike in business he received at his cellar door (beverage producer, 5 February 2015). Such examples highlight viewers’ appetite for media pilgrimage, and show how texts generative of media tourism can work to construct locations and identities in ways that are not simply limited to “creative transposition” within a purely imaginative realm (see Hills 2002: 149), but which also have real, material effects at the travel destination. While most of the featured producers enjoyed the benefits of this, those best able to maintain these effects over the long term were those

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that offered experiences that could give fans a ‘taste’ of Gourmet Farmer, but in ways that did not jeopardise the authenticity of their offerings (or of Gourmet Farmer itself) by appearing to deliberately commodify the interest generated by the show. For the most part, these were cases where producers’ depictions on the show seemed to ‘naturally’ mirror the activities and experiences their businesses already offered. For example, Bill Lark’s appearance in series 1 ostensibly involved teaching Evans, O’Meara and Haddow to fish for freshwater trout. However, the activities of the day—meeting at the Lark Distillery cellar door in Hobart, travelling to the distillery’s peat bog and enjoying a gourmet lunch of whisky with peat-smoked trout—followed an almost identical itinerary to one of the Lark Distillery’s existing whisky tours. These tours predate Gourmet Farmer, but their capacity to enable fans to ‘authentically’ recreate experiences they have seen on the show has resulted in the tours becoming a growth area of Lark Distillery’s business, necessitating the employment of additional staff and the purchase of a larger tour bus (Bill Lark, 5 February 2015). Similarly, when Evans visited cooking school proprietor Rodney Dunn to seek advice on how to protect his vegetable garden from local wildlife, he was shown engaged in activities that could be replicated by Dunn’s cooking school students. In a reflection of the Agrarian Kitchen’s cooking classes, Evans was first greeted in the cooking school kitchen, before going outside to see the school’s kitchen garden. Dunn has seen the impacts of Gourmet Farmer on demand for his cooking classes: “if [Gourmet Farmer] wasn’t a prime motivation, it was definitely up there,” he said of customers’ stated reasons for attending the cooking school (3 December 2014). In both these cases the on-screen representation of the businesses essentially replicated activities available off-screen, resulting in clear pathways for customers to translate viewing experiences into opportunities for media pilgrimage. In other instances, businesses still enjoyed positive increases in tourist visitation if they offered activities that captured something of the spirit, even if not the literal details, of what was shown on Gourmet Farmer. For example, Masaaki Koyama, a sushi master who operates a small restaurant and market stall, was featured diving for abalone and sea urchin with Evans and his friends, and then preparing sushi and sashimi from the freshly caught seafood. Customers are not able to go diving with Koyama or to have him prepare sushi for them on the beach, but they can watch him prepare sushi and sashimi at his market

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stall and restaurant, where they can enjoy a sushi platter similar to the one shown during his Gourmet Farmer episode. Indeed, Koyama has experienced a notable increase in local and interstate visitation to his eateries as the show’s episodes have been re-broadcast (23 March 2015). Each of these cases is an example of the types of positive alliances that can occur when the aims of the media production are in alignment with the activities and experiences of those featured on screen. Neither Essential Media and Entertainment nor SBS were ‘advertising’ these businesses; instead, they were primarily concerned with presenting “interesting stories” appropriate to the genre and the audience, and these were cases of a fortunate alignment between the kind of stories that were felt to be compatible with the focus and philosophy of the show (media producer, 3 February 2015) and the customer experiences offered by the featured businesses. This success lies, at least in part, in the extent to which these representations and experiences enable the play with the boundaries between reality and fantasy that is integral to the nostalgia and idyllism of contemporary food media and to experiences of media tourism. Within practices of media touris, the capacity to redefine and recontextualise the boundaries between reality and fantasy is frequently understood as the prerogative of media pilgrims located within particular cult geographies (see Hills 2002: 146). However, the cases of Gourmet Farmer’s food and beverage producers are examples of activities also being undertaken by the recipients, and not just the proponents, of media pilgrimage. As in other instances of cult geography, these are examples of the boundaries between reality and fantasy being neither straightforwardly “fused” nor “confused” (Hills 2002: 146), but rather enabling access to experiences that replicate those depicted on television in ways that are simultaneously constructed and authentic. That is, whisky tours, cooking classes and visits to restaurants are each real experiences with real effects on local businesses and economies, but they are also constructed experiences that grant tourists, visitors and locals (temporary) access to both the Gourmet Farmer story world and its food politics and to the ‘new’ Tasmania it imagines. This serves to locate producers’ practices within those of the Tasmanian cult geographies, articulated both within Gourmet Farmer and by a range of other stakeholders, that understand Gourmet Farmer’s depictions of Tasmanian life as reflections of long-standing realities, rather than as contemporary attempts to reimagine, rebrand and reposition Tasmania’s agriculture, food and beverage sectors in ways that capitalise on growing markets for ‘gourmet’ artisan and alternative food.

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The role of fantasy in these cult geographies, and in media tourism more generally, can be seen as part of the reason for their appeal. In these cases this involves the construction of new Tasmanian landscapes seemingly populated by small food and beverage producers whose readily available, fresh, quality produce and close connections to consumers appear to define eating and drinking experiences in the island state. Without a brand partnership arrangement, food and beverage producers who appear on food television tend to have little say over the focus, prominence or duration of their depiction on the show. This can result in quite different experiences for individual producers, but those whose business activities fortuitously align with the production’s storylines and/or those that offer experiences that enable potential media pilgrims to play with the permeable boundaries of reality and fantasy have tended to see significant value from their involvement in food television programmes like Gourmet Farmer. However, these benefits were not experienced equally by all the food and beverage producers who appeared on the show. Those who were least happy with their experiences on the show tended to be those whose businesses often did not offer activities that could readily capitalise on an appetite for media pilgrimage. They also tended to be those whose expectations and motivations departed most significantly from those of the Gourmet Farmer production team. In particular, the differing value placed on fantasy was a source of tension. Although these producers generally shared Gourmet Farmer’s vision of Tasmania and shared similar political commitments with respect to food, they tended to value less permeable boundaries between reality and fantasy than is typical of practices of media tourism and of food media’s political and representational tropes. Specifically, they felt that the overemphasis on fantasy—and in particular, the focus on Evans’ story and the ‘feel-good’ nature of his experiences—resulted in insufficient, or overly superficial, coverage of their own products and production methods (e.g. food producer, 13 April 2015; beverage producer, 20 February 2015; beverage producer, 16 February 2015). For example, a cider maker who was enlisted to show Evans how to make cider and perry was critical of the episode’s inadequate focus on the particulars of his production methods. As he explained: There was a great deal more [that could have been shown] that was not included…Like all television programmes, it was extremely superficial. It was not really dealing with all the important details [such as the selection

126  M. Phillipov and sourcing of specialist apples varieties and the science involved in cider production]…I think there was more useful material in the can than was used. (beverage producer, 16 February 2015)

With its emphasis on the pleasures of drinking the cider, rather than on the science of making it, the producer saw the episode as missing the “important details” of cider production in order to prioritise the “nice feel” necessary for television (beverage producer, 16 February 2015). Another producer expressed disappointment that a last-minute focus on events happening at Evans’ farm led to their own story being less prominently featured than they expected: “I felt slightly miffed that [following] the two and a half days’ work that we’d put in, we weren’t going to get the exposure that we had perhaps expected” (beverage producer, 20 February 2015). A third felt that coverage of her own products had been limited because Gourmet Farmer has become “a Matthew Evans show” less concerned with “promoting the farmer [than with] promoting them[selves]” (food producer, 13 April 2015). These criticisms are notable for the fact that they essentially reflect a desire for Gourmet Farmer to be a different type of show from the one that it is; in this case, one that is more producer- and product-focused than focused on an individual’s story. However, production decisions on Gourmet Farmer are made not so much on the basis of Matthew Evans’ desire to “promote himself” but rather according to what makes successful television. Indeed, Evans originally pitched to SBS the type of producer- and product-focused programme that some of the food and beverage producers would have preferred to see, but it was deemed by the broadcaster to be “really, really boring” to primetime audiences (Matthew Evans, 2 October 2012). The Thursday night food slot is one that frequently features programmes hosted by charismatic food personalities (media producer, 9 April 2015), as opposed to the product-driven advertorial that can characterise some commercial food programming. It is one also driven by feel-good entertainment values—Evans’ more recent hard-hitting, campaigning culinary documentaries like What’s the Catch? and the For the Love of Meat have only been possible because of the profile he has built through the more easy-going Gourmet Farmer (media producer, 3 February 2015). So, just as they did with the tourism agencies and operators, tensions can arise from mismatches between the expectations of a television production, on the one hand, and those who seek to leverage its positive associations, on the other.

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In the case of Gourmet Farmer, the tensions resulted not from attempts to appropriate and commodify the cultural cachet associated with the show, but rather as a result of the differing levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction felt by the food and beverage producers who had featured on the programme. This was a consequence of the fact that the needs of television producers concerned with engaging storylines and producing appropriate content for the designated timeslot were not necessarily the same as those of the food and beverage producers hoping to use Gourmet Farmer as a promotional platform for their own products. All generally shared Gourmet Farmer’s vision for Tasmania—“we [are] all trying to market and promote the Tasmanian brand,” in the words of one beverage producer (beverage producer, 20 February 2015)—but the potential for dissatisfaction arose in cases where there was an expectation that the focus would be on the “important details” of individual products rather than on the more escapist pleasures that are central both to Gourmet Farmer’s construction of Tasmania as a cult geography and to the broader rebranding and reimagining of Tasmania and its food politics that have also been occurring outside the text.

Constructing Cult Geographies The example of Gourmet Farmer tourism discussed above highlights how a number of media and food industry groups—the Gourmet Farmer production team, the state government agencies, and the local food and beverage producers—are each operating at the intersections of media representations, industry imperatives and state branding discourses in ways that provide opportunities for productive synergies and relationships, but also areas of tension. While much of the existing scholarship tends to understand food television as a vehicle for experiences of armchair tourism, Gourmet Farmer offers an example of how both tourists and a range of industry stakeholders are materially reimagining and reconstructing a ‘new’ Tasmania through artisan and alternative food. Tourism may be an unintended by-product of such television productions, but their capacity to induce armchair tourists to convert their interest in activities witnessed on screen into actual experiences of tourism is something that is highly valued by both state tourism agencies and operators, and by local food and beverage producers—each of whom is attentive to, and seeks to capitalise on, the promotional opportunities of popular culinary travelogues and their celebrations of alternative and artisan food.

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Gourmet Farmer has been responsible for creating new forms of cultural landscape that are, in some respects, specific to the peculiarities of both Gourmet Farmer and Tasmania, but they also point to the broader capacity of food television to construct particular locales as ‘foodie’ destinations that express a particular food politics and which produce complex relationships between place and source media texts. In particular, this includes the capacity of food media texts to “leak out” (Hills 2002: 151) into the spatial and cultural practices of particular destinations, and to intersect with other discourses and imperatives in ways that have the potential to significantly affect both the place-identities and economies of these destinations. It is this potential for ‘leakage’ that makes Gourmet Farmer and its politics so powerful in constructing Tasmania as a foodie paradise and rural idyll, and this is also what makes involvement in the show such a desirable promotional opportunity for those in the tourism, food and beverage industries. This potential for leakage sometimes gives media texts a life of their own, the implications of which exist outside of the control of the media text and its production staff—for example, when the text’s authenticity is undermined by ‘unauthorised’ appropriations of its meanings, images and identities, as it was in the case of some Tasmanian tourism strategies. But frequently, as the examples in this chapter show, the media text’s own framing remains hegemonic. The food industry professionals most satisfied with their Gourmet Farmer experience were typically those who were most able to work within the tropes about ‘good’ food and ‘good’ food experiences that are characteristic of contemporary food media: that is, food producers living seemingly idyllic lifestyles, whose production practices grant access to pleasures and a politics unavailable to ‘ordinary’ consumers. Within this context, watching dairy farmers clock off at midday after a leisurely morning’s work in lush green fields is a much more compelling prospect than a detailed discourse on the science of cider or beer making. Gourmet Farmer’s—and food media’s—representations of food production are shaped by the increasing visibility and accessibility of particular types of food politics, but they are also (and, possibly, primarily) shaped by a range of media industry imperatives, including the demands of the broadcaster, the genre conventions of food and lifestyle television, and what is successful with audiences. I have been arguing so far that food media has become an important site for the expression of a food politics that prioritises connecting with and emplacing one’s food. The affective charge associated with media tropes of connection and place powerfully shape the meanings associated

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with particular food practices, products and experiences, and bring into contact a range of industry actors drawn to food media’s affective economies. If capturing in ‘real life’ the experiences they have seen on screen is an important way in which (some) audiences engage with texts like Gourmet Farmer and express their commitment to its ideas about ‘good’ food and ‘good’ food production, it is obvious why food and tourism industries might take a keen interest in these types of texts. As we have seen in previous chapters, when the interests of industry actors are aligned, popular food politics can effectively operate in the service of media and food industry needs. But cases where these interests are not aligned highlight the extent to which food media’s dominant tropes not only enable but also constrain the types of food practices and politics that might be mobilised from, and outside of, food media texts. This chapter looked at the experiences of those involved in or affected by the production and circulation of food media texts. However, given the key role these texts play in shaping the types of food politics that are made publicly visible and accessible, the next chapter will once again return to the question of media representation. This chapter has shown how the prominence food media gives to certain types of producers and production techniques has implications for how food practices (including tourism practices) are enacted by consumers and experienced by industry actors. The next chapter explores how food media’s representational strategies also have implications for how food practices can be imagined and, possibly, remade.

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McGaurr, Lynette. 2015. Environmental communication and travel journalism: Consumerism, conflict and concern. London: Routledge. Parmett, Helen Morgan. 2016. It’s HBO: Passionate engagement, TV branding, and tourism in the postbroadcast era. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13: 3–22. Phillipov, Michelle. 2016a. Escaping to the country: Media, nostalgia, and the new food industries. Popular Communication 14: 111–122. Phillipov, Michelle. 2016b. Using media to promote artisan food and beverages: Insights from the television industry. British Food Journal 118: 588–602. Reeves, Elaine. 2010. Six of the best for Cumper. The Mercury. 24 March: 24. Reijnders, Stijn. 2011. Places of the imagination: Media, tourism, culture. Surrey: Ashgate. SBS. 2013. Annual report 2012–2013. Special Broadcasting Service. http:// media.sbs.com.au/home/upload_media/site_20_rand_602172661_sbs_ annual_report_2011_12.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. Schultz, Julianne, and Natasha Cica. 2013. Tasmania, the tipping point? Griffith Review 39. Thomas, Lyn. 2008. Alternative realities: Downshifting narratives in contemporary lifestyle television. Cultural Studies 22: 680–699. Tzanelli, Rodanthi. 2004. Constructing the cinematic tourist: The ‘sign industry’ of The Lord of the Rings. Tourist Studies 4: 21–42. Tzanelli, Rodanthi, and Majid Yar. 2014. Breaking bad, making good: Notes on a televisual tourist industry. Mobilities 11: 1–19. Urry, John. 2002. The tourist gaze. London: Sage. Versteegen, Heinrich. 2010. Armchair epicures: The proliferation of food programmes on British TV. In The pleasures and horrors of eating: The cultural history of eating in Anglophone literature, ed. Marion Gymnich, and Norbert Lennartz, 447–464. Goettingen: VandR Unipress. Waade, Anne Marit, and Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen. 2010. Haptic routes and digestive destinations in cooking series: Images of food and place in Keith Floyd and The Hairy Bikers in relation to art history. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 8: 84–100. West, Jonathan. 2013. Obstacles to progress: What’s wrong with Tasmania, really? Griffith Review 39: 50–59.

CHAPTER 6

‘It Tastes Better’? Cookbooks, Happy Farmers and Affective Labour

Throughout this book I have been suggesting that we are seeing an increasingly coherent set of representations in food media that construct particular ideas about ‘good’ food and ‘good’ food production, particularly those centred on nostalgia, authenticity, place and a sense of ‘connection’ between food consumer and food producer. Across a range of food media texts, images abound of food producers (both professional and ‘amateur’) enjoying happy, relaxed lifestyles and the deep contentment of a life devoted to ‘traditional’ forms of food production, while consumers enjoy elevated eating experiences feasting on the produce of hard-working rural artisans. In many cases, such representations are a product of the genre conventions and contexts of the media industries, as well as of a genuine commitment to food politics—a desire to present as pleasurable and desirable alternative forms of food production and consumption, and to use media as a mechanism to show consumers the origins and sources of their food. This dual focus on pleasures and politics has, in part, explained the appeal of food media for both media and food industries. But, as has been implicit throughout this book and as this chapter will show more fully, food media’s representations of food production and consumption often centre on depictions of “labour idylls” (Luckman 2015: 119) that stand in contrast to the realities of professional foodwork. As I will argue, these can, paradoxically, restrict consumers’ understanding of where our food comes from, and potentially limits what a mediated food politics can ‘do’ to shape both the knowledges and concrete practices associated with modern food systems. © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_6

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“Labour idyll” is a term used by Susan Luckman to describe the presentation of public personas associated with niche craft production, but it is one also applicable to representations of food (see Wark 2013: 298). This last chapter in Part 2 will focus on the implications of these representations of work as an important final dimension of how contemporary food politics is mobilised through media, and how the conventions of media texts are shaping the terms through which this politics is expressed. It will consider relationships between media representations and realities of foodwork, focusing on Kylie Kwong’s (2010) cookbook It Tastes Better: Over 100 New Recipes Using My Favourite Seasonal Produce as an example of how ideas about ‘good’ food are often articulated via images of ‘good’ food production framed around particular producer identities, the embodiment of certain kinds of attitudes and affects, and specific types of work practices. Through an examination of the text’s representations of work, this chapter considers an aspect of contemporary politics that, as we will see as we move into Part 3, is part of what enables food media both to produce an appealing sense of connection between producer and consumer and, inadvertently, to provide opportunities for its appropriation for quite different political ends. It Tastes Better is an exemplar of a genre of food media text in which celebrity chefs profile farmers and food producers alongside recipes of dishes using their produce, such as Mario Batali and Jim Webster’s cookbook America Farm to Table: Simple, Delicious Recipes Celebrating Local Farmers (2014). Also part of this genre is Gourmet Farmer and other television programmes like Paddock to Plate and the Hairy Bikers series. Like many contemporary food media texts, It Tastes Better has a political motivation to show how ‘good’ food is produced—in this case, by putting a ‘face’ to the farmer. It Tastes Better is designed to help readers learn more about the “growers, farmers, fishermen, artisans and food providores” that have “rehumanised the food chain” (Kwong 2010: xi, xiii). For Kwong, this ‘good’ food is produced not just by farmers with a deep sense of connection to their land, animals and vocation, but also by those committed to organic and biodynamic production; it is this combination, according to Kwong, that literally makes their food “taste better”. As well as a political and pedagogical text, It Tastes Better also sits within the genre of the “restaurant cookbook” (Kear 1999), showcasing the producers who supply to Kwong’s Sydney restaurant, Billy Kwong, and featuring recipes for the restaurant’s signature dishes and some of Kwong’s own home favourites.

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The book is a useful case study not just because it is exemplary of the growing number of food media texts that now feature farmers and food producers, but also because—unlike some of the other food media texts discussed in this book—the textual representations in It Tastes Better reflect an especially close alignment between the stated expectations of the book’s author, its publisher and the featured food producers. Unlike texts such as Gourmet Farmer (and, as we will see later, primetime television programmes like Recipe to Riches and My Kitchen Rules), participants’ experiences of being part of It Tastes Better are shaped not so much by attempts to reconcile (sometimes incommensurable) media and food industry imperatives as they are by the shared politics and vocabularies of those involved. That we nonetheless see tensions between the representations and realities of foodwork is revealing of the broader factors shaping media representations of food and the politics they reflect. It also perhaps tells us something about the limits to food media’s capacity to mobilise a food politics based on the realities of how food is produced, rather than on a nostalgic idyllism. This chapter first examines representations of farmers and food producers within the text of It Tastes Better before considering how these producers talk about their work ‘outside’ the text. By locating this analysis in relation to the literatures of affective labour and creative economies, I focus on the specific identities and affects associated with ‘good’ food producers as a means of thinking through the cultural and political representations of work practices. I am focusing on representations of work because, while this discussion has been implicit in earlier chapters, it is has also been central to the other representational strategies of food media texts discussed so far—particularly those related to nostalgia, rural idyllism and so on. A growing media and cultural studies scholarship on work cultures and practices has highlighted the ways in which work has come to occupy a central position in the emotional and symbolic lives of subjects within the “new” informational economy (e.g. Gregg 2009, 2011; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010; McRobbie 2016). Popular food media has contributed to the visibility of certain types of food producers—small-scale, artisan and ‘alternative’—in ways that construct their goods as both material and symbolic. That is, the food produced is both a material reality and a symbolic good, filled with a range of additional meanings and significances. How the work that goes into producing these goods is framed and understood—both in media representations and through the experiences of producers themselves—is

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helpful for thinking through how far we can take a food politics that is shaped around the kinds of idyllic, pleasurable representations of food production that I have been suggesting are characteristic of contemporary food media texts.

The ‘Work’ of Kylie Kwong Kylie Kwong is a chef and restaurateur well known to Australian food media audiences through her television appearances and cookbooks. As an Australian woman of Chinese heritage, Kwong’s distinctiveness within the predominantly white, masculine world of elite cookery (see Swenson 2009) is important to her public identity. She has been the host of two ABC television series, the author of six cookbooks, and a regular guest on MasterChef Australia. In addition to her more ‘conventional’ media work, Kwong has also been a prominent voice in popular food activism. As well as her public stance on sourcing organic and biodynamic produce for her restaurant, Kwong is an ambassador for sustainable seafood (Frew 2007) and an advocate for indigenous produce and the environmental benefits of eating insects (Duncan 2013). In the words of one of the food producers who appears in It Tastes Better, part of Kwong’s appeal is that her principles are not merely high-minded ideals, but something that she lives in practice: [Of ] the many powers behind Kylie’s message, one is the person herself— she’s such a beautiful person, she’s such a great communicator, it is so heartfelt and that is very powerful. But it’s also very powerful that she’s making a restaurant work according to her ethical standards. So it’s not just a lovely warm and fuzzy sentiment, she’s proving that it works…in hard, practical business ways as well. (food producer, 14 May 2016)

Kwong’s skills as a communicator were also what attracted interest from the then Publishing Director of Lantern books Julie Gibbs, who commissioned Kwong’s first and subsequent cookbooks. Prior to the publication of her first book, Kylie Kwong: Recipes and Stories (2003), and the 2003 broadcast of her first television series, Kylie Kwong: Heart and Soul, Kwong was not especially well known outside the Sydney restaurant scene, but Gibbs’ instinct was that Kwong’s talent and communication skills meant that her books could attract a wider audience (Gibbs, 20 August 2015).

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Most of Kwong’s books have focused on Chinese cookery—a combination of instructional texts (such as Simple Chinese Cooking and Kylie Kwong’s Simple Chinese Cooking Class) designed to simplify Chinese cookery for the home cook, and texts (such as Recipes and Stories and My China) that combine recipes with stories of Kwong’s family and heritage. While the instructional cookbooks have been Kwong’s most successful commercially—Gibbs describes Simple Chinese Cooking as her “best seller by a long way” (Gibbs, 20 August 2015)—It Tastes Better was more of a passion project; it was Kwong’s “dream book” (Kylie Kwong, 27 June 2016), rather than one that she or Lantern anticipated would sell a lot of copies. Although her other books engage in questions of food ethics (such as encouraging readers to buy free-range, organic meat and poultry, see Kwong 2006: 13; Kwong 2012: 19), It Tastes Better is her most explicitly political. The Australian described it as “the feel-good release of the year… a celebration of all that’s good about sustainable eating”.1 While it is nowhere near as hard-hitting as the locavore texts or campaigning culinary documentaries discussed in Part 1, it is nonetheless underpinned by a more explicit politics than is typical of feel-good lifestyle texts. Other feel-good texts, such as Gourmet Farmer or River Cottage, tend to couch their politics as an expression of a personal journey on the part of their hosts, but It Tastes Better has a much more normative tone. As the unusually prominent dedication to her mother in the book’s front pages indicates, this is a politics of eating “properly” (Kwong 2010: i, see also p. xi). While all the producers profiled subscribe to organic and/ or biodynamic principles, “proper” eating covers a more diverse range of producers than one might perhaps expect. It Tastes Better profiles producers from a range of operational scales—from very small-scale, hobby ­producers to suppliers whose primary market is the major supermarkets. Nonetheless, these producers are united by a shared set of representations that replicate many of the food media tropes associated with ‘good’ food, including depictions of production practices characterised by unalienated labour and relaxed lifestyles, and images of beautiful scenery and produce that draw upon (urban) notions of the idyllic nature of rural lives.

1 Quoted

on front cover of It Tastes Better.

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The profiles foreground the deep sense of vocation felt by the producers, explicitly emphasising that the producers are not motivated by money or other commercial considerations. It is specifically noted, for instance, that poultry farmer John Meredith “does not cut corners to make a few extra bucks”, and that Wally Allan made a deliberate decision to grow ginger organically even though he could have made “good money” by growing it conventionally (Kwong 2010: 33–34, 336). Rather than a focus on business operations, the profiles instead highlight the aesthetics and serenity of producers’ farms. Meredith Dairy is described as “beautiful”, while Colin and Joy Lienert’s Berkshire pig farm is characterised as a “peaceful haven” and a “pig heaven” (Kwong 2010: 71, 299). These are storybook farms, where colourful guinea fowl waddle among the grape vines to control pests, and fat, woolly sheep are happily herded to their daily milking. As is the case for the producers who appeared in other texts such as Gourmet Farmer and River Cottage, these are also farms where there seems to be plenty of down time. All the producers always seem to have time for a chat, including the Orrs, who unfailingly have tea and freshly baked cake ready for Kylie’s visits (Kwong 2010: 364). Throughout the book, producers are depicted attending lunches, picnics and dinner parties hosted by Kwong in idyllic locations—from Frogmore Creek Vineyard in Tasmania to the Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island. Here, the producers are shown enjoying leisurely meals prepared with an abundance of exotic produce— Kwong’s meal at Frogmore Creek, for example, includes both black-lip abalone and southern rock lobster—with recipes provided for each of the dishes from the event. In doing so, It Tastes Better follows tropes common to food media, in which pleasurable depictions of food are used to imagine and construct particular forms of desirable lifestyle. But unlike other examples of lifestyle media in which the “important details” of food production are excluded to preserve the “nice feel” of the text (see Chap. 5), It Tastes Better includes much more specific information about production practices alongside its more typical lifestyle tropes. For example, in her profile of Murray River Salt, Kwong outlines at length how the salt is produced: how salted water is pumped from saline aquifers into temperature-controlled baths, then crystallised, drained, dried and packaged. Profiles also frequently list full product lines for each business—such as Meredith Dairy’s range of cheeses and Frogmore Creek’s variety of wines—and include photos of product packaging and details of where readers are able to purchase the

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products. What is interesting about this inclusion of more detailed product information is the opportunity this gives the producers to talk about their work. How this work is talked about, how it is located in relation to Kwong’s work as a restaurateur, and how ‘good’ work is framed throughout It Tastes Better is useful to think about in relation to theories of immaterial and affective labour.

The Pleasures of Work For the growing media and cultural studies scholarship on work, engagement with Hardt and Negri’s (2004) theories of immaterial and affective labour offers an important framework for understanding work’s contemporary structures, practices and values. For Hardt and Negri, immaterial labour is the labour that has come to characterise postindustrial capitalism; it is what has transformed the organisation of production from the “linear relationship of the assembly line to the innumerable and indeterminate relationships of distributed networks” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 113). As labour that involves both the production of immaterial goods (such as services, knowledge and communication) and the production and manipulation of affects (such as feelings of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement or passion), immaterial and affective labour are characteristic of work in the service and information sectors (Hardt and Negri 2004: 108; see also Hardt 1999: 94). They argue that, while not necessarily dominant in quantitative terms, immaterial and affective labour are hegemonic in qualitative terms, imposing their tendencies on “other forms of labor and society itself ” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 109). For Hardt and Negri the hegemony of immaterial labour is shaping the nature of modern work more broadly, but their work has found greatest purchase in studies of creative and cultural industries, where immaterial and affective labour have been reframed not as something with revolutionary potential (as it is in Hardt and Negri, see 2004: 114),2 but as a form of labour reform by stealth (e.g. Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010; McRobbie 2016). 2 For Hardt and Negri (2004: 106, 114), because immaterial labour produces communication, affective relationships and knowledge, it can “directly expand the realm of what we share in common”. Immaterial labour also forms the basis of a new global class formation that they call the “multitude”, defined as “all those who work under the rule of capital and thus potentially as the class of those who refuse the rule of capital”.

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For these critics immaterial and affective labour is associated with post-Fordist regimes of production, and particularly with the policies of the UK’s former New Labour government, which have channelled increasing numbers of young people into “creative” jobs that are by their nature often precarious and exploitative, and which offer little in the way of traditional workplace security or job protection (Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009: 419; McRobbie 2016: 37, 60; Nixon and Crewe 2004: 130; Luckman 2015: 102). In contrast to the collectivised, unionised labour markets of the industrial era, the informational economy has ushered in a range of new jobs involving mobile, flexible skills and highly individualised modes of self-entrepreneurship and self-branding that understand work in highly affective terms—what McRobbie (2016: 36) has termed “passionate work” (see also Duffy 2015; Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009). For McRobbie (2016: 45), immaterial and affective labour has been put in the service of an “experimental re-making of the middle class at work where ideas of creativity and innovation compensate for and to an extent obscure the shrinking realm of protection along with welfare and various entitlements”. While McRobbie (2016: 46, 91) understands this phenomenon in specifically urban and gendered terms—she sees growth in the creative and cultural industries not just as part of a strategic revitalisation of urban economies, but also as producing normatively feminine forms of labour that govern female subjectivities in particular ways—insights from studies of creative and cultural industries can nonetheless be applied to other locations and work contexts. This is because we are also seeing similar conditions operating even within traditionally ‘material’ areas of labour production. In particular, we can see discourses of passionate work at play in the construction of farming identities and practices represented in It Tastes Better and other food media texts. In fact, although in many accounts, the focus of new work economies has been on the production of immaterial goods and services, agriculture and food production occupy a special position in Hardt and Negri’s (2004) theories of immaterial and affective labour. On the one hand, as a form of material production that pre-dates the postindustrial economy, agriculture is specifically excluded from the types of immaterial labour that characterise contemporary service and informational sector work—even if it is acknowledged that agriculturalists have “always used the knowledge, intelligence, and innovation typical of immaterial labor” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 109, 110). On the other hand, agricultural labour, along with the labour of

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domestic work, are offered as “important keys to understanding the characteristics of the immaterial paradigm” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 110). In the case of agricultural labour, its flexibility, its capacity to move with the unpredictable changes of nature, suggests the types of knowledge central to immaterial labour more than it does the “mechanistic sciences of the factory” (Hardt and Negri 2004: 110). Indeed, agriculture is used as a key example of how material production is becoming increasingly biopolitical. As Hardt and Negri (2004: 116) write, as the “conditions of agricultural production change…agriculture communicates with other forms of production and no longer poses a qualitatively different, isolated form of production and life”. Viewed in this context, the farmers and food producers in It Tastes Better can be seen as one of a number of contemporary examples of the increasing suffusion of the immaterial paradigm into material forms of production. In particular, the mobile, flexible, affective dispositions of the new informational economy are also a feature in the construction of desirable farming identities and ideas about ‘good’ food. This can be seen particularly clearly in the way that professional hardships are discussed and dealt with throughout It Tastes Better. In comparison to many other lifestyle food texts, which tend to present the work of food production as leisurely, unhurried and inevitably successful, It Tastes Better is somewhat unusual in its acknowledgement of the challenges and hardships involved in food production. For example, Kwong (2010: 208) recounts vegetable grower David Tatman’s experiences of crop failure resulting from his adherence to organic practices: David planted a whole paddock of celery one year, but it didn’t thrive because the nutrient levels in the soil weren’t yet high enough. Because it was being grown organically, he couldn’t use fast-acting artificial fertilisers to boost the soil, so that crop failed.

She also notes the long hours growers must dedicate to their work: potato growers Mal and Lola Orr, for example, have worked seven days a week since buying their property in the 1980s and “don’t know when [they] last had a holiday”; Paul and Virginia Kurtz, who grow pastureraised eggs, lamb and beef, work from dawn until dusk (Kwong 2010: 5, 281). Yet despite the pedagogical aims of the text, the nature of these challenges and what they mean for the work of food production are not

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discussed at any length. If, as Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern (2014) argued in a slightly different context, the labour of food production has often been invisible in academic food studies (see also Guthman 2000), It Tastes Better, along with several of the other texts discussed in this book, offers an example of how this lacuna is also replicated within popular cultural representations of food production. Throughout the cookbook, labour is primarily discussed in romanticised terms. This reflects a long history of conceptualising rural life in idyllic terms (particularly for urban dwellers) (see Burchardt 2002; Marx 1964; Williams 1973), but it also shows some of the hallmarks of the hegemony of affective labour. The work of food production is constructed in largely affective terms—as “passionate work” (McRobbie 2016: 36) that is (and should be) done out of love and dedication, rather than something done merely as a job. Learning of the Kurtz’s long working hours, for example, gives Kwong (2010: 5) a “wonderful mental image” of farmers “tending their fields, having that direct connection with the soil” and “work[ing] the land with their own bare hands”. She “couldn’t believe” that the Orrs had worked so long without a break, but she is reassured by Lola’s “indomitable spirit” and Mal’s “true farmer’s hands…with earth ingrained in his skin and beneath his finger nails” (Kwong 2010: 281)— sentimental ideas about the nobility of hard work that have long had a purchase in agrarian culture (see Silvasti 2003). Nowhere does the book acknowledge the physical and psychological impacts of a life of heavy labour. Similarly, the financial and emotional effects of a whole crop failure remain equally unexplored. Instead, in the cases of the Kurtzes, the Orrs, David Tatman and others, the real difficulties of farming are frequently diminished with phrases like “despite difficulties such as this” or “despite these pressures” and a quick segue into more positive discussions of the quality and integrity of their produce and their capacity to just “keep going” (see, for example, Kwong 2010: 208, 305). It Tastes Better is especially approving when producers express their gratitude for what they have or their desire to “go with the flow” and to adapt to what life may bring, for example: Kwong describes olive oil producer Dee Nolan’s belief in letting “life…take care of itself ” as “beautiful”; and is “utterly convinced that it is their ability to appreciate what is right before their eyes…that makes Mal and Lola Orr’s potatoes taste so good” (Kwong 2010: 267, 284). The invisibility of the labour involved in foodwork is also rendered visually in It Tastes Better, in which almost all the images of the food and

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beverage producers are ‘posed’ photos rather than action shots. We see photos of Kwong with her arms around smiling producers, and images of producers posing in front of a tractor, holding cute baby animals or standing with a glass of wine. There are rarely shots of producers actually at work. The action shots are primarily reserved for images of children and grandchildren happily playing in the fields, or of Billy Kwong chefs working in the restaurant kitchen. That images of work are primarily associated with the preparation, rather than the production, of food signals something about how and where work is located in this text. If Lantern cookbooks are designed to be read as extensions of their authors (see Chap. 4), we can certainly see this in It Tastes Better. Kwong, for example, attributes her representations of the food producers to her Buddhist practices and, in particular, to the principle of balance and a desire to understand others’ and one’s own motivations (Kylie Kwong, 27 June 2016). In this regard she describes the process of writing the book as one of simply retelling the producers’ stories as they were told to her; “it was not a conscious thought that came across my mind,” she said, to focus on any of the hardships or difficulties of the work, because these were not what the producers spoke about (Kylie Kwong, 27 June 2016). Certainly, there is also effacement of Kwong’s own professional work in It Tastes Better. After all, these are farmers and producers with whom Kwong has a business relationship—they are the suppliers to her restaurant—but her visits to them are typically couched in terms of pleasure and friendship, rather than business dealings. Nonetheless, the fact that the book’s main images of work reflect the work of Kwong’s restaurant team, and not of the producers who supply to it, is indicative of a tendency to idealise food production in ways that present the labour of foodwork as part of an “essential self ” (Adkins and Lury 1999) rather than as a performance of particular professional or work identities. We can see this most clearly through It Tastes Better’s tendency to discursively align the qualities of the producer with the qualities of the product—a strategy also used to great effect in Maggie Beer’s self-branding (see Chap. 4). For example, Mal and Lola Orr and Tony Scherer are paralleled with their potatoes and wines, respectively. The Orrs’ potatoes are described as being “like them” because they have “real integrity and character—they are robust and not at all watery” (Kwong 2010: 284). Scherer is described as “so genuine and so soulful” and that “his wine reflects these qualities” (Kwong 2010: 49). Here, the moral and ethical

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characteristics of the producers (integrity, soulfulness, ‘character’) are rendered in the taste and physical form of their products. As Kwong says in her book’s introduction, it is these farmers’ “intimate relationship” with, and connection to, their land, their animals and their plants that is the “very reason why their produce tastes so much better” (2010: xiii). As she later elaborates, these intimate relationships derive from contentedness, where producers adopt a “holistic” way of living that leaves them “very happy with their lot” and not “want[ing] for more” (Kylie Kwong, 27 June 2016). These images of contented farmers working in idyllic ­surroundings, doing things “properly” (Kwong 2010: i) to produce products of integrity, and overcoming hardships by taking a positive attitude, as well as the suggestion that the ethical intentions and characteristics of the farmers can be conveyed through the taste of their produce, all work to construct a particular set of relationships between ‘good’ farmers and ‘good’ food. Like Gourmet Farmer’s cheesemakers who clock off at lunchtime (see Chap. 5), It Tastes Better reflects a tendency of other popular depictions of alternative and small-scale production to emphasise the happiness and satisfaction of the farmer/producer as a necessary precursor to the production of ‘good’, ‘ethical’ and delicious food. In The Promise of Happiness Sara Ahmed warns about the normative and disciplinary dimensions of happiness: happiness, she says, has become a “moral injunction” that engages bodies in technologies of self-production (2010: 35, 43). In It Tastes Better, the images of farmers and food producers offer examples of one of Ahmed’s (2010: 38) “happy objects” that circulate and accumulate affective value as signs of the “good life”. Just as alternative food discourses often emphasise the link between “happy animals” and “happy meat” (Pilgrim 2013), there is a similar linking here of happy farmers with ‘good’ food. The effect of this is to make the food appear pleasurable and desirable while keeping much of the ‘actual’ labour invisible. In these types of media representations of farming, we can see parallels to the occupational cultures McRobbie (2016: 40) observed within the creative workforce, which she describes as highly normative in their demand for perpetual cheerfulness, offering little space for negative moods or bad affects, lest they compromise the appearance of ‘successful’ personas. These are similar to the work cultures Luckman (2015) identifies within the craft scene, in which producers frequently adopt the types of personas and presentational forms that construct coherent

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work-life narratives in which hardship or failure is minimised and the integration of professional and personal identities foregrounded. We can see similar regulatory practices in the representation of small-scale farmers and food producers. For the craft producers observed by Luckman (2015: 80, 116, 119), the “performance of…labour idylls” both charge the handmade object with affective force and work in the service of “selling the dream of a perfect life…as much as, if not more so than, craft items themselves”. In the case of It Tastes Better’s farmers and food producers, practices of “passionate work” transform food from an economic to an affective commodity that (quite literally) tastes of the ethical values and desirable lifestyles of its producers. This serves not only to construct the story of the producers as essential to eating pleasure (much as it did for Michael Pollan’s experience of “sublime” roast chicken in Chap. 2), but it also necessitates the demonstration of ‘good’ affects, particularly in the form of happy, affective labour, as a means to shore up the ethics of the produce, to fuse producers’ identities and lifestyles with their products, and to replicate hegemonic notions of “proper” food production.3 Such notions of labour are not merely issues of representation or behaviours imposed or attributed from ‘outside’. Affective labour is also a disciplinary practice, as part of which individuals adopt particular “technologies of the (hegemonic, interpellated) self ” in order to produce desirable, (self-)branded identities (Luckman 2015: 118; see also McRobbie 2016: 36). In the food space, this involves self-branding, much like that of Brand Maggie Beer (see Chap. 4) in which the qualities of the producer and the product are fused. In the case of It Tastes Better, the specific representations of foodwork are not simply imposed by the text, nor are its “labour idylls” (Luckman 2015: 119) constructed only as saleable fantasies for the middle-class, urban readership that is the primary audience for Kwong’s books. In fact, the producers who appeared in It Tastes Better were unanimously happy with their portrayal in the book, and felt that the terms in which they were represented genuinely reflected their stories and experiences of a life devoted to food production. Comments such as “we loved working on [It Tastes Better] with Kylie” and “[working on It Tastes Better] was an absolute delight” (e.g.

3 As Kwong reflects of her own experiences of eating, “the carrot suddenly takes on a whole new life when we know that it’s Rob Bauer’s carrots and…hear about Rob Bauer’s amazing life stories” (Kylie Kwong, 27 June 2016).

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food producer, 28 September 2016) were common across the producer interviews. This is remarkable given the varying degrees of satisfaction experienced by other food industry personnel involved with food media (see Chaps. 5 and 8). Kwong’s recollection that her book simply reflects the producers’ stories as they were told to her was confirmed through my own interviews with the producers, which equally tended to diminish the hardships associated with food production careers and to present the work as a “labour of love”. In fact, even when specifically pressed for details, producers rarely spoke about the challenges of the labour involved in professional foodwork. One described farmers as “the biggest whingers there are” (food producer, 28 September 2016), but across the interviews (including that farmer’s own), producers’ voices filled with pride as they spoke of their love for the plants and animals they raise and the products they produce. Many used highly affective terms, such as “love” and “labour of love”, to describe their work. Some explicitly downplayed the extent to which they felt their work was indeed work. Comments such as, “I don’t really consider [farming] a job…, it’s my life” (food producer, 14 May 2016) were common. One said that he did not see his work as real work, but as a “passion” and a “hobby”: Like, I don’t go to work, I actually go have fun. And I say that to my girls who work for me and my wife, ‘you have to have fun every day, it has to be fun. If it becomes a drudgery then you need to go and have a holiday.’ And my wife says, ‘I need a holiday’…And what we do is we go away and we look at other food businesses, and whether it’s a coffee shop, whether it’s a Chinese restaurant, we look at service and how people look after other people. (food producer, 28 September 2016)

While for some farmers, continuous work is seen as part of the nature of the job—as one sheep farmer put it, “animals…don’t have weekends” (food producer, 14 May 2016)—for those able to take a break, even holidays become opportunities for market and business research, described in terms of “fun” rather than “work”. As is the case with the “presence bleed” and “function creep” (Gregg 2011: 2, 23) of other work cultures, being “on” all the time is justified as both necessary and pleasurable (see also Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2010). On the whole, producers spent far less time talking about the potentially challenging dimensions of their work, and frequently diminished

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these challenges when they did. Some talked briefly about the physical toll of farm labour (e.g. food producer, 28 September 2016; food producer, 1 August 2016), the challenges of the weather (e.g. food producer, 28 September 2016; food producer, 11 May 2016; food producer, 14 May 2016), problems of cash flow (e.g. food producer, 1 August 2016; food producer, 1 May 2016; food producer, 28 September 2016) and their irritations with bureaucracy (e.g. food producer, 28 September 2016; food producer, 3 June 2016; food producer, 1 May 2016), but most said that they only communicated to customers the challenges and hard work involved if specifically asked (e.g. food producer, 28 September 2016; food producer, 1 August 2016; food producer, 1 May 2016; food producer, 28 September 2016). For example, a potato grower talked about her farmers’ market customers in the following terms: I think it’s good for them to know [how the potatoes are produced]…We have people who come to us at the [farmers’] market who say, ‘we’ve never ever thought about what went into producing this potato until we asked you’, and…they will ask, which is lovely, and often you wish you’d had the time to really tell them, but just in a few words when there is a queue of people waiting, it’s very hard. But they’re interested,…and this is a good thing… If they’re interested enough to ask, then we’re quite happy to tell them, [but] we’re not standing there and saying, ‘look at this potato, we worked hard to produce it’. (food producer, 28 September 2016)

This combination of a desire for customers to know how the produce was grown with a reluctance to impose this information without invitation was common across all the producers interviewed. Various versions of “when they ask…I tell them about” were typical, as was a hesitancy to go into too much detail if there was a long line of customers at the farmers’ market or if they were unsure how much customers wanted to know. The one producer who talked at length about the hardships of farming, and pointed to urban consumers’ lack of understanding of the realities of farm life as a significant concern, nonetheless rhetorically distanced these matters from her own experiences and practices of foodwork. When discussing media representations of farming, she points out that what we primarily see are the “Instagram farm[s]” that convey the “more palatable side…of farming”, rather than real farmers dealing with

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real challenges, such as outbreaks of flystrike in summer, constant uncertainty, little political voice and lack of downtime: There is very little downtime in farming now, and I think that’s something that is of great concern. People aren’t getting enough time with their families, and their brain and their bodies, to have a bit of a break. (food producer, 14 May 2016)

This, she says later, is because: Farmers now need to be vets, they need to be agronomists, they need to be stockbrokers, they need to be mechanics and there is such a broad range of skills that they need, apart from the fact that they need a kind of psychological strength, which is pretty much beyond anything that is demanded in any other profession I can think of, except perhaps the armed forces. (food producer, 14 May 2016)

Although she frames the nature of farm work in very strong terms— as something that demands a mental resilience equivalent only to that required of military personnel—rhetorically at least, she largely distances this from her own experiences. The challenges of farm labour are described in the third person: “people aren’t getting”, “farmers now need”, “they need a…psychological strength”. That is, these are challenges that are couched in terms of how they affect “people” and “farmers”, not in terms of how (or if) they affect her. Instead, her descriptions of her own work are filled with the same affective discourses as the other producers, particularly when she discusses the work’s pleasures: There are so many times during the day [when working] when I look up and am just filled with pleasure about what I’m seeing—whether it’s the sky, whether it’s the first proper rains that we’ve just had, whether it’s the sun setting…I feel very fulfilled now because of that deep connection with nature. (food producer, 14 May 2016)

This kind of focus on a deep sense of fulfilment was characteristic of the way that most of the producers talked about their work; media’s emphasis on the “more palatable side…of farming” was also typically replicated in farmers’ own discourses.

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Passionate Work and the Politics of Representation The representations of farmers and food producers in It Tastes Better are simultaneously a product both of what makes a saleable commodity (both saleable food products and saleable cookbooks) and of farmers’ own professional discourses. In both cases, questions of labour and the realities of work are largely invisible. They reflect an alignment of the traditionally stoic personas of farmers with new forms of desirable representation—new imperatives and technologies of the self that demand the performance of happy, affective labour and the minimisation of bad affect. If we can argue that “passionate work” is one of the presentational forms now demanded of the type of food politics that we often see in food media, then farmers who speak in these terms are more likely to appear in these types of media representations, and those most likely to appear in these types of media representations are most likely to speak in these terms. The hardships involved in farming are widely known; for example, farmer suicide is acknowledged as a serious problem in many parts of the world.4 But representations of farmers in texts like It Tastes Better frequently convey an impression that small-scale production, a disposition of gratitude and not “want[ing] for more” (Kylie Kwong, 27 June 2016) largely insulates farmers from the hardships experienced by those in large-scale agriculture, where producers are at the mercy of major supermarkets and fluctuating commodity prices (see Chap. 7). As the examples from It Tastes Better show, texts such as this do achieve some aspects of their pedagogical goals to show us where our food comes from—we learn, for example, that this food is grown organically by people with great dedication to their vocation—but it does not tell us everything, particularly about the sacrifices and hardships that people may endure to produce this food. If workers in the creative industries are expected to adopt the strategies of the “entrepreneurial self ” (see McRobbie 2016; Duffy 2015) with all the demands for affective labour that this entails, we are also seeing something similar in the realms of agriculture and food production—at least for those seeking to engage with popular media.

4 For an Australian example of programmes designed to combat the problem, see http:// www.farmerhealth.org.au/page/research-centre/the-ripple-effect, accessed March 2017.

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The identities that we see in texts like It Tastes Better are a reflection of the culturally available discourses through which to talk about ‘good’ farming and food production and of the types of farmers and food producers able to gain access to these types of forums. The personas and presentational forms through which contemporary food politics is mobilised are appealing for both media and food industries, and reflect clear synergies in their needs and agendas, but for the farmers that appear in food media, the adoption of these personas and presentational forms both benefits them and obscures their working conditions. This is significant because, as we will see in the two chapters that follow, the representational strategies used here, while intended to convey the ‘good life’ that can come from the production and consumption of ‘good’ food and to facilitate a connection between producer and consumer, also find great compatibility with the representational strategies of other organisations (such as major supermarkets) that have quite a different food politics. This, I suggest in this book’s Conclusion, may be one of the unintended—but perhaps inevitable consequences—of a food politics invested in pleasure.

References Adkins, Lisa, and Celia Lury. 1999. The labour of identity: Performing identities, performing economies. Economy and Society 28: 598–614. Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The promise of happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Banks, Mark, and David Hesmondhalgh. 2009. Looking for work in creative industries policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy 15: 415–430. Batali, Mario, and Jim Webster. 2014. America farm to table: Simple, delicious recipes celebrating local farmers. New York: Grand Central Life and Style. Burchardt, Jeremy. 2002. Paradise lost: Rural idyll and social change in England since 1800. London: Tauris. Duffy, Brooke Erin. 2015. The romance of work: Gender and aspirational labour in the digital culture industries. International Journal of Cultural Studies 19: 1–17. Duncan, Carol. 2013. Eating insects. Ethical, sustainable and crunchy. ABC Newcastle. http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2013/05/22/3764772. htm. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. Frew, Wendy. 2007. Writer weighs in with good fish and tips. The Sydney Morning Herald, August 24. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/ writer-weighs-in-with-good-fish-and-tips/2007/08/23/1187462441723. html. Accessed 27 Jan 2017.

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Gregg, Melissa. 2009. Learning to (love) labour: Production cultures and the affective turn. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6: 209–214. Gregg, Melissa. 2011. Work’s intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Guthman, Julie. 2000. Agrarian dreams: The paradox of organic farming in California. California: University of California Press. Hardt, Michael. 1999. Affective labor. Boundary 2: 89–100. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin Books. Hesmondhalgh, David, and Sarah Baker. 2010. ‘A very complicated version of freedom’: Conditions and experiences of creative labour in three cultural industries. Poetics 38: 4–20. Kear, Adrian. 1999. Cooking time with Gertrude Stein. Performance Research 4: 44–55. Kwong, Kylie. 2003. Recipes and stories. Victoria: Viking. Kwong, Kylie. 2006. Simple Chinese cooking. Australia: Lantern. Kwong, Kylie. 2010. It tastes better: Over 100 new recipes using my favourite sustainable produce. Australia: Penguin. Kwong, Kylie. 2012. Kylie Kwong’s simple Chinese cooking class. Australia: Lantern. Luckman, Susan. 2015. Craft and the creative economy. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Marx, Leo. 1964. The machine in the garden. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 2016. Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Cambridge: Polity. Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne. 2014. Challenging the agrarian imaginary: Farmworker-led food movements and the potential for farm labor justice. Human Geography 7: 85–99. Nixon, Sean, and Ben Crewe. 2004. Pleasure at work? Gender, consumption and work-based identities in the creative industries. Consumption, Markets and Culture 7: 129–147. Pilgrim, Karyn. 2013. ‘Happy cows’, ‘happy beef’: A critique of the rationales for ethical meat. Environmental Studies 3: 111–127. Silvasti, Tiina. 2003. The cultural model of ‘the good farmer’ and the environmental question in Finland. Agriculture and Human Values 20: 143–150. Swenson, Rebecca. 2009. Domestic divo? Televised treatments of masculinity, femininity and food. Critical Studies in Media Communication 26: 36–53. Wark, McKenzie. 2013. A more lovingly made world. Cultural Studies Review 19: 296–304. Williams, Raymond. 1973. The country and the city. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART III

Appropriations

CHAPTER 7

Media, Supermarkets and the Strategic Manufacture of Consumer Trust

As the previous chapters have shown, the types of food values and practices that receive the most sustained attention within food media texts are those primarily associated with ‘alternative’ food systems and smallscale, artisanal production. The pleasures—and the ratings success—of programmes such as River Cottage and Gourmet Farmer, for example, are in their nostalgic re-enchantment of traditional food practices threatened by industrialised food production. Similarly, the ‘quality’ markers of Maggie Beer Products or those of the producers profiled in It Tastes Better lie in their deep connection to place and in consumers’ capacity to know the faces, and understand the values, of the people who produce their food. Against this backdrop of bucolic rural scenery and contented artisan producers looms an ‘Other’ against which this ‘good’ food is implicitly or explicitly defined: supermarkets. In contemporary food politics, supermarkets are frequently the public faces of industrial food, and the subject of substantial criticism for their negative impacts on food production and consumption. Supermarket practices have been the subject of exposés by proponents of the so-called ‘real’ food movement, including locavore writers (see Chap. 2). In In Defense of Food, for example, Michael Pollan contrasts supermarket food with the healthier, more authentic food that can be purchased directly from growers at farmers’ markets and CSAs; supermarkets are merely places filled with “foodish products” containing ingredients that “your ancestors simply wouldn’t recognise as food” (Pollan 2008: 149). In the UK Joanna Blythman’s (2007) Shopped: The Shocking Power of British © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_7

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Supermarkets warns about the dangers of food systems dominated by supermarkets, of the impacts of this on consumer health and well-being, as well as on the livelihoods of farmers and suppliers. There is also now an extensive academic literature critiquing the role of supermarkets in restructuring agri-food systems, supply chains and food production practices in Australia and elsewhere (see Burch et al. 2013; Burch and Lawrence 2007b; Dixon 2002). Within this literature, the supermarket is understood not just as a food system actor that exerts considerable power over the food system (Dixon 2008); its practices are also understood to epitomise ‘Food from Nowhere’ (Campbell 2009), in which the industrial, technical, geographical and social processes of food production are largely invisible. Within this context, the rise of alternative food networks and practices—farmers’ markets, organic box schemes, local foods and sustainable agriculture movements, among others—have often been understood as a response to the consumer disenchantment with industrial, supermarketised food (Goodman et al. 2012). The size and market power of supermarkets, and the large-scale food producers and manufacturers that this necessitates that they deal with, means that, with the exception of heavily branded spaces (such as daytime television programmes or some food websites), ‘supermarket food’ has limited appeal for food media. It would be impossible to imagine, for instance, a commercially successful version of River Cottage or Gourmet Farmer that shows Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Matthew Evans learning how to run a large agribusiness operation—except, perhaps, for the purposes of exposé or critique. As noted in Chap. 2, food media’s celebration of the small-scale and the artisanal reflects, in part, the politics of its primarily middle-class audience, which has both the economic and cultural capital to choose to shop at farmers’ markets or gourmet food stores, and to see ethical food choices as part of the construction of ‘good’ citizenship and sustainable consumption practices. But food media audiences also continue to shop, at least some of the time, at the supermarket. As a result, supermarkets have been subject to rigorous critique and have attempted to capitalise on the affordances of changing media and consumer landscapes in which food is increasingly expected to reflect particular ethical and political values. This is a phenomenon that has been occurring across the anglophone West, but whereas elsewhere it has resulted in an ever-more segmented retail market designed to cater to particular market niches (Wholefoods in the USA, for example, or Waitrose in the UK), Australia’s unusually concentrated, but also undifferentiated, supermarket sector not only

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means that debates about supermarket practices have been especially intense in the Australian context, but also that the battle between retailers has been primarily fought on price (Mitchell 2013b: 8). Negative media coverage is especially damaging to supermarket reputations in a region with only two major retailers, both of which sell many of the same products and replicate most of the same methods of dealing with customers and suppliers (Knox 2015: 17). This has resulted in swifter shifts in brand identities and strategies to re-engage consumers with supermarkets and supermarket food than has tended to occur elsewhere. Drawing on Lindgreen’s (2003) work on trust as a “strategic variable” for the food industry, Carol Richards, Geoffrey Lawrence and David Burch (2011: 29) call this process the “strategic manufacturing of consumer trust”. For Richards et al. (2011: 31), the essence of supermarket trading involves anonymous relationships between retailer and consumer, and so is not well suited to building and maintaining relationships of trust. With growth in the alternative food sector driven, at least in part, by the perception of more open and transparent trust relationships between producers and consumers (Goodman et al. 2012: 242), supermarkets have attempted to counter declining consumer trust in supermarket food through a range of strategies. These include reputational enhancement and direct quality claims through private standards labelling and, most relevant to this chapter, through what Richards et al. (2011: 29) call “discursive claims-making”. Discursive claims-making involves symbolic representations of “authenticity” and “tradition” as a means of renegotiating the contested terrain of supermarket food provisioning (Richards et al. 2011: 29, 38, 42). For example, product packaging may feature images of storybook farms (much like the ones that litter popular food media texts), which look quite different from the farms actually required to supply enough food to a major retail chain (Richards et al. (2011: 40). Since Richards, Lawrence and Burch published their work in 2011, these strategies of trust manufacture now also include more explicit attempts to engage with food politics and food media tropes. Specifically, it has resulted in a range of strategies to “ethicalize” (Lewis and Huber 2015: 294) supermarket brand identities. This has been particularly important in Australia, where criticisms of supermarket power and its effects on the sustainability and viability of food systems have been especially intense. Australia, with its thriving food media industry and large food media audiences, has one of the most concentrated retail grocery markets in the world. Two major players, Coles and Woolworths, share around 70% of

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Australia’s $89.8 billion grocery market, with smaller retailers Aldi, IGA (Independent Grocers of Australia) and other supermarkets holding the remaining 30% (Roy Morgan Research 2016). Coles and Woolworths are part of larger conglomerates that also own a range of other retail outlets, including petrol stations, bottle shops, pharmacies, variety stores, hardware chains and office supply franchises. This significantly extends their market reach and means that even when taking into account those who never shop at either Coles or Woolworths, every man, woman and child in Australia spends an average of $100 a week at an outlet owned by one of the major supermarkets (Knox 2015: 3). Such substantial market power has led to Coles and Woolworths being subjected to increased regulatory oversight, including investigations by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), proceedings in the Federal Court and a Senate Inquiry, as well as criticisms for their perceived anti-competitive and duopolistic practices. These criticisms canvass a range of issues (from the impact on small retailers to cheap foreign imports), but in parallel with popular food media’s intensified interest in food provenance and in putting a face to the producer, mainstream media coverage of supermarket practices has also increasingly focused on supermarkets’ (allegedly poor) treatment of farmers and suppliers. This has necessitated that both major supermarkets tailor their brand management strategies to engage with—some may say appropriate—discourses of food politics. With supermarkets around the world responding similarly to criticisms of their practices, Australian retailers’ attempts to reshape their brands in ways that connect to the values associated with discourses of food provenance and ethics not only highlight the new opportunities and challenges of these politics for supermarkets specifically, but also further reveal some of the effects of the contemporary media’s intensified interest in food. The chapters in Part 3 look at the ways in which Australian supermarkets have sought to engage with some of the discourses of food politics I have been looking at so far in this book. In particular, they highlight how these discourses are now shaping media products and industry relationships in the mainstream food sectors in much the same way as they do in the alternative; in fact, the mainstream is now increasingly drawing upon the coherent set of representations we associate with the alternative in order to establish new brand identities for major retailers. To this end, Part 3 will examine these phenomena by looking at two aspects of supermarkets’ attempt to “ethicalize” their brand identities: conventional and “integrated” (Spurgeon 2013) advertising.

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This chapter begins by examining the mainstream media coverage associated with Coles’ and Woolworths’ market dominance. It will focus on 2011–2014, which was a period of peak concern about Australian supermarket practices, and a number of the issues raised at this time have generated some of the supermarkets’ most interesting and sophisticated engagements with media. While there are a range of issues that could be examined, I focus on the two that received the largest amount of media coverage and the most creative supermarket responses: the ACCC’s damning investigation of supermarkets’ bullying of suppliers; and the events dubbed the ‘milk wars’, which saw both supermarkets sell their own-brand milk for a considerably discounted $1 per litre. While the details of these two issues are probably familiar to Australian readers, discussion of the news coverage is provided to outline the specific contexts and flashpoints to which the media strategies discussed in Part 3 were designed to respond. This chapter then looks at two celebrity ‘brand partnerships’ through which the supermarkets sought to respond to these criticisms and, in the terms of Lewis and Huber (2015: 297), to “recalibrate and ‘reimagine’” their brands along ethical lines: Curtis Stone’s partnership with Coles; and Jamie Oliver’s with Woolworths. Both were primarily mobilised through traditional advertising campaigns that drew upon Stone’s and Oliver’s star power and well-known commitments to food ethics and sustainability. I show how these relationships were designed to draw upon the intertextual resonances of the celebrity chefs and their food politics to provide counter-narratives to ongoing criticisms of supermarket practices; however, these relationships came with both benefits and challenges to the supermarket brands and to the celebrity chefs themselves. Chapter 8 looks at the more sophisticated ‘integrated’ advertising strategies used as part of the supermarket sponsorship of primetime food television programmes My Kitchen Rules and Recipe to Riches. The primary purpose of these chapters is to show how negative media coverage of food system practices is resulting in media and food industry alliances—in these cases, between supermarkets, celebrity chefs and television cooking shows—that adopt the images, tropes and personalities of food media in ways that seek to align ‘conventional’ food sectors with the connotations and values of the ‘alternative’. This works to both draw upon and shape the meanings associated with contemporary food politics. My thinking in these chapters has also been underpinned by two key questions: what happens to contemporary food politics when its recognisable principles and signifiers are adopted by supermarkets in the quest to “strategically manufacture consumer trust”? Are there particular characteristics

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of this politics that leave it especially open to this kind of appropriation? I will come back to these questions in the Conclusion, but first I outline the media criticisms of Australian supermarkets and the supermarkets’ responses, beginning with their alleged bullying of suppliers.

Supermarkets Under Attack There has been extensive media coverage of issues related to Australian supermarkets, with intense competition between the retail chains and ongoing investigations of retail practices keeping issues of supermarket power in the news for much of the last decade. Coles and Woolworths have been under investigation by the ACCC for a number of issues related to their allegedly anti-competitive and duopolistic practices since at least the mid-2000s. While most investigations have cleared the supermarket chains of any wrongdoing, two resulted in Federal Court action. These were highly damaging to the supermarkets’ reputations, leading to sustained criticisms over a period of years. Both cases related to supermarkets’ bullying of suppliers. The ACCC formally opened its investigation in 2011. By the time the matter reached court in 2014 Australian newspapers averaged over 300 stories a year detailing allegations of supermarkets’ misuse of market power. While the evidence primarily concerned Coles’ treatment of suppliers, and it was only Coles against which court action was taken, the news coverage frequently mentioned both Coles and Woolworths, and this posed significant PR and brand management problems for both retailers. Neither was especially successful in getting ahead of this negativity, and both would eventually take their PR battle out of the news and into other media strategies and platforms. The ACCC’s investigations in 2011 opened a Pandora’s Box of damning allegations. The investigations were first prompted by claims from suppliers that Coles and Woolworths were adopting many of the same bullying tactics and misuse of market power as their UK counterparts (see Blythman 2007). Indeed, many news reports during this time noted the British supermarket pedigrees of Coles and Woolworths executives, and suggested that they were hired to replicate international strategies to squeeze suppliers and drive up profits (e.g. Lunn 2011: 17; Priest 2011: 4; Washington 2011a: 3). These included tactics such as: “cliffing” (where suppliers are given an ultimatum to agree to tougher terms or have their products pushed off the shelf); terminating supply contracts with little or no notice; removing products from supermarket advertising catalogues during contract renegotiations; making suppliers pay for

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breakages after they had delivered the goods; and the imposition of other fees without warning or negotiation (Washington 2011b: 6). In 2012 it was reported that Woolworths had “asked” suppliers to find cost savings of between five and ten per cent within two weeks or face being removed from supermarket shelves; one food manufacturer described it as “the most brutal negotiations that I have experienced in my three decades in the industry” (qtd. in Hawthorne and Heffernan 2012: 1). Other stories suggested that the retailers were deleting branded lines in favour of private label products unless suppliers agreed to reduce prices, pay extra fees, or supply house brands (Mitchell 2013c: 8). It was even being claimed that some suppliers were being forced to cover the costs of having their own products removed from supermarket shelves to make way for private labels (Speedy 2013: 17). The media reports were damning, with some alleging that supermarkets’ deliberate and coordinated bullying of suppliers had contributed to the transfer of $4 billion a year in profits from suppliers to the major retail chains (Crowe 2013: 6). As senior management from both retailers were issuing statements denying that they were using their market power to bully suppliers and eliminate competition through private label offerings, even multinationals like Heinz and Coca Cola joined in the criticism. Heinz called Australia the “worst market” in the world, describing it as an “inhospitable environment” for suppliers (qtd. in Kruger et al. 2012: 6). When iconic Australian brands collapsed, including Unibic (makers of Anzac biscuits) and Rosella (makers of tomato sauce), most reports blamed the price squeeze from supermarkets as a key factor in their failure (e.g. Kruger et al. 2012: 6; Wilkins 2014b: 21). Responding to the negative publicity and to fears of government intervention, the supermarkets launched a voluntary code of conduct to get ahead of some of the criticisms (Mitchell 2013a: 1), but by May 2014 the first of the two Federal Court actions had commenced. While these cases only involved Coles, the revelations that emerged were damaging not only to Coles and its parent company Wesfarmers, they also shed light on broader issues of supermarket power that posed a problem for the supermarket sector as a whole. In both court actions, Coles was accused of “unconscionable conduct” in its dealings with suppliers (Mitchell and Papadakis 2014: 1). In the first case, the supermarket chain was accused of bullying suppliers into contributing $16 million in rebates to fund a supply chain upgrade (Mitchell and Papadakis 2014: 1). Managers were given a “script” to instruct them on how to ask for additional payments, and were told to give suppliers just days to comply or face

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“commercial consequences”, such as range reviews, removal from shelves or exclusion from promotions (Mitchell and Papadakis 2014: 1; Mitchell 2014a: 35). If suppliers did not pay, managers were to elevate the issue further up the Coles hierarchy, including up to senior management (Mitchell and Papadakis 2014: 1). Although Coles initially stated it would “vigorously defend” itself against all claims, it eventually admitted in court that it had indeed warned suppliers that it would refuse to stock new products and would withhold information on sales forecasts unless they agreed to pay the additional rebate, and that it had used formalised scripts and had “escalated” suppliers up the management chain when they refused to pay (Mitchell 2014b: 21). The second Federal Court case commenced in October of the same year. This time it centred on allegations of the unconscionable conduct against suppliers that occurred on Coles’ so-called “profit days” or “perfect profit days” (Greenblat 2014: 1). On these days, when Coles found gaps between its expected and real profits on suppliers’ products, suppliers were asked to pay the difference so as to ensure a “perfect profit”. Evidence was presented in court to show that when Coles’ profits from selling Oates cleaning products, for example, fell short by $326,590 in 2011, the retailer demanded that Oates pay this amount, without providing an explanation of how it came to this figure nor of how this gap occurred. When Oates refused to pay, Coles deducted $246,400 from a payment due to the supplier. Not long after, Oates agreed to pay $365,200 after Coles flagged a “range review” (Mitchell and Wilkins 2014: 1). As in the first case, Coles initially denied the allegations, describing its communications with suppliers as “normal topics for business discussions” between grocery suppliers and retailers around the world (qtd. in Mitchell and Wilkins 2014: 1). But as the evidence mounted Wesfarmers Group Managing Director Richard Goyder and Coles Managing Director John Durkan apologised for the retailers’ treatment of suppliers (Mitchell and Durkin 2014: 1), and agreed to pay $10 million in fines, $1.25 million in legal costs, and an estimated $16 million refund to suppliers to settle both cases (Knox 2015: 123–124). This was widely reported as an “embarrassing mea culpa” (Mitchell and Durkin 2014: 1) and a cynical attempt to “kill the bad publicity” by pre-empting the (likely to be unfavourable) outcome of the court judgement (Ferguson 2014: 23).

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At around the same time that Coles and Wesfarmers were issuing apologies, reports of Woolworths’ bullying of suppliers also surfaced.1 Reports claimed that Woolworths, as part of its “Cheap Cheap” marketing campaign, was slashing retail prices of some items below the cost paid to suppliers—and was asking suppliers to make up the difference. Woolworths used many of the same tactics as Coles—threats of range reviews, loss of shelf position, escalation to senior managers—as well as adopting the additional strategy of telling suppliers that payment requests were being made with the “endorsement” of the ACCC (Hawthorne 2014a: 1, 2014b: 8).2 When details of the negotiations reached the media Woolworths’ staff received emails urging them to ignore reports of unconscionable conduct and to continue as normal (Hawthorne 2014b: 8). One food industry executive quoted in The Age described the “brutality of the threats and lack of ethics [as] worse than what Coles was accused of” (qtd. in Hawthorne 2014a: 1). For its part, Woolworths released a statement saying that it was simply doing its best to reduce prices for customers’ benefit and that the company “categorically rejects any suggestion that it has acted unconscionably” (qtd. in Hawthorne 2014a: 1). Each of these stories received wide national media coverage and, with lengthy ACCC investigations and Federal Court proceedings offering a regular supply of new reports over a period of years, this posed an ongoing PR crisis for the supermarket duopoly. There were some stories and opinion pieces defending the supermarkets and praising their success (e.g. The Australian 2013: 13; Fahrer 2012: 71; McLeod 2012: 21), but the media coverage was overwhelmingly negative. As well as reporting details of the investigations and legal cases, the stories frequently expressed concern about what one early report characterised as the “rise and rise” of supermarket private label products (Lunn 2011: 17). Private labels include supermarket own brands, the lower-priced products that bear a supermarket label and which compete directly with the products of brand manufacturers (see Burch and Lawrence 2007a: 100). 1 These eventually became the basis of a Federal Court action against the supermarket chain in 2016, although Woolworths was ultimately cleared of charges of unconscionable conduct. These events are outside the scope of this chapter’s focus on 2011–2014, but more information can be found in Durie (2016). 2 The ACCC responded with a public statement that it does not offer endorsements of business practices: “The ACCC does not have a practice [outside formal processes such as authorisation] of endorsing or approving conduct,” it said (qtd. in Hawthorne 2014b: 8).

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The intensified media coverage of supermarkets’ treatment of suppliers between 2011 and 2014 coincided with a period of substantial growth in supermarket private labels, with commentators at the time predicting that private labels would grow from around 20–40% of the packaged goods market by 2015 (Washington 2011b: 6).3 The main advantage of private labels is that their vertical integration allows supermarkets to decrease costs and increase control of the supply chain through the flexible sourcing that own brands allow (Burch and Lawrence 2007a: 101). While, as both the literature and supermarket representatives themselves note, supermarkets have increasingly sought to use own brands as a space of innovation and develop novel food products ahead of traditional brand manufacturers (Burch and Lawrence 2007a: 109–110; supermarket representative, 13 April 2015; supermarket representative, 15 October 2015), news reports predominantly describe private labels as merely cheap knock-offs of branded products (e.g. Ferguson 2012: 8). A report by Adele Ferguson (2012: 8) in The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, presented the similarity of supermarket own brands to proprietary branded products as something that allows supermarkets to capitalise on the familiarity of established product lines without the investment in advertising, marketing and product development of their branded competitors. A number of reports also suggested that the rise of private labels was leading to the destruction of Australian brands and contributing to the rise of foreign imports. For example, a feature in The Sydney Morning Herald on Coles’ supplier-bullying tactics compared supermarket own brands unfavourably to their branded alternatives, highlighting how major brands like Edgell and SPC use all-Australian produce, compared with private label products that source cheaper ingredients from Italy, Thailand, Greece and South Africa (Washington 2011b: 6). Another story about the first Federal Court case against Coles saw many of its column inches devoted not to legal proceedings but to discussion of private labels—about how Coles’ Rice Puffs are virtually identical to Kellogg’s Rice Bubbles, or Woolworths’ Snapz to Arnott’s Jatz, for example (Bita 2014: 16). In such examples, the complexities of the legal cases were often reduced to the problem of private labels, with many suggesting that supermarket bullying of suppliers

3 The actual growth has been far more modest. At the time of writing, private labels make up 25% of all supermarket sales (Chung 2016).

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was probably a deliberate strategy to increase the market penetration of supermarket own brands. While claims about supplier bullying generated substantial negative media coverage, as Malcolm Knox (2015: 92) remarks in his book Supermarket Monsters, it is one thing for supermarkets to go after relatively faceless suppliers, it is quite another when the supermarket squeeze is seen to be directly affecting Australian farmers. Coles’ and Woolworths’ treatment of suppliers generated sustained negative media coverage, but when attention turned to the retailers’ treatment of farmers—central figures in Australian myths of nation (Murphy 2008)—this prompted an even greater media and public backlash. Media coverage of supermarkets’ relationship to farmers canvassed a range of issues over the period 2011–2014, but the events that generated the most attention were those now dubbed the ‘milk wars’, in which both supermarkets reduced the price of their own-brand milk to a considerably discounted $1 per litre. Given that the milk wars occurred while the negative publicity about supplier bullying was also circulating, they further amplified the supermarkets’ PR problems and demanded more complex methods for managing them. On the Australia Day public holiday on 26 January 2011, Coles announced that it was cutting the price of its own-brand milk by one third to $1 per litre. The price cut formed part of the retailers’ “Down Down” marketing campaign, which was focused on bringing down the price of key staples, including milk, bread, oil and toilet paper. Television, print and online advertisements featured slogans such as: Because we all buy milk… …we’ve brought the price of Coles Brand Milk down. Not on special. DOWN and STAYING DOWN, every day! Quality food costs less at Coles.4

Woolworths, while critical of the price cut and declaring it unsustainable for the dairy industry, immediately followed suit with an equivalent reduction in the price of its milk. Coles’ communications were all customer-focused; when announcing the price cut, then Merchandise Director John Durkan said that the new year was always an expensive time for customers, and cheaper milk would offer significant savings for households (Fuller 2011: 3). The retailer had 4 Ellipses,

bolding and capital letters in original advertising materials.

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expected customers to view this news positively and, although sales of own-brand milk did jump by more than 5% within three weeks of the price cut (Murphy 2011), Coles also appeared to misjudge the public sentiment. While timed to coincide with Australia Day celebrations and tightened new year budgets, the announcement also came at a time when Australia’s dairy regions in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria were experiencing record flooding following a period of record drought. A week after the announcement, Cyclone Yasi hit northern Australia, further devastating Queensland dairy regions. With only one message at the centre of the campaign (that low prices are better for consumers), Coles found itself largely unprepared for the scale of the criticism. Woolworths, which itself remained critical of the price cut, also experienced significant backlash. Between 2011 and 2014, around 5000 articles were published on milk discounting across the metropolitan and rural press, lending both sustained visibility to the issue and placing sustained pressure on the supermarkets. As was to be expected, rural and regional news outlets serving dairy regions, such as The Weekly Times, The Land, Stock Journal and Farm Weekly, were especially vocal in their criticisms of the price cuts, but dairy farmers also found some perhaps unexpected allies among readers of major metropolitan publications known for their primarily urban, middle-class audiences, including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and the Australian Financial Review. In what is perhaps a reflection of the growing interest of privileged, urban ‘ethical consumers’ in rural lives and livelihoods, and some, perhaps unexpected, alliances between rural and urban readers, these latter four papers showed a keen interest in the issue, with the great majority of stories critical of the supermarket price cuts and emphasising the negative impacts on Australian dairy farmers and Australia’s domestic dairy industry. For example, The Australian warned that the milk price cut would “hit the nation’s dairy farmers…hard”, and quoted Queensland Dairyfarmers Organisation President Brian Tessman as describing the move as “kicking family farmers when they are down” (qtd. in Ooi 2011: 3). Similar sentiments were repeated in Tessman’s editorial for the Australian Financial Review a couple of weeks later (Tessman 2011: 71). The Sydney Morning Herald warned that the number of dairy farmers leaving the land would rise if the supermarket milk discounting continued (Jopson 2011: 7). Rural papers reported a surge of new donations to the Queensland Dairyfarmers Organisation flood fund, which industry

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representatives largely attributed to the growing concerns of urban consumers (Rowling 2011: 5). Supermarkets’ discounting of milk also generated rare bipartisan political concern. Rob Oakeshott, then an Independent MP for the rural NSW electorate of Lyne, told Parliament that milk price cuts were causing dairy farmers to commit suicide: “those parading themselves as Santa Claus [i.e. the supermarkets] have done so quite literally over the dead bodies of Australian farmers,” he said (qtd. in Coorey 2011: 8). In an unusual moment of political alliance, then-Industry Minister Kim Carr and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott agreed that the milk discounting constituted an abuse of Coles’ and Woolworths’ market dominance; Carr accused the supermarket chains of “constricting choice” and “killing innovation” (qtd. in Priest and Dodson 2011: 1). A Senate Inquiry was held to examine the issue of milk pricing; this also generated substantial media coverage, with lengthy reports in all major media outlets. While the Inquiry ultimately cleared the supermarkets of predatory pricing (Durkin and Walsh 2011: 1), much of the reputational damage had already been done. Coles, in particular, tried to get in front of the criticisms via a number of strategies, including op-eds reminding readers of the benefits of low prices (e.g. McLeod 2012: 21). But even as milk sales increased, the supermarkets lost control over the framing of the issue. The dairy industry organised to develop both a conventional and a social media strategy that ensured sustained visibility of issues affecting dairy farmers over a number of years. In contrast to stories of supplier bullying, in which the suppliers were largely faceless companies and corporations, milk discounting provided opportunities for heart-wrenching human interest stories of farmers leaving the land or fearing for their capacity to stay in the industry (e.g. Lynch and Greenblat 2011: 6; Cranston 2011: 6; Cook 2012: 6; The West Australian 2013: 73; Mitchell and Willoughby 2013: 5). Typically, a new wave of stories would appear each year to mark the Australia Day anniversary of the initial price cut, ensuring ongoing visibility of farmers’ plight and sustained criticism of supermarket power. Coles’ 2013 announcement that it would extend its $1 per litre milk to its Coles Express stores (a move immediately matched by Woolworths’ Caltex outlets, see Collier 2013: 25) provided further ammunition. This announcement occurred amid reports that the Queensland dairy industry had lost 70 farms since 2011 (Thompson and McCarthy 2013: 4).

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It was also around this time that Coles and Woolworths restructured the supply chain to cut out the processor middlemen (often foreign-owned corporations) and to buy directly from farmer co-ops. Supermarket media releases championed this move as a boon to the Australian dairy industry, and it was a move that was indeed met with more positive media coverage and, notably, cautious optimism from the rural press. Both Queensland Country Life and Stock Journal, for example, described the new deals as a potential “circuit-breaker” that could end the “vicious $1/litre milk price war” (Marshall 2013a: 20, 2013b: 9). Major metropolitan papers, however, largely dismissed it as a “cynical marketing ploy” (Speedy and Edwards 2013: 4) and as a case of a “spin war” (Knight 2013: 28). The positive spin was further undermined when the ACCC ordered Coles to withdraw its social media advertising campaign to promote these new deals; the campaign’s claims that farmers were receiving higher prices since the milk wars were deemed to be misleading, as farmers were actually receiving lower farm-gate prices than they had been in 2010 (Bita 2014: 16). Matters were not helped when The Guardian published a presentation to Coles’ shareholders in which General Manager of Corporate Affairs Robert Hadler boasted of how successfully Coles had used “every PR tactic possible to neutralise the noise” of damaging criticisms during the milk wars, and blamed farmers, “grandstanding agri-politicians” and the media for standing in the way of a “silent majority…demanding low prices”.5 Attempting to repair some of the reputational damage caused by these revelations, Coles CEO Ian McLeod told SBS TV’s The Observer Effect that the retailer had simply been “determined” or “relentless”, but never “ruthless”, in its championing of low customer prices.6 While the milk wars generated the greatest volume of media coverage, concerns about the impact of supermarkets on the dairy industry also led to worries about their impact on other food sectors. For example, the major supermarkets were implicated in the collapse of Australia’s biggest tomato grower, which went into voluntary administration in 2012. As The Australian reported, the closure of SP Exports 5 Full presentation published by The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/interactive/2013/sep/30/coles-presentation-silencing-critics-in-full, accessed February 2017. 6 Full transcript available at: http://www.sbs.com.au/article/128389/The-ObserverEffect-Transcript-of-29-September-2013, accessed February 2017.

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heightened fears that it is becoming near-impossible for any local vegetable grower, regardless of size or skill, to turn a profit in an era of ever-smaller margins and a price war between the two supermarket giants. (Neales 2012: 11)

The woes of the Australian food industry were also reported at length in Malcolm Knox’s (2014) article for national magazine The Monthly, a piece widely circulated via blogs, social media and NGOs and later forming part of his book-length exposé, Supermarket Monsters (Knox 2015). The article described many of the consequences of the major supermarkets’ market domination for farmers and suppliers. For instance, it included a story about a lettuce farmer who was always required to grow lettuce for the maximum potential size of an order, even though the actual order was typically far smaller; the surplus had to be destroyed because he was contractually prohibited from selling his lettuces to the supermarket’s competitors (Knox 2014). A few days after Knox’s The Monthly article was published, Tasmania’s The Mercury newspaper featured a story about a local carrot farmer who had been forced to plough more than 150 tonnes of carrots back into the ground because they failed to meet the strict visual standards and size requirements stipulated by his major supermarket contract (Hanson 2014). Overall, even though both major supermarkets have experienced negative media coverage over a sustained period, it has not strongly affected either’s financial bottom line.7 It has, however, presented ongoing public relations and brand management problems for both. This has led the chains to work more closely, and in more sophisticated ways, with media. In a bid to “strategically manufacture consumer trust” (Richards et al. 2011), they have adopted a number of strategies to re-engage consumers with supermarkets and supermarket food. In the words of one supermarket representative, such approaches understand the supermarkets’ “true accountability” as being to the customer, and see this customer focus as central both to the management of business functions and to brand communications (supermarket representative, 15 October 2015).

7 In the years 2011–2014, during a period of sustained negative media coverage of supermarket practices, Coles and Woolworths averaged 4.09% and 6.77% profits, respectively (before interest and tax, calculated from Woolworths Group Annual Reports, 2011–2014). This is a significant by international standards: in more recent figures, for example, supermarkets in the UK, US and EU averaged only 2.0, 3.8 and 2.6% profits, respectively (Gilbert et al. 2016 : 9).

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As she elaborates in an echo of media statements made by Coles and Woolworths executives, and with a sense of both concern and bemusement about the criticisms that the businesses are facing: Everything we do has a real customer rationale behind it and as long as we’re really focused on trying to deliver to customer needs and requirements, we’re doing the right thing. If you’re delivering great quality food at low prices and you’re doing it in a way that is backed up by leading sourcing and sustainability initiatives, then how much criticism can there be for that? (supermarket representative, 15 October 2015)

Such communication strategies, centred on messages that the customer is paramount and that low prices need not come at the expense of ethical sourcing, do not just include reactive responses to criticism, such as media interviews and op-eds. They also involve attempts to set the agenda of media coverage through more positive framing. These attempts included issuing fact sheets and “grower success story” booklets to “debunk the myths” about Coles’ treatment of farmers and suppliers. Both were distributed to media and political decision-makers. For example, the grower success story booklets, which profile the positive relationships between Coles and producers in each Australian region (titles included ‘Backing South Australia’, ‘Backing the West’, ‘Backing Tassie’, etc.), were included as part of Coles’ submission to the Federal Government’s Agricultural Competitiveness White Paper in 2014.8 But among the most powerful strategies were those that communicated directly with customers through advertising and social media. Particularly notable were the communications associated with Coles’ expansion of its ‘ethical’ product lines—free-range eggs, sow stall free pork, no added hormone beef, among others. Coles has been at the forefront of this ethical agenda, in part because its involvement in the Federal Court proceedings and leading role in the milk wars has meant that the supermarket has been subjected to more sustained criticisms than rival Woolworths. Supermarket representatives describe Coles’ ethical agenda as driven both by considerations of brand protection and by a desire to do the “right thing” by consumers. As one put it: 8 For details of the submission, see http://agwhitepaper.agriculture.gov.au/GP%20 Submissions%20for%20publication/GP287%20Coles%20Ltd.pdf, accessed May 2017.

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Obviously there is a percentage of consumers who are aware of…those things [ethical concerns]…, and obviously for those consumers it’s important. But I think the other element [underpinning the focus on ‘ethical’ products] is about protecting the brand and although it may not be at the forefront of consumers’ minds very often, the media will pick up on certain elements and actively target retailers and manufacturers with some of the practices that they’ve done. So there’s an element of brand protection, but there’s also an element of doing the right thing as well. (supermarket representative, 28 August 2015)

Although, in interviews, supermarket representatives were very reluctant to say that any initiatives were direct responses to negative media coverage, as the above quotation suggests, they were certainly very keen to counter media criticisms. Coles’ expansion and promotion of its ‘ethical’ product lines was an ideal way to do this, as it provided opportunities to connect ‘good news’ stories about supermarkets with the mainstreaming of food politics and the intensified media interest in ‘ethical’ food that was also occurring at the time. To this end, among the most effective techniques were those that combined this ethical agenda with strategies designed to tap into the popularity of food media, the appeal of its highprofile celebrity chefs and its politics of food provenance. These include the new relationships with food television that will be discussed in the following chapter, as well as the more conventional advertising featuring celebrity chefs. In what follows below, I focus on two of the most highprofile examples of the latter: Curtis Stone for Coles and Jamie Oliver for Woolworths.

Neutralising the Noise: Curtis Stone Celebrities and celebrity chefs are now a staple of both supermarkets’ advertising and marketing campaigns, but Coles first used celebrity endorsement somewhat earlier than Woolworths. The retailer has used a diverse range of celebrities over the years—from musicians Status Quo and One Direction to proponent of molecular gastronomy Heston Blumenthal. This eclecticism of celebrity endorsers, when combined with advertising messages primarily focused on price, has meant that Coles’ brand messages have typically been perceived as less clearly focused than Woolworths’ (The Sydney Morning Herald 2013). Curtis Stone has appeared in Coles’ advertising campaigns since 2008, including the popular, budget-focused “Feed Your Family for $10” promotion, first

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launched in 2010. However, it was not until Coles started to capitalise more fully on Stone’s “ethical capital” (Lewis and Huber 2015: 295) in 2011 that a more coherent brand identity began to emerge—one focused on fresh produce, quality and the ethical treatment of farm animals, farmers and suppliers. This was to counter negative media coverage about the major supermarkets in general, and Coles in particular, during this time. As Lewis and Huber (2015: 290) note, Stone’s persona of a “local chef made good” lends quite a different kind of celebrity power from Jamie Oliver’s global mega-stardom. This is in part because prior to Stone’s relationship with Coles, he would have been only moderately well known to Australian audiences. He had been the host of ABC TV’s Surfing the Menu and reality cooking show My Restaurant Rules in the early 2000s, but it was not until his celebrity breakthrough in the United States, alongside his almost daily appearances on television advertisements during the Coles-sponsored reality TV hits MasterChef Australia and My Kitchen Rules that he became a household name in Australia (Lewis and Huber 2015: 294). Since at least Surfing the Menu, in which Stone travelled around Australia with co-host Ben O’Donoghue to meet local producers and cook with their produce, Stone has promoted seasonal, produce-driven cooking. His website describes his philosophy in the following terms: My cooking philosophy is to keep it simple and cook with naturally produced ingredients just as Mother Nature intended…When Mother Nature worked out what we should be eating at different times of the year, she did a pretty good job, so listen to her. Food that is in season just tastes better and you really don’t have to do a whole lot to it to make it taste great! It is always less expensive, and chances are it hasn’t been artificially treated or travelled halfway across the world to reach your kitchen.9

Stone’s Los Angeles restaurant, Maude, also reflects his commitment to seasonal produce, serving ten-course degustations, with each course showcasing one seasonal ingredient per month. While Stone’s professional history may be less well known than Jamie Oliver’s, his celebrity nonetheless serves as an “intertextual commodity” (Marshall 2002). That is, the meaning of Stone’s celebrity is constructed by drawing upon the various intertextual meanings associated with his professional life and 9 See

http://www.curtisstone.com/about-curtis, accessed February 2017.

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personal food politics (see Marshall 1997: 58)—associations that may be more or less familiar to different audience members, but which nonetheless serve as authenticating devices for both Stone’s and Coles’ messages. Thus while it might perhaps seem ideologically compromising for a chef with Stone’s ethical commitments to endorse a major supermarket—a place governed by what Johanna Blythman (2007: 76) has described as an ethic of “permanent global summertime”, which ensures that much of the fresh produce is available all year regardless of seasonality—it is precisely because of his strong ethics and credibility that he was attractive to the supermarket chain (supermarket representative, 15 October 2015). From Coles’ perspective, the success of his endorsement thus lies in his ability to maintain independence and integrity in how [he] work[s] with big brands. These are things that Curtis won’t talk about…[For example,] he doesn’t get on TV and talk about fruit when it’s not in season…So the strength really comes from [his] ability to maintain [his] own kind of integrity to what [he] believe[s] in…I think if people saw Curtis advertising products that weren’t sustainable or weren’t healthy or weren’t things that you would want to associate with a Michelin star chef, then there would be no strength to him and his messages. (supermarket representative, 15 October 2015).

Notwithstanding a minor controversy, reported in a large number of daily media outlets, in which Stone was caught out spruiking “spring” apples that had actually been picked in autumn (The Sydney Morning Herald 2014: 4), Stone’s clear identity in terms of what he stands for, as well as his perceived autonomy—there are things he simply will not do— means that his ethical capital can be deployed as an effective counter to other, more damaging narratives about Coles’ brand. Most recently, this has involved being the face of a new series of ‘Coles Fresh’ advertisements featuring “in season” mangoes, peaches and other fresh produce. But perhaps most powerful from a brand management perspective were Coles’ campaigns for ‘ethical’ meat and eggs: no added hormone beef, sow stall-free pork, RSCPA-approved chicken, and cage-free eggs. Coles was the first Australian supermarket to launch such a strong ethically focused marketing campaign but, from an advertising perspective, it adopted fairly simple techniques. For example, the television commercials typically featured Stone as a ‘talking head’ announcing

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the move to hormone-free beef or sow stall free pork as an “Australian first” amid shots of the packaged product, and cameos from the occasional in-store butcher or beef farmer. In store, advertising features were primarily text-based, featuring key slogans (“no added hormone beef”, “sow stall free pork”, etc.), with or without an image of Stone. There were also prominent labels on the food products and their surrounding shelves. The campaign adopted very traditional “informational” rhetorical strategies—simply communicating the availability of products and their specifications (Percy and Rosenbaum-Elliot 2016: 31). However, from the supermarket’s perspective, customers’ limited understanding of animal welfare and food production issues means that ‘ethical’ initiatives can serve as powerful identity markers that symbolically signal to consumers the ethical credentials of the retailer. As one supermarket representative put it, using sow stall free pork as an example: A large percentage of the consumers who buy those products [i.e. sow stall free pork] wouldn’t necessarily go for that sort of thing, and our own consumer insight research has actually shown that consumers say that if they see us doing it, then they kind of expect that it’s the right thing to do without actually fully understanding. (supermarket representative, 28 August 2015)

Such campaigns, then, are often a reflection of supermarkets’ increasing role as what Jane Dixon (2007: 29) calls “new food authorities”. For Dixon (2007: 31), supermarkets (much like the celebrity chefs) have restyled themselves as “lifestyle experts” in a bid to re-engage consumer trust; this involves “proactively but subtly” advising households and individuals on a “host of qualities including convenience, cleanliness, thrift and family nutrition” in order to locate the supermarket, and supermarket food, at the heart of healthy and satisfying family lifestyles. To the areas of supermarket expertise discussed by Dixon, Coles also added advice on ‘ethical’ production and consumption to tap into the growing ethicalisation of food media that was occurring at the time, and to provide a counter to the preceding years of negative media coverage. To maintain these ‘ethical’ branding associations, Coles continued to communicate key messages long after the active period of the campaign had ceased, with the labels continuing in store and Stone continuing to use ethical terminology (no added hormone beef, RSPCA-approved chicken, etc.) in all subsequent campaigns, including those not designed around ethical platforms (supermarket representative, 15 October 2015).

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Stone’s value to the campaign lies not just in the fact that his existing ethical capital lent credibility to brand messages centred on ethical platforms, but also because his relationship with Coles became increasingly defined as both a traditional brand endorsement and as a deeper relationship through which his values and expertise could “help the company make better decisions” (Stone qtd. in Valent 2015). The nature of the relationship between Coles and Stone remains confidential, although some reports estimate that it constitutes a “multi-million dollar deal” (see Miller 2012). Publicly at least, the relationship is framed as a collaborative one in which Stone has genuine influence over Coles’ decisionmaking. In an interview with Good Food magazine, for example, Stone says that working with a major supermarket is key to achieving his goal of making ethically sourced food more widely accessible, and not only available to a privileged few. As he puts it: Half of Australia shops at Coles every week…Some people can afford to go to a farmers’ market and buy everything organic and some people don’t have that option. You can have a really beautiful philosophy and talk to a tiny segment of the population, or you can look at the corporations that have a loud voice and get in there. (Stone qtd. in Valent 2015)

Stone specifically points to Coles’ hormone-free beef, RSPCA-approved chicken and sow stall free pork as evidence of the “better decisions” shaped by his influence (Valent 2015). Coles’ communications similarly emphasise Stone’s advisory role in his partnership with the supermarket chain. In an echo of Woolworths’ long-time slogan, “Fresh Food People”, Coles recently named Stone a “Fresh Advisor” and, in the company’s 2015 annual report and subsequent media releases, described working “together” with Stone to rejuvenate product lines and develop new offerings (Coles 2015: 10). Coles has also staged a series of media events showing Stone “working with” Australian farmers (e.g. Vlasic 2016; Sherrington 2016). For example, when Coles signed an eight-year deal with Queensland mango producers Manbulloo Mangoes, the announcement was made by Stone during a visit to the mango farm. Telling Seven News that this was an example of Coles helping the Australian food industry to thrive, this and similar events served as an ideal counter to claims that supermarkets are crushing farmers and suppliers. “If the suppliers can’t run a profit, then of course, you don’t have suppliers,” he said. “So it’s very important for

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us to nurture and grow Aussie industry”.10 Through the use of the term “us”, Stone’s brand identity is fully aligned with that of Coles. Moreover, in addressing one of the key issues that had plagued Coles over the preceding few years in this way (i.e. Coles’ negative treatment of farmers and suppliers), Coles benefits from the merging of Stone’s intertextual associations as the ‘friend’ of local, seasonal producers with those of the retailer. The images of unity in the Manbulloo Mangoes example reflect a strategy of public relationship-building between Stone, Coles, and its farmers that was honed as part of an earlier Coles advertising and marketing campaign, ‘Helping Australia Grow’. The discursive strategies in this campaign are worth looking at in more detail because, while supermarket representatives typically seek to frame Coles’ campaigns as reflecting a genuine and proactive commitment to ethical principles (supermarket representative, 28 August 2015; supermarket representative, 15 October 2015), ‘Helping Australia Grow’ was the campaign identified in Robert Hadler’s 2013 presentation to shareholders as specifically designed to “neutralise the noise” of criticisms from farmers over the industry impacts of low prices and their treatment at the hands of the supermarket chain. The campaign relied heavily on the brand partnership with Curtis Stone and, in particular, on Stone’s ethical capital and his perceived respect for farmers (as reflected in his philosophies of seasonality) to lend authenticity to the campaign’s representations of Coles’ relationship with its farmers and suppliers. ‘Helping Australia Grow’ was active in Coles stores, in television commercials, in print and online advertisements, in newspaper and magazine advertorials, via social media and, as we will see in the next chapter, in integrated advertising approaches. Featuring images of Stone side-byside with the farmers who supply Coles, the campaign emphasised Coles’ positive relationships with farmers and its beneficial contributions to the Australian food industry. While ‘Helping Australia Grow’ did not specifically engage with the ethical discourses of the earlier campaigns, it did deploy strategies of “discursive claims-making” (Richards et al. 2011: 29) to present images of happy, fulfilled farmers as a contrast to dominant media accounts of supermarkets’ much less idyllic treatment of farmers and suppliers. 10 Available from Manbulloo Mangoes’ Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ manbulloomangoes/videos/1037942519637263/, accessed February 2017.

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The television commercial begins with Curtis Stone welcoming the viewer into Coles’ fresh produce section via a farm gate. The supermarket appears as an Arcadian rural market, where windmills, hay bales and rustic wooden wagons surround colourful, flawless fruit and vegetables. Appealing to a similar sense of the nostalgia and romance of ‘old-fashioned’ methods of food production to that which drives the media representations of ‘alternative’ food discussed in Parts 1 and 2, these scenes draw upon the idyllic rural imagery associated with traditional family farming and the quaint practices of (an imagined) yesteryear, when farmers rode on antique tractors, deployed scarecrows rather than pesticides, and lovingly harvested each piece of fresh produce by hand. Against this backdrop of nostalgia we are introduced to two Coles farmers, mango farmer Marie Piccone and lettuce farmer John Said, who are both shown picking and packing their beautiful, perfectly formed produce straight from the field. After showing us the delights of the “100% Aussie grown” mangoes and lettuces at the farm, the commercial uses match on action editing to depict Said plucking his lettuce out of the ground and placing it directly onto the produce display in the Coles store. These visual techniques implicitly evoke both food media’s tropes of connection and the transparency of alternative supply chains to create an impression that the Coles customer is buying direct from the farmer whose just-picked produce appears almost immediately on the supermarket shelf. In doing so, the ‘Helping Australia Grow’ campaign draws on the discourses of food media and alternative food networks to invite consumers to engage directly with producers and to feel as if they are participating in enlarged production systems in which they are also a part of the value creation (see Nosi and Zanni 2004; Hinrichs 2003). But neither Piccone nor Said are individual farmers with whom customers can have a direct connection. Their titles of “mango farmer” and “lettuce farmer” significantly understate their actual roles—managing director of Manbulloo Mangoes and CEO of Fresh Select, respectively—both of which involve little day-to-day harvesting of fruit and vegetables. This is also the case for print advertisements that feature the Lee family from Roma, Queensland, pictured with what appears to be three generations of family members in the lush, green pastures grazed by their beef cattle. This bucolic image is contrasted with a 2010 report in the Courier Mail, which describes the Lee’s family business as the billiondollar “cattle colossus” Australian Country Choice, which includes a large feedlot operation and abattoir in addition to 28 grazing properties (Houghton 2010). By presenting the farmers as individuals or families,

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rather than as representatives of the larger agribusinesses that they own or work for, ‘Helping Australia Grow’ draws on the discourses of affective labour central to constructions of authenticity within ‘alternative’ food spaces (see Chap. 6). As is typical of strategies of discursive claimsmaking (see Richards et al. 2011: 38), the ‘Helping Australia Grow’ campaign works to symbolically distance Coles produce from connotations of corporate agribusiness or industrial food production by representing farmers and farming activities in ways that signify simple, traditional farming practices, and direct connections between the grower, the produce and the methods of production. The campaign emphasises the farmers’ apparent endorsement of these images of contented and unalienated labour through various representations of Coles, Stone and farmers forming a ‘united front’. In an echo of images of Kylie Kwong posing with smiling farmers (see Chap. 6), the television commercial concludes with a shot of Stone with his arms around three of Coles’ farmers, the four of them reciting in unison: “Coles and Australian Farmers. Together, we’re Helping Australia Grow”. Print and online advertisements feature still shots with similar images. By emphasising the identity of the farmer and the values of transparency and connectedness typically associated with food media and practices invested in the ‘alternative’, the campaign makes a link between the trustworthiness and wholesomeness of Australian farmers and farming practices and the trustworthiness and wholesomeness of the fresh produce sold at Coles. These symbolic moves are also typical of other appropriations of alternative discourses by mainstream food retailers and manufacturers (see Jackson et al. 2007; Todd 2009), but the specific form they take in ‘Helping Australia Grow’ does important ideological work for Coles. The images of Coles’ farmers living idyllic lives free of exploitation—a claim lent credibility through an endorsement by a celebrity chef known for his commitment to ethical food production— work to present Coles and Stone as collaborating with farmers in ways designed to counter media representations of farmers suffering under low customer prices and disproportionate supermarket power. As a technique designed to “neutralise the noise” of damaging criticisms, the ‘Helping Australia Grow’ campaign was a successful one. Criticisms of supermarket practices did not disappear but, as we will see in the next chapter, the campaign’s move into integrated advertising on major television cooking shows saw core campaign messages largely accepted and endorsed by audiences. While both Stone and Coles experienced some minor blowback over aspects of their ethical

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platforms—Meat and Livestock Australia, for example, objected to messages about hormone-free beef, accusing Coles and Stone of attempting to “shock…consumers into thinking beef and cattle raised on growthpromoting hormones was unsafe, despite years of scientific testing showing the meat posed no risk to humans” (qtd. in Russell 2011: 18)—the strategic reframing of the relationship between Coles and its farmers has also been beneficial for Stone’s own brand identity, with public recognition of both his celebrity identity and his ethical capital significantly boosted by his relationship with the supermarket chain (see Valent 2015). However, if Coles’ partnership with Stone is an example of how to successfully appropriate the discourses of alternative food and the representational strategies of popular food media in order to ‘smooth over’ criticism of supermarket practices, other celebrity endorsements more fully reveal the tensions inherent in these relationships, as we will see below in the case of Jamie Oliver and Woolworths.

From PR Coup to “PR Fail”: Jamie Oliver While Woolworths initially lagged behind Coles in its engagement with celebrity chefs, its deal with Jamie Oliver in 2013 was seen as a coup for the supermarket chain (Woolworths 2013). Besides bringing with him the influence associated with being one of the world’s most powerful food celebrity brands, Oliver also came with a successful record of supermarket endorsement developed through his long-running association with the UK’s Sainsbury’s supermarket (Strategic Direction 2011: 16). The deal, reported to be worth £1 million a year to Oliver, was credited with netting £153 million in additional profits to Sainsbury’s within two years (Born 2002). Oliver’s move to Woolworths two years after his relationship with the British supermarket ended was widely spruiked as a “natural fit” for the chain. Woolworths, which had long marketed itself as the “Fresh Food People”, had a brand identity that was not limited simply to price and which had been less damaged by the media scrutiny of supermarket practices than Coles’. As Lewis and Huber (2015: 294) point out, Oliver’s ethical credentials, developed through his high profile international campaigns focused on healthy eating, as well as his “trustworthy persona, wholesome family-oriented lifestyle, familiar warmth and bonhomie”, complemented Woolworths’ existing brand identity in ways that required relatively little labour from the company’s marketers. Media releases, for example, quoted then-Managing Director, Tjeerd Jegen, as saying: “Jamie is world famous for his passion for fresh food, and Woolworths is Australia’s fresh food people” (Woolworths 2013).

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Shared discourses of “freshness” were evident across all dimensions of the brand partnership: recipe cards, website features, instore displays and television commercials all emphasised “fresh” and “healthy” cooking. One of the early television commercials shows Oliver walking through a Woolworths store filled with colourful, pristine-looking produce and smiling staff carrying artfully arranged palettes of food. He introduces his partnership with the supermarket chain in the following terms: “I’ve teamed up with Australia’s fresh food people because, like me, Woolies are passionate about bringing fresh ideas to really good food”. Subsequent commercials feature Oliver preparing “fresh new recipes” in a kitchen that looks very similar to the ones in which he appears in his television series (particularly Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals and Jamie’s Super Food), visually connecting the lifestyle discourses and genre conventions of his television cooking shows (see Chap. 3) to Woolworths’ “fresh food” brand identity. These recipes were also featured on Woolworths’ website and recipe cards, which were presented in-store alongside displays of all the ingredients needed to prepare the dishes. With dishes including Stuffed Leg of Lamb with Rosemary and Pine Nuts, and Butternut Pumpkin Penne with Mint and Avocado Chopped Salad, these recipes showcased Oliver’s recognisable culinary style in much the same way as his ‘Created With Jamie’ range of products (see Chap. 3). As they did for Stone, supermarket representatives similarly emphasised the importance of Oliver’s perceived independence for the credibility and value of the brand partnership. Like Stone, “Jamie…has standards that he works to…[He] will [not] go on TV and advertise a canned or a frozen ready meal or something like that in order to maintain [his] integrity…and…encourage people to buy healthy food for their families” (supermarket representative, 15 October 2015). Oliver’s perceived integrity and commitment to improving people’s eating habits were framed as central to the brand alliance. Like Stone, he was presented not simply as a mouthpiece for the supermarket, but as a genuine brand partner seeking to use his influence to effect changes to the retailer’s stocking and sourcing practices. Although Stone also publicly talked about having a similar influence at Coles, Oliver’s ‘back end’ role was more fully foregrounded in Woolworths’ marketing campaign. Oliver’s video press release announcing the partnership, which appeared on Woolworths’ website and in television commercials, specifically emphasises his ‘behind the scenes’ influence, especially in relation to the ethical sourcing of chickens and eggs:

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Hi guys, Jamie Oliver here. Hope you’re well, Australia. OK, so I’m going to be working with Woolworths. This is a massive opportunity to reach out to even more Aussies—18 million Aussies go through Woolworths every single week…I’m going to be working across the whole of the business, front and back end, to make sure that you’re going to be inspired, whether it’s on magazines or websites, or recipe cards, or on adverts, to give you all the lovely tips and shortcuts, and brilliant simple recipes that are going to really work hard for you and your families. We’re kicking off this new relationship with a commitment from Woolworths to completely get out of caged eggs in the near future, which I think is a big deal. Even on the welfare of chicken, you’ve got the free-range and the organic chicken of course, but on that base level chicken that most Aussies buy into, I’m looking to work with Woolworths—and they’ve committed to do this— to really raise those welfare standards, to give you a better, more delicious product. At the end of the day, for me and Woolworths, what we want to do is inspire you guys to eat more and cook more fresh food, and have fun with it and enjoy it…We’re not going to stop until we get all of you lovely Aussies cooking more lovely fresh food. So, take care, and you will see me probably in a Woolworths near you very, very soon.11

Combining the launch of the Oliver–Woolworths partnership with the announcement that Woolworths would phase out caged eggs and transition to RSPCA-approved or equivalent standard for fresh chicken by 2018 (ABC News 2013) was an attempt to capitalise on an ethical terrain that, in the major supermarket space at least, had until that point been primarily occupied by Coles. Given the clear alignment in the brand identities of Oliver and Woolworths, and given that the supermarket had escaped the worst of the media criticism—and the legal sanctions—experienced by Coles, it is perhaps surprising that Woolworths’ and Oliver’s ‘Fresh Food’ campaign ultimately offered a less successful counter-narrative of ‘good’ supermarket practices than ‘Helping Australia Grow’. This is because although Stone had experienced some criticism for his ethical stances (such as from Meat and Livestock Australia), Oliver’s high profile also magnified any media criticisms of Woolworths, since any story about Woolworths could also be circulated as a story about Jamie Oliver. In contrast to other successful examples of aligning celebrity brands with ‘artisan’ food 11 Released 3 October 2013. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYbLowjhdro, accessed February 2017. Emphasis added.

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companies (see Chap. 4), the supermarket chain’s more explicit foregrounding of Oliver’s influence at the production level left both Oliver and Woolworths open to more damaging attacks from farmers’ and industry groups when things did not go to plan. For example, in a move that generated substantial national media coverage, industry groups hit back against Woolworths’ plan to transition to higher welfare chickens and eggs, claiming that the industry had not been consulted prior to the announcement. At the time, NSW Farmers Federation chief executive, Matt Grant, said that: We want to make sure that changes being proposed to production systems are done through the producers themselves…We don’t welcome having international chefs not willing to learn about how different Australian agriculture is, compared with Europe. These chefs aren’t doing it because they love making food, they are doing it because it is commercially viable for them to be a face of a supermarket. It’s all about the dollar. (qtd. in Marriner and Whyte 2013: 28)

Unlike Stone, Oliver was not a “local chef made good” (Lewis and Huber 2015: 290); this meant he could be framed as an international megastar interfering with Australians’ livelihoods in a way that Stone was not. It was a case of what Halonen-Knight and Hurmerinta (2010: 455) would call “reversed” brand trait transference: where criticisms of the supermarket brand also negatively affect the celebrity endorser. With Oliver’s claims to be “working across the whole of the business”, changes to Woolworths’ sourcing practices were blamed not just on the supermarket chain, but also on the “international chef” unwilling to learn about the specificities of Australian agriculture. Moreover, these changes were shrouded in a discourse of forced compliance that, once it also spilled into other controversies associated with the supermarket chain, did further damage to both Woolworths and Oliver. The most high profile of these involved criticism of Woolworths’ ‘Jamie’s Garden’ promotion. ‘Jamie’s Garden’ was designed to educate children on the benefits of fresh food. To customers who spent $20 or more, it offered free collectible stickers featuring cartoon fruits and vegetables designed to teach children about where their food comes from and how it is grown. The promotion leveraged Oliver’s reputation as a crusader for healthy eating, developed through his campaigning culinary documentaries, Jamie’s School Dinners and Jamie’s Food Revolution, the latter of which featured Oliver dressed as a giant pea telling children to

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“eat [their] vegetables” (see Chap. 3). While there was nothing controversial about the promotion itself, its positive messages about eating fresh, healthy produce were overshadowed by claims from AUSVEG, Australia’s peak industry body for vegetable growers, that growers had been asked to contribute an extra 40 cents per crate of produce, on top of the 2.5–5% in marketing fees they already paid Woolworths, to fund the campaign (Trute 2014). While Woolworths insisted that the contribution was voluntary, AUSVEG’s complaint occurred at the same time as the Federal Court action against Coles, a time when supermarket bullying of suppliers was fresh in the public’s mind and high on the media agenda. AUSVEG national marketing manager Simon Coburn was quoted in a number of media outlets as saying that fruit and vegetable growers were frightened that Woolworths would blacklist them if they did not contribute the additional fee. “The growers feel like they are in a position that, if they were to say no, they are worried that their contracts would be reduced or terminated completely,” he said (qtd. in Trute 2014). It was also reported that AUSVEG’s public affairs manager, William Churchill, had written directly to Oliver, asking that he use his influence with the supermarket chain to have them withdraw the request. In his public statements, Churchill deliberately framed Oliver as a man likely to be a champion of the farmer, given his high-profile commitments to sustainable food systems and his initial pledge to work across the “whole of [Woolworths’] business”. As he put it: I doubt Jamie is the kind of person who would want to adversely affect farmers. If he sees this is being levied unfairly on growers, he could ask serious questions, and possibly compel them to give the money back to growers…He seems like a reasonable man. (qtd. in Han 2014a: 5)

Oliver did not respond directly to AUSVEG, but a spokesperson issued a statement, saying that: Jamie, naturally, is concerned when he hears about small producers suffering financial hardship and your letter will be discussed with Woolworths further at our next senior-level meeting to ensure farmers are completely clear about the aims of the program. But ultimately, Oliver has no sway with the grocery retailer. As I’m sure you know, Jamie in essentially an ‘employee’ of Woolworths and as such he has no sway regarding the commercial direction or negotiations that the Woolworths business takes. (qtd. in Whyte and Han 2014: 31)

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If the key to a successful brand partnership is the perceived independence and integrity of the celebrity endorser—the “standards that [Oliver] works to” mentioned earlier by supermarket representatives (supermarket representative, 15 October 2015)—and if the power of celebrity endorsement is based on the “meaning transfer” that occurs when their endorsement is seen to reflect an authentic extension of their own values and practices (McCracken 1989, see also Chap. 4), then Oliver’s claim to be merely an “employee” of Woolworths was a bald admission of the purely commercial nature of the relationship. The claim was received badly by the growers’ group and the press, as was the statement that Oliver’s goal would simply be to ensure that farmers were “clear about the aims of the program”, rather than to eliminate additional costs (e.g. O’Chee 2014; Han 2014b: 22). It did not help that Oliver’s international mega-stardom and limited time spent in Australia meant that he was not seen out ‘pressing the flesh’ with Aussie farmers in the way that Stone was for Coles. As Lewis and Huber (2015: 290, 294) have argued in a slightly different context, supermarkets’ attempts to “ethicalize” their brand identities by engaging celebrity chefs often highlights the extent to which these chefs are “often ironically embedded in the very marketized and corporatized foodways that their own food practices and ethics would seem to eschew”. In this particular instance, it was also a case of Oliver’s high-profile ethical capital essentially magnifying the scandal. Oliver’s star power meant that the incident generated significant negative media attention in ways that essentially amplified, rather than ameliorated, key brand management issues for the supermarket chain, particularly those related to the retailer’s treatment of farmers and suppliers. The key advantages of the Oliver–Woolworths partnership may have been Oliver’s international brand recognition and his own brand alignment with Woolworths’ ‘Fresh Food People’ message, but the failure of this partnership to address key brand management issues meant that it did damage to both Oliver and Woolworths.

Manufacturing Trust Richards et al. (2011) use the term “manufacturing” trust to highlight that supermarkets’ strategies to re-engage consumers through discursive claims-making are conscious and deliberate. For them, it also implies a degree of falseness and insincerity; unlike the practices of alternative food networks, supermarkets can never inspire genuine trust, but merely a

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“simulacrum of trust intimated through quality assurance schemes and visual symbolism” (Richards et al. (2011: 42, emphasis added). But as mainstream retailers and producers increasingly move into previously “alternative” sectors in response to changing consumer demands and discourses (Jackson et al. 2007), and as they adopt various strategies to deal with these changes (increases in ethical products, relationships with celebrity chefs, adoption of the conventions of food media), one of the results is a considerable blurring between the “mainstream” and the “alternative”—a distinction that many scholars now suggest is increasingly difficult to uphold as the alternative seeks mainstream consumer markets and the mainstream seeks to capitalise on and respond to the growing prominence of the alternative (Guthman 2000; Sonnino and Marsden 2006). This has impacts across a range of dimensions of the broader food production and retail system, but in the realm of discursive claims-making we can see how the blurring of the mainstream and the alternative reflects the increasingly contested nature of the politics and practices of mass food provisioning. The examples in this chapter reveal both the successes and the limits of supermarkets’ adoption of the conventions of popular food media and its alternative and ethical discourses to ameliorate criticisms and to re-engage consumer trust. Curtis Stone’s relationship with Coles, which thoroughly integrated Stone (and his ethical capital) into all brand communications, and presented Stone and Coles as a united front, was an example of how this can be done effectively. Jamie Oliver’s relationship with Woolworths, in contrast, relied primarily on Oliver’s international mega-stardom and did not produce the united “we”, or “us” that Stone was able to achieve for Coles. This ultimately made explicit the commercial nature of the relationship in ways that served not to ameliorate criticisms, but to amplify them. Despite the “PR fail” (Carter 2014), Oliver’s relationship with Woolworths has continued, although his claims of “back end” influence are now considerably more muted and his ethical platforms largely limited to assisting householders to reduce food waste through creative use of leftovers.12 Even in Stone’s case, where his ethical capital and politics of seasonality and provenance undoubtedly had real consumer resonances, it is

12 See Oliver’s case for “turning leftovers into makeovers”: https://www.woolworths. com.au/Shop/Discover/christmas/jamie-christmas-makeovers, accessed February 2017.

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difficult to overlook that celebrity endorsements or brand partnerships are necessarily the product of paid promotional relationships and so are lacking in the kind of authenticity that characterises celebrity brands in the alternative sector, such as the celebrity brand of Maggie Beer (see Chap. 4). It is also the case that negative media coverage, particularly criticisms of supermarkets’ treatment of farmers and suppliers, has persisted alongside supermarkets’ partnerships with celebrity chefs. If, as scholars suggest, the purpose of supermarkets’ strategies of trust manufacture are to disguise the industrial processes that underpin modern food production (Richards et al. 2011: 43), both the persistent media criticisms of supermarket practices and the moments of ‘failure’ in supermarkets’ own marketing campaigns nonetheless—and, in the case of the latter, inadvertently—reveal them. The ongoing brand management problems this has posed have prompted more sophisticated (if not always more successful) forms of media engagement; these are the subject of the next chapter.

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Knight, Elizabeth. 2013. It’s not the first deal with farmers, and it won’t be the last. The Sydney Morning Herald. 28 March: 28. Knox, Malcolm. 2014. Supermarket monsters. The Monthly. https://www. themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/august/1406815200/malcolm-knox/ supermarket-monsters. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. Knox, Malcolm. 2015. Supermarket monsters: The price of Coles and Woolworths’ dominance. Victoria: Redback. Kruger, Colin, Eli Greenblatt, and Ben Butler. 2012. Suppliers count the cost as Woolies and Coles shoot it out over prices. The Sydney Morning Herald. 21 April: 6. Lewis, Tania, and Alison Huber. 2015. A revolution in an eggcup? Supermarket wars, celebrity chefs and ethical consumption. Food, Culture & Society 18: 289–307. Lindgreen, Adam. 2003. Trust as a valuable strategic variable in the food industry: Different types of trust and their implementation. British Food Journal 105: 310–327. Lunn, Stephen. 2011. Big two’s tactics clear the shelves. The Australian. 5 November: 17. Lynch, Jared, and Eli Greenblat. 2011. Farmers warn on milk war threat. The Age. 8 March: 6. Marriner, Cosima and Sarah Whyte. 2013. Whose kitchen rules? Coles and Woolies look to celebrities to win shopper dollars. The Sun Herald. 22 December: 28. Marshall, Andrew. 2013a. Farmers own milk set for Woolworths debut. Stock Journal. 4 April: 20. Marshall, Andrew. 2013b. Woolworths new farmers own house brand milk. Queensland Country Life. 4 April: 9. Marshall, David P. 1997. Celebrity and power: Fame in contemporary culture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Marshall, P. David. 2002. The new intertextual commodity. In The new media book, ed. Dan Harries, 69–81. London: British Film Institute. McCracken, Grant. 1989. Who is the celebrity endorser? Cultural foundations of the endorsement process. Journal of Consumer Research 16: 310–321. McLeod, Ian. 2012. Busting myths on big supermarkets. The Age. 20 October: 21. Miller, Megan. 2012. Stone writes his next chapter. Herald Sun. 16 June. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ipad/stone-writes-his-next-chapter/newsstory/fc3b287465d7b41852ffcec2f71abdcf?sv=1377af6f10a7482d5ef7078f3 9dbf918. Accessed 27 Jan 2017. Mitchell, Georgina, and Sally Willoughby. 2013. Farmers left sour over ‘cutthroat’ milk war. The Sydney Morning Herald. 18 February: 5.

190  M. Phillipov Mitchell, Sue. 2013a. Coles, Woolies accept curbs. The Australian Financial Review. 18 November: 1. Mitchell, Sue. 2013b. Supermarket copycat strategy ‘limits profit’. The Australian Financial Review. 1 August: 8. Mitchell, Sue. 2013c. Woolworths home label sets the pace for sales growth. The Australian Financial Review. 2 April: 8. Mitchell, Sue. 2014a. Coles $16m ‘gouge’. The Australian Financial Review. 10 May: 35. Mitchell, Sue 2014b. Coles heavy hand evident in veiled threats to suppliers. The Australian Financial Review. 2 July: 21. Mitchell, Sue, and Patrick Durkin. 2014. Humbled Coles admits it did wrong. The Australian Financial Review. 16 December: 1. Mitchell, Sue, and Marianna Papadakis. 2014. ACCC goes after top Coles execs. The Australian Financial Review. 6 May: 1. Mitchell, Sue, and Georgia Wilkins. 2014. Coles accused of gouging. The Age. 17 October: 1. Murphy, Jason. 2011. Margins drain away in milk shake-up. The Australian Financial Review. 9 March: 5. Murphy, Kate. 2008. The ‘most dependable element of any country’s manhood’: Masculinity and rurality in the Great War and its aftermath. History Australia 5: 72.1–72.20. Neales, Sue. 2012. Growing pains become unbearable. The Australian. 29 February: 11. Nosi, Costanza, and Lorenzo Zanni. 2004. Moving from ‘typical products’ to ‘food-related services’: The Slow Food case as a new business paradigm. British Food Journal 106: 779–792. O’Chee, Bill. 2014. Jamie Oliver burnt by Woolworths partnership. Farm Weekly. 18 June. http://www.farmweekly.com.au/news/agriculture/general/opinion/jamie-burnt-by-woolies-deal/2702360.aspx. Accessed 1 Feb 2017. Ooi, Teresa. 2011. Farmers cry foul as milk price cut. The Australian. 27 January: 3. Percy, Larry, and Richard Rosenbaum-Elliott. 2016. Strategic advertising management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollan, Michael. 2008. In defence of food. London: Penguin Books. Priest, Marcus. 2011. Suppliers accuse Coles of bullying. The Australian Financial Review. 4 November: 4. Priest, Marcus, and Louise Dodson. 2011. Big supermarkets under attack. The Australian Financial Review. 3 November: 1. Richards, Carol, Geoffrey Lawrence, and David Burch. 2011. Supermarkets and agro-industrial foods: The strategic manufacture of consumer trust. Food, Culture & Society 14: 29–47.

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Rowling, Troy. 2011. Queensland dairy farmers are fighting wars. Queensland Country Life. 10 February: 5. Roy Morgan Research. 2016. Supermarket weep: Woolies’ share continues to fall and Coles and Aldi split the proceeds (media release). 24 October. http:// www.roymorgan.com/findings/7021-woolworths-coles-aldi-iga-supermarket-market-shares-australia-september-2016--201610241542. Accessed 14 April 2017. Russell, Mark. 2011. Coles ‘will hurt beef industry’. Sun Herald. 23 January: 18. Sherrington, Matt. 2016. Loans to boost Northern mango and prawn productivity. North Queensland Register. 18 August. http://www. northqueenslandregister.com.au/story/4105762/manbulloo-and-pacificreefs-productivity-bolstered/. Accessed 10 Feb 2017. Sonnino, Roberta, and Terry Marsden. 2006. Beyond the divide: Rethinking relationships between alternative and conventional food networks in Europe. Journal of Economic Geography 6: 181–199. Speedy, Blair. 2013. Coles tightens the screws on food suppliers. The Australian. 1 April: 17. Speedy, Blair, and Verity Edwards. 2013. Woolies milk move leaves farmers sour. The Australian. 28 March: 4. Spurgeon, Christina. 2013. Regulated integrated advertising. In The Routledge companion to advertising and promotional culture, ed. Matthew P. McAllister, and Emily West, 71–82. New York: Routledge. Strategic Direction. 2011. Jamie Oliver at Sainsbury’s: Analysis of a brand alliance. Strategic Direction 27: 16–17. The Sydney Morning Herald. 2013. Coles and Woolworths go head to head with top chefs. The Sydney Morning Herald. 22 December. http://www.smh. com.au/national/coles-and-woolworths-go-head-to-head-with-top-chefs20131221-2zrqj.html. Accessed 10 June 2014. The Sydney Morning Herald. 2014. Coles sprung over apple claim. The Sydney Morning Herald. 7 November: 4. Tessman, Brian. 2011. Milk price war leaves a sour taste. The Australian Financial Review. 17 February: 71. Thompson, Tuck, and John McCarthy. 2013. How milk industry went from the cream of the crop to an udder disaster. The Courier Mail. 19 January: 4. Todd, Anne Marie. 2009. Happy cows and passionate beefscapes: Nature as landscape and lifestyle in food advertisements. In Critical pedagogies of consumption, ed. Jennifer A. Sandlin, and Peter McLaren, 169–179. New York and London: Routledge. Trute, Peter. 2014. Veg growers slam Woolies’ Jamie Oliver fee. The Sydney Morning Herald. 6 June. http://www.smh.com.au//breaking-newsnational/veg-growers-slam-woolies-jamie-oliver-fee-20140606-39ocx.html. Accessed 27 Jan 2017.

192  M. Phillipov Valent, Dani. 2015. Chef Curtis Stone, more than just a cardboard cut-out. Good Food. 2 June. http://www.goodfood.com.au/eat-out/news/chef-curtisstone-more-than-just-a-cardboard-cutout-20150601-gh9kmd. Accessed 12 May 2016. Vlasic, Kimberley. 2016. Celebrity chef Curtis Stone tours Far North, banana, avocado farms. Cairns Post. 20 April. http://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/ cairns/celebrity-chef-curtis-stone-tours-far-north-banana-avocado-farms/ news-story/ebdce142d6933eece61bcbce3fcf0e43. Accessed 10 Feb 2017. Washington, Stuart. 2011a. Coles and Woolworths bullying us, say suppliers. The Sydney Morning Herald. 26 November: 3. Washington, Stuart. 2011b. It’s war, but how low can they go? The Sydney Morning Herald. 26 November: 6. The West Australian. 2013. Dairy farmers fight for survival. The West Australian. 26 January: 73. Whyte, Sarah, and Esther Han. 2014. Growers get Jamie’s sympathy over ad fee. Farm Weekly. 19 June: 31. Wilkins, Georgia. 2014. Supermarkets had ‘role’ in Rosella failure. The Age. 7 May: 15. Woolworths. 2013. Woolworths and Jamie Oliver to inspire a healthier Australia (media release). Woolworths Limited. 4 October. Woolworths Group. 2011. Woolworths Limited annual report 2011. http:// www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/investors/our-performance/reports/ Reports/Annual_Reports/Annual_Report_2011/. Accessed 1 May 2017. Woolworths Group. 2012. Woolworths Limited annual report 2012. http:// www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/investors/our-performance/reports/ Reports/Annual_Reports/annual-report-2012/. Accessed 1 May 2017. Woolworths Group. 2013. Woolworths Limited annual report 2013. http:// www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/investors/our-performance/reports/ Reports/Annual_Reports/annual-report-2013/. Accessed 1 May 2017. Woolworths Group. 2014. Woolworths Limited annual report 2014. http:// www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/investors/our-performance/reports/ Reports/Annual_Reports/annual-report-2014/. Accessed 1 May 2017.

CHAPTER 8

Soft-Selling Supermarkets: Food Television and Integrated Advertising

Supermarket sponsorship of television cooking shows has long been a staple of daytime food programming. An example many Australians will remember was the sponsorship of Huey’s Cooking Adventures by nowdefunct, cut-priced supermarket BI-LO (see de Solier 2005: 473–477). Host Iain Hewitson’s rather unsubtle product placements and explicit endorsements serve as a model for how such sponsorship has typically occurred in the daytime space. However, these methods of representing sponsors’ products and messages are probably more similar to the celebrity endorsements in Chap. 7 (i.e. clearly recognisable as paid promotional content) than the more sophisticated “integrated” (Spurgeon 2013) advertising strategies that now characterise primetime food television sponsorship. Integrated advertising is a term used to describe the integration of advertising material with other media and communications content. In contrast to discrete forms of “interstitial spot advertising” that are clearly identifiable as non-programme content because they are placed in the breaks within and between programmes, integrated advertising includes product placement, integration of brands in storylines, branded tie-ins and other kinds of branded programme content (Spurgeon 2013: 72). The popularity of food media, and the greater sophistication and subtlety with which promotional messages can be conveyed through integrated advertising approaches, has made food media sponsorship attractive to major supermarkets as a means for both managing ongoing criticisms of supermarket practices and aligning their brand identities with more progressive political discourses and projects. © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_8

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These sponsorship models have proven highly effective—at least if sales figures are anything to go by. In fact, Coles’ sponsorship of two of Australia’s most popular primetime television cooking shows, MasterChef Australia and My Kitchen Rules (MKR), has been so successful that it has been credited with helping the supermarket chain, which has historically lagged behind Woolworths, to “close the gap” with its rival retailer (Janda 2010). These sponsorship deals are equally lucrative for the television production companies involved; MasterChef Australia and My Kitchen Rules have each been estimated to generate between $15 and $20 million in sponsorship revenue per series from their suites of sponsors (Mitchell 2014: 22)—a significant amount of money by Australian television industry standards. But these sponsorship deals are not simply about sales, they are also about brand protection. Following from the context provided in Chap. 7 of mounting public and media concern about supermarket power and business practices, this chapter examines the effects of the media and food industry relationships on two different models of food television sponsorship: Coles’ sponsorship of My Kitchen Rules; and Woolworths’ sponsorship of Recipe to Riches. These two cases show some of the different ways that the mainstream food industry is seeking to forge media industry alliances designed to align their own brand messages with the discourses associated with popular food media and contemporary food politics. To this end, integrated advertising in both programmes includes techniques designed to counter key sources of criticism of the major supermarkets. These include supermarkets’ treatment of farmers and the rise of supermarket private labels, respectively. While Richards et al. (2011: 43) would probably suggest that these are additional examples of discursive claims-making designed to re-engage consumer trust by disguising the industrial processes of modern food production, the greater complexity of these integrated advertising strategies, combined with the involvement of the larger range of stakeholders they require, makes them both more subtle and more difficult to control than conventional approaches to discursive claims-making. Both cases are examples of attempts to align the meanings of supermarket food with the discourses of food ethics and provenance that are now a regular feature of food media but, as we will see below, some strategies have offered more effective brand protection than others, and this relative success (or otherwise) is important for thinking through both the limits and affordances of these politics, and how and to what end they are mobilised.

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My Kitchen Rules and Recipe to Riches are both produced by Fremantle Media and air on the commercial, free-to-air networks Seven and Ten, respectively. MKR is a variation on an established “reality gameshow” (Hill 2005: 31) formula for television cooking shows, with amateur cooks progressively eliminated via weekly cooking challenges. With eight series to date at the time of writing, MKR is one of the most popular shows on Australian television and regularly attracts double the viewers of programmes on rival networks (Vickery and Dunk 2015). This success in Australia has resulted in MKR being franchised to a range of international territories, including the United Kingdom and the United States. Recipe to Riches is a slightly more unusual programme derived from a Canadian format. Unlike MKR, it features a new group of contestants each week, each of whom is vying to have their home recipe selected to go into mass production and be sold through Woolworths supermarkets. Recipe to Riches performs far less well in the ratings than MKR, but its success with key advertising demographics has been enough to sustain two series of the primetime programme (Jackson 2013), with applications open for contestants for a third series at the time of writing.1 MKR and Recipe to Riches reflect two distinct models of sponsorship. MKR’s is fairly typical of food television, particularly for reality gameshows. For a “top tier” sponsorship contribution estimated to be between $3 and $5 million (Canning 2010: 3; Lee 2010: 10), Coles is offered a range of brand placement and embedded marketing opportunities, including in-show promotions, contestant challenges centred on Coles’ products, themed television commercials and branded website content (Meade 2012: 28). Coles may be the show’s major sponsor, but there are numerous others, such as Holden cars or Finish dishwasher detergents, whose products also appear regularly throughout the series, and those (such as Maggie Beer Products’ involvement on MasterChef Australia) whose sponsorship deal might be limited to appearances in a single episode. In contrast, arrangements between Woolworths and Recipe to Riches are closer to those negotiated between record labels and reality TV singing contests, such as Idol (see Fairchild 2008). In this case, a Woolworths representative sits on the show’s judging panel, and the supermarket chain offers a production contract under the

1 In 2013, for example, Recipe to Riches attracted average audiences of around 600,000 compared with MKR’s 1.9 million (see Jackson 2013; Bodey 2013).

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Woolworths Select private label to the show’s winner. Woolworths also provides considerable behind-the-scenes advice in relation to product development and viability (media producer, 18 December 2014). This makes Woolworths integral to the narrative on Recipe to Riches in a way that is not necessarily the case for Coles and MKR—although the financing arrangements ensure that Recipe to Riches remains an independent production, rather than brand-funded programming (Sams 2013b: 19). Of course, the specific details of these deals are, by their nature, closely guarded secrets (media producer, 18 December 2014), but some of these can be deduced through analysis of the television texts. This chapter begins with an analysis of an episode of MKR in which the contestants’ challenge is to cook for—and be judged by—the farmers who supply fresh produce to Coles. This challenge has become an annual event on MKR, and is an example of “deep…integration” (Meade 2012: 28) of the sponsor’s brand into the episode’s narrative—a case in which the advertising material is not just thoroughly embedded within, but also practically indistinguishable from, programme content. The ‘Farmer’s Choice’ episode analysed in this chapter aired during MKR’s fifth series in 2014. It was an activation of the ‘Helping Australia Grow’ campaign designed to “neutralise the noise” of farmer criticisms of the supermarket chain (see Chap. 7). As a strategy designed to neutralise this noise, it was indeed an effective one. As I show below, the effectiveness of ‘Farmer’s Choice’ lies in its clear alignment between messages about ‘good’ food already associated with MKR and those that Coles was seeking to reinforce as part of its own brand identity. I argue that by blurring the lines between advertising and programme content, and by successfully enlisting both contestants and audiences in the ‘soft selling’ of supermarkets, ‘Farmer’s Choice’ worked to construct Coles produce as the natural choice for foodies, and Coles’ farmers as highly satisfied with their relationship with the supermarket chain. As a result, the episode’s narrative of respect and gratitude for Coles’ farmers and their produce served as an effective counter-narrative to the sustained criticism Coles had experienced during the ‘milk wars’ over the preceding three years. The chapter then turns to an examination of Recipe to Riches, and, in particular, to episodes from series 2, which departed from series 1 in two key ways. In the second series, Woolworths refined the brief to contestants from “just cook whatever you like” to a focus on healthier products and eating occasions more closely aligned with Woolworths’ brand identity as the “Fresh Food People” (supermarket representative,

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13 April 2015). The series 2 production also tried to overcome some of the constraints of the original Canadian format by providing more detail about how home recipes are transformed into mass-produced products (media producer, 18 December 2014). While Woolworths’ sponsorship of Recipe to Riches performs ideological work much like Coles’ sponsorship of MKR—in this case, by boosting the public image of private label products—the fact that Woolworths was essentially “cast [as a] star in its own television show” (Sams 2013b: 19) meant that its representations formed part of more complex networks of engagement between stakeholders. This created risks for the sponsoring brand that were not experienced by Coles. This is because Woolworths’ centrality as a ‘character’ in the series format (and not just in particular episodes or storylines) meant that its brand image was tied to the success or failure of the show in a much more thoroughgoing way than was the case for Coles and MKR. While, on the textual level, Recipe to Riches was successful in boosting the public image of supermarkets in the community (Lewis and Phillipov 2016), and at presenting private label products as a space of innovation (rather than a threat to the Australian food industry), its sponsorship model, which advances much more direct relationships between the major supermarket sponsor, contestants and audiences than was the case for Coles and MKR, exposed Woolworths to some, somewhat unexpected, moments of contestation and ‘failure’ of its key brand messages. Just as relationships between media and food industries in the artisan sector frequently connect stakeholders with different (and sometimes incompatible) needs and expectations (see Chap. 6), the sponsorship models used on MKR and Recipe to Riches demonstrate how relationships between the media and food industries can be equally complex within the conventional sector. In this case, like the celebrity endorsements in Chap. 7, these relationships may be motivated by a desire to ‘soft sell’ supermarket food (on the part of the supermarkets, at least), but in attempting to disguise or reframe contentious supermarket practices, these strategies sometimes inadvertently reveal them, and through these moments of revelation we can examine the effects of the food industry’s appropriation of contemporary food politics for quite different political practices and projects.

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Farmer’s Choice As an activation of the ‘Helping Australia Grow’ campaign that was itself a response to the negative publicity generated by the milk wars, ‘Farmer’s Choice’ was designed to do particular kinds of work for Coles. The challenge to cook for, and be judged by, the farmers who supplied the raw ingredients was not in itself special or unusual. In fact, it is a fairly common trope on television cooking shows. For example, series 3 of MasterChef Australia featured contestants cooking for lamb farmers, while series 6 included an episode in which they cooked for the farmers and food producers in the vicinity of Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. But while MasterChef ’s cooking-for-farmers challenges might occur at any point in the series, MKR’s tend to occur past the series’ halfway point, once contestants’ cooking skills have become more advanced. The ‘Farmer’s Choice’ episode in series 5 was typical of this nowannual event. The episode begins with show hosts and judges Pete Evans and Manu Feildel introducing the challenge to the contestants. As Feildel advises that the challenge will be to “celebrate [the] great produce” necessary for “great cooking”, smiling farmers enter the kitchen carrying bushels and crates of pristine-looking produce. Noting that these are the farmers who provide Coles with its fresh produce, Evans tells the contestants: “We want you to provide a feast—a thank you feast—for the farmers who give so much”. “It’s their produce,” Manu adds, “so don’t muck it up.” On the screen viewers are invited to join the conversation on Twitter, using both the usual hashtag of #mkr and the additional hashtag #ThankYouFarmers, with a small number of the tweets using these hashtags selected to appear on screen during the show’s broadcast. The official MKR account, @MKR_2014, uses both hashtags and Facebook to tell audiences, “Our Aussie farmers have spent months creating the produce for this special challenge!”2 The contestants all appear to be suitably impressed by the apparent “specialness” of the ‘Farmer’s Choice’ contest. One says that she is “so excited” to be given the “honour to be able to cook for these guys”. Another describes it as a “foodie’s dream”. A third says, “these farmers have put their blood, sweat and tears into this produce, so we really

2 See Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/MyKitchenRules/photos/a.38376​ 2010148.202050.203078475148/10152325894840149/, accessed February 2017.

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want to let it shine today”. As they are cooking, the contestants frequently remark on the “pressure” they feel to make sure that their food is “cooked perfectly” for the farmers, who watch on—and often comment—from a balcony above them. The tweets selected to appear on screen also reinforce the notion that cooking for the farmers is both a privilege and a risk, with comments focusing on the need to do “justice” to the farmers’ produce, not “stuffing up” the fresh ingredients, and the “privilege” of cooking for Aussie farmers. The contestants’ and the social media audience’s comments share similar rhetorical moves, presenting both the farmers, whose “blood, sweat and tears” goes into producing the food for our table, and the fresh produce itself as precious commodities deserving of gratitude and respect. The farmers themselves are also presented as deeply invested in, and connected to, the food they produce. Much like they are in the ‘Helping Australia Grow’ advertising campaign, the farmers on ‘Farmer’s Choice’ are presented as individual farmers, not as the representatives of large agribusinesses that, in many cases, they are. In the chatter and banter between the farmers and the contestants (the farmers regularly ask the contestants to affirm the high quality of the produce), and in the farmers’ playful warnings not to overcook the steaks or to waste fresh ingredients by “stuffing up” the recipe, the farmers are shown to be hard working, devoted to their vocation and highly satisfied with their products. As he watches two contestants cooking lamb, the lamb farmer is asked, “How would it make you feel if they burnt this lamb?” He replies: “I’d be real sorry. We put so much work into them.” While the ‘Farmer’s Choice’ farmers are, for the most part, businessmen who own or work for large companies and so by necessity have little ‘hands on’ involvement in the day-to-day rearing of animals or the harvesting of fruit and vegetables, they are presented as down-to-earth, dirt-under-their-fingernails food producers, rather than as the faces of professional agribusiness. Much like the clothing choices of the contestants, which are made by MKR’s wardrobe department and not the contestants themselves (television contestant, 28 September 2014), the farmers are carefully styled to embody many of the key signifiers of ‘authentic’ farm labour. With their flannelette shirts, rolled up sleeves, akubra hats and thick ‘Aussie’ accents, these (primarily male) farmers symbolise the rugged, salt-of-theearth masculinity of farm life central to Australian myths of nation (see Murphy 2008).

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In addition to focusing on the farmers themselves, there is a repeated emphasis on the freshness and beauty of their produce. Indeed, throughout the episode, ‘Farmer’s Choice’ invites a semiotic linking of the freshness of the produce with its aesthetic perfection. The freshness of the ingredients is remarked upon several times by both the judges and the contestants. Such remarks are frequently accompanied by close-ups of brightly coloured, pristine-looking fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, including whole sides of salmon, tricolour capsicums and piles of prime meat. As one of the contestants enters the storeroom filled with the farmers’ produce, she gushes, “It is the most beautiful room, honestly. There are so many colours. Everything looks so fresh.” Later, the viewer is treated to a close-up of the same contestant slicing through a shiny, totally unblemished, perfectly spherical red cabbage as she says, “look at this beautiful cabbage—it’s gorgeous”. The contestants’ delight and amazement at the freshness and beauty of the farmers’ produce is interesting given that these ingredients should, in theory at least, be totally unremarkable. After all, this is presented as the produce that is supplied to Coles supermarkets all over the country, and at no stage is it suggested that this produce is any better, fresher or more ‘premium’ that what ordinary shoppers could buy for themselves. That the easily accessible, widely available ingredients from one of Australia’s two major supermarkets can be described as a “foodie’s dream”, then, reflects not so much the ‘truth’ of these ingredients, but rather the way that they are being mobilised in the service of particular kinds of ideological work. This is done primarily by mobilising strategies of “brand trait transference” (Arsena et al. 2014: 1537), through which the qualities associated with the MKR television show are transferred to Coles supermarkets and its produce. Specifically, the episode invites viewers to associate Coles’ produce with the preparation of the high end, high quality food that is the goal of most MKR challenges. Typical of those challenges specifically concerned with cooking for Coles’ farmers, ‘Farmer’s Choice’ aired about three quarters of the way through the series—in this case, only ten episodes prior to the grand finale. Given reality television’s focus on the “transformation” or “makeover” of ordinary people (Seale 2012: 28), this stage of the MKR series is one in which contestants are presented no longer as simply ordinary home cooks but rather as increasingly skilled. Indeed, in their judging of the ‘Farmer’s Choice’ dishes, both the judges and the farmers agree that the contestants have produced impressive

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results. The farmers are unreservedly pleased with what the contestants have done with “their” ingredients—even the watermelon farmer, whose fruit is used in what is presented as a risky and experimental pork and watermelon dish, enjoys the results of the challenge. The judges’ critiques of each of the dishes are similarly positive. These critiques, which typically function as a suspense and tension device within the show, are unusually and overwhelmingly affirming of all the contestants’ dishes. As judge Pete Evans says by way of thanks to the farmers: “Ladies and gentleman, we’ve had some beautiful produce brought in by you guys and I think we can all agree that what the contestants have managed to do has been awesome.” MKR’s textual conventions and production practices not only enlist the judges and farmers in endorsing key brand messages, the contestants also replicate these messages about MKR, Coles and its farmers. Contestant interviews are an important device used by reality television to provide commentary on, and narrative structure to, the action viewers are witnessing on screen. On ‘Farmer’s Choice’, these comments are especially successful in replicating Coles’ key brand messages due to their apparent spontaneity. When asked about these interviews, former contestants typically describe the views they expressed on the show as genuinely held; apart from a few scripted comments designed to bookend the commercial breaks, such as, “today’s challenge is to cook for Coles’ Aussie farmers”, contestants are never “told” what to say or forced into saying anything they don’t want to (television contestant, 28 September 2014). Nonetheless, the seconds of interview commentary that appear in a broadcast are constructed from hours of footage—individual contestant interviews can last up to 11 hours (television contestant, 12 September 2014)—and many report subtle “encouragement” from producers to respond to questions in particular ways (e.g. television contestant, 12 September 2014). As one put it, “they…create stories in a very cunning way by asking you certain questions…It wasn’t until it was on TV that we realised what they did” (television contestant, 22 October 2014). With their careful selection and editing, combined with their apparent sincerity, these contestant comments act as powerful framing devices that invite audiences to interpret the text in specific ways. For instance, by presenting cooking for Coles’ farmers as a “foodie’s dream”, an “honour” and a “special” privilege, the show invites viewers (and contestants) to see supermarket foods not as something ordinary or mundane, but as the ingredients of choice for foodies and gourmet cooks. In much the

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same way that reality television utilises the affective labour and passions of audiences (see Jenkins 2006: 61), contestants’ apparently unscripted endorsements of Coles, its produce and its farmers assist in boosting Coles’ “culinary cultural capital” (de Solier 2005: 470) by linking the meaning of the Coles brand to that of MKR and to the food values that it represents. The success of ‘Farmer’s Choice’ as a brand management exercise is at least in part due to the clear alignment between Coles’ and MKR’s desire to each emphasise their foodie credentials.3 This is also a case in which food television’s logic of “vicarious consumption” (Adema 2000)—the sumptuous visual images of food that activate various consumer fantasies (McBride 2010)—dovetails with the desire of sponsors to connect beautiful images of food with other brand messages, such as those of freshness and quality. Certainly from Coles’ perspective MKR was an attractive sponsorship prospect because of the clear link between MKR’s messages about food and those of Coles’ marketing campaigns, especially with respect to the quality, freshness and “wholesome[ness]” of Coles’ produce (supermarket representative, 28 August 2015). In the ‘Farmer’s Choice’ episode, close-ups of raw ingredients—the brightly coloured vegetables and meat, the unblemished fruit, the “gorgeous” red cabbage—not only emphasise the aesthetic perfection of the produce on display, but also make symbolic connections between attributes of physical beauty and those of freshness and quality. Indeed, the terms beauty, freshness and quality are frequently used interchangeably in both the contestants’ and the judges’ comments on ‘Farmer’s Choice’. These slippages in the signifying chain—where quality and freshness come to be signified by beauty (rather than, say, by flavour)—serve to produce a fairly narrow definition of what constitutes ‘good’ fresh food.

3 While MKR accepts sponsorship from a major supermarket, the types of foods it features from its major supermarket sponsor must be compatible with its own foodie credentials. For example, one contestant recalls being directed by one of MKR’s producers to choose better quality produce when shopping for ingredients at Coles. “I wanted to get a packet of cheap parmesan,” he said, “and they said, ‘No…get the really good one’, and we went to the deli and picked up a really nice, proper parmesan cheese” (television contestant, 22 October 2014). In such cases, decisions about ingredient selection may have been directed by MKR production staff with MKR’s needs in mind, but they have the additional consequence of also boosting Coles’ gourmet cachet.

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This is not to say that Coles would have specifically negotiated representations of its produce on the show at this level of detail. Given that flavour is much harder to depict visually than beauty, and given food media’s tendency to represent food in terms of its beauty or sumptuousness (see McDonnell 2016), there are clear practical reasons why beauty might be more likely to serve as the master signifier of food’s desirability within a medium like food television. But it is also neither accidental nor insignificant that the representations of Coles’ produce took the form that they did. The damage caused by the media coverage of the milk wars and the Federal Court proceedings stemmed not just from the revelations of the impacts of low prices on farmers and suppliers, but also from the vulnerabilities and risks experienced by growers engaged in asymmetrical contracts with supermarkets—particularly in cases where their produce may fail to meet the strict standards (visual or otherwise) demanded by major retailers. While neither Coles nor MKR were willing to discuss the details of what they agreed to in relation to the ‘Farmer’s Choice’ episode or their sponsorship deal more broadly, we can surmise that at least some aspects of Coles’ representation in this episode would have been agreed in advance. We may not know precisely which aspects these are, but a textual analysis of their potential effects shows that ‘Farmer’s Choice’ endorses the value and effectiveness of the strict produce standards stipulated in supply contracts. The same strict standards that forced a Tasmanian carrot farmer to plough his perfectly edible, but slightly oversized, carrots back into the ground (see Chap. 7) are those touted by ‘Farmer’s Choice’ as markers of the quality of Coles’ fresh produce. Moreover, by pairing this emphasis on the beauty of the fresh produce with images of the happy, fulfilled, downto-earth farmers who produced it—and by emphasising a discourse of gratitude that ignores any potential for exploitation—Coles further benefits from the positive brand associations generated through these sponsorship arrangements, while also obscuring any negative consequences associated with this narrow definition of quality and desirability. That it does this by blurring the lines between advertising and programme content so fully means that it is unlikely to appear as a cynical exercise in public relations and brand management, in contrast to the more ‘obvious’ techniques of conventional advertising. Rather, the success of the integrated advertising—especially the ‘voluntary’ contestant endorsements—means that it produces promotional messages with the potential to appear more credible than those that are clearly demarcated as paid advertising.

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These strategies did receive some gentle lampooning in the media— for example, Fairfax journalist Ben Pobjie’s (2014) regular television column included the occasional sarcastic remark about his “amaz[ement]” that an episode of MKR would showcase the produce of its major sponsor—but, for the most part, Coles’ integrated advertising received very little attention or comment. This may have been due to the fact that integrated advertising has become so normalised on reality television in general, and on food television in particular (see Madger 2009), as to become unremarkable. However, given the media’s intensified interest in the politics of food, the increasingly vocal critiques of supermarket practices that had been appearing elsewhere in media at the time, and the prominence and conspicuousness of Coles’ advertising in this case, this relative lack of response is noteworthy. Indeed, in much the same way as ‘Farmer’s Choice’ appeared to successfully enlist the contestants in ‘voluntarily’ endorsing key brand messages, it also did so for key sections of the show’s audience. As it is for an increasing number of television programmes (see Wang 2016), social media is an important vehicle for audience engagement with MKR; with up to 20 tweets per second featuring the #mkr hashtag during episode broadcasts (Mediaweek 2014), MKR claims about 75% of the conversation, against 25% for rival reality shows (Broderick 2014). This is a form of engagement that is not only actively encouraged by the show’s producers, but is also used as a source of informal audience research.4 As is characteristic of most of MKR’s episodes, ‘Farmer’s Choice’ generated substantial online conversation using both the #mkr and #ThankYouFarmers hashtags. The conversation was striking for the way that it largely replicated the discourses associated with Coles’ farmers and fresh produce that were central to the ‘Farmer’s Choice’ episode. Of the tweets that used the #ThankYouFarmers hashtag (of which there were 83 ‘top’ tweets, excluding the posts from the official Channel 7 and MKR accounts), approximately 48% specifically engaged with these

4 As MKR Executive Producer Evan Wilkes told Mediaweek, “As I watch [episode broadcasts], I’ve got Facebook on my iPad, I’ve got Twitter open on my phone. I’m constantly looking at it just to get feedback and ideas…[on] what are people thinking about?” (Podcast available at http://www.mediaweek.com.au/evan-wilkes-emma-ashton-reality-tv/, accessed February 2017).

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core themes.5 With the exception of one post, which was overtly critical of the show, the tweets were notable for the way they consistently reinforced the language, themes and focus of the ‘Farmer’s Choice’ episode. For example, the episode’s emphases on the need to show gratitude and respect to “our Aussie farmers”, on the importance of “living up” to the expectations of farmers, on doing “their” ingredients justice and on the beauty, quality and freshness of the ingredients, each appear as key concerns within the Twitter conversation. Representative tweets include: saladdeath @saladdeath, 1 April 2014, 1:39 AM Nothing is better than fresh Australian produce #mkr #thankyoufarmers Arun Dutta @arundutta84, 1 April 2014, 1:40 AM All the best to the #mkr contestants. This is an awesome episode. So proud of the #aussie #farmers #thankyoufarmers Troy Brodie @TroyBrodie, 1 April 2014, 1:40 AM Farmers fresh food is the best!! #mkr #ThankYouFarmers Priti – make my go @PritilovesJay, 1 April 2014, 1:41AM Do the farmers justice! Fresh produce, don’t screw it up! #thankyoufarmers #mkr Teh Das @tehcup, 1 April 2014, 2:39AM #thankyoufarmers :) thank you for keeping Australia well fed with amazing produce :)

With the repetition of terms like “fresh” and the recognition of the commitment of farmers to keeping Australians “well fed”, the Twitter conversation associated with the #ThankYouFarmers hashtag reflects observations made in other contexts that social media and online commentaries tend to stay within the frames, values and discourses of the media texts on which they are commenting (see Lester and Hutchins  2011). Participants who use either the #mkr or

5 ‘Top’ tweets are those that have been identified by Twitter as garnering the greatest user engagement via replies and retweets.

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#ThankYouFarmers hashtags in their tweets are likely to be especially engaged and committed viewers (see Bruns and Burgess 2012), so these responses may perhaps reflect a reluctance or disinclination on the part of fans to critique ‘their’ show (and, indeed, viewers tend to be more accepting of product placements in reality television than in other genres, see Jenkins 2006), but given the prevalence of critique in both mainstream and food media, this almost complete lack of contestation of Coles’ and MKR’s messages is noteworthy. Given that MKR’s producers use social media engagement as a means of gauging audience responses to programme content, this Twitter conversation also highlights the success with which reality television audiences are invited to engage in affective relationships that seek to build synergies between audience participation, television programme content, sponsoring brands and advertising. As a result, much like the contestants’, the audiences’ acceptance and endorsement of MKR’s messages about Coles’ produce and the supermarket’s relationship with farmers serves as an (apparently spontaneous, unsolicited and ‘authentic’) vehicle through which to promote, reinforce and normalise core brand messages. The success of the ‘Farmer’s Choice’ episode was in the clear alignment between the goals of MKR and its sponsoring brand. They may have been motivated by different needs (the visual conventions of television on the one hand, and image management on the other), but the resultant programming was equally beneficial to both. Coles and MKR did this in a way that enabled them to successfully enlist audiences and contestants in replicating brand messages that essentially incorporated and appropriated many of the terms under which supermarket food and supermarket practices are typically critiqued. Rather than industrial ‘Food from Nowhere’, Coles’ produce was framed very squarely as ‘Food from Somewhere’, produced by farmers whose names and faces we know and who, importantly, convey the same signifiers of happiness and satisfaction that govern representations of food producers in the alternative sector (see Parts 1 and 2). Here is a case in which many of the same representational strategies that appeal to consumer fantasies and expand markets for small-scale producers (all the while disciplining these producers into particular kinds of behaviours and affects, see Chap. 6) are not only similarly disciplining for conventional farmers; they also serve to short circuit many of the substantial criticisms directed at supermarkets. After all, it is hard to say that Coles is treating its farmers badly when there are so many apparently unsolicited endorsements

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of how much these producers are valued! That these messages were endorsed by audiences, contestants and the farmers themselves affirms that Coles’ brand management approach (however politically problematic it may otherwise be) ultimately ‘made sense’ to the various stakeholders involved—something that is not always successfully achieved through these types of relationships, as the next example will show.

Converting Recipes to Riches? While Coles appeared as simply one sponsor (albeit a particularly prominent one) among many on MKR, Woolworths’ sponsorship of Recipe to Riches took “cross-promotional television to a whole new level” (Sams 2013a). Like Coles’ sponsorship of MKR, Woolworths’ sponsorship of Recipe to Riches performs specific, albeit different, ideological work for the supermarket chain—in this case, by boosting the public image of (private label) ‘supermarket food’, rather than countering criticisms of supermarkets’ treatment of farmers and suppliers. But, unlike on MKR, these messages occur in a context in which, as Recipe to Riches’ supermarket partner, Woolworths is a central ‘character’ in the series format and not just in particular episodes or storylines. Many considered this to be a sponsor’s dream—one journalist described Recipe to Riches as a “major offensive in the all-out supermarket wars” that should have a “few Coles executives feeling a little nervous in front of their television screens” (Sams 2013a)—but the different, more direct, relationship between television producers and sponsors in this case created some difficulties in enlisting the affective labour of audiences and contestants. This is not because Recipe to Riches’ lacklustre ratings had the potential to affect Woolworths, the broadcaster and the production company, nor because the overtness of the sponsorship relationship meant that is was more likely to be seen as cynical product advertising masquerading as entertainment. It was because the audience activities associated with reality TV (such as social media engagement), and the seemingly genuine motivation of Recipe to Riches contestants to use the show as a platform for bringing products to market, had the potential to directly affect Woolworths’ brand in a way that was not the case for Coles and MKR. After all, Recipes to Riches contestants were essentially ‘working for’ (or, at least, striving to work for) the programme’s major sponsor, and their enthusiasm—or lack thereof—towards that relationship could either challenge or confirm existing criticisms of the supermarket chain.

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While Recipe to Riches, like ‘Farmer’s Choice’, attempted to incorporate and reframe criticisms of supermarkets—in this case, by presenting private label products not as a threat to the food industry but as a space of innovation and inclusion—its less successful enlisting of contestants and audiences highlights some of the limits of this type of appropriation of the values and discourses of contemporary food politics. Recipe to Riches’ programme content was largely determined by the original Canadian format (media producer, 18 December 2014). Unlike other localised versions of international food programmes (see Fletchall 2015), Recipe to Riches follows the original format very closely, with contestants proceeding through ‘golden ticket’, ‘batch up’, marketing and product launch rounds. Each episode focuses on a specific “eating occasion” selected by the programme’s supermarket sponsor, such as snacks, desserts, mains or breakfast (supermarket representative, 13 April 2015), with three contestants attempting to bring their product to market, and one chosen to have their products sold in Woolworths the next day. The series winner is the contestant with the greatest overall product sales. With Tania Lewis (Lewis and Phillipov 2016) I have previously argued that a key effect of Recipe to Riches is to boost the ethical credentials and public perception of supermarket food by presenting this food not as an anonymous corporate product but as a ‘batched up’ version of a home cooked recipe. For example, although the programme’s purported aim is to “lift…the lid on the food we buy”, with the exception of some brief factory footage in the final episode of series 2, and the short online series extras ‘Show to Shelves’,6 Recipe to Riches reveals very little about the actual processes of mass food manufacture. In fact, when contestants are asked to reproduce their recipe in commercial quantities, the batch up takes place not in a factory, but in the kitchen of a Sydney catering college, where the use of industrial equipment extends only to mixers, kettles and brat pans of a scale used by caterers and restaurant kitchens, not those used by food manufacturers. As a result, much of the preparation looks like what contestants would normally do at home: chopping chillies and dates by hand; individually zesting and juicing lemons; and preparing apple purée in a regular home blender.

6 See https://tenplay.com.au/channel-ten/recipe-to-riches/about, accessed February 2017.

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Some of Recipe to Riches’ “implicit linking of domestic cookery practices…and supermarket goods” (Lewis and Phillipov 2016: 114) is undoubtedly a relic of the original Canadian format, which would have been produced with at least some awareness of the concerns about supermarket food that animate North American food politics—concerns that, in the words of Michael Pollan (2008: 1), supermarket shelves are dominated by “edible food-like substances”, rather than real food. In such a context, connecting supermarket foods to the artisanal food practices of ordinary home cooks can be read as an attempt to ameliorate public unease about the practices and products of conventional, supermarketised food systems. But while these ideas also have some purchase in Australia, they tend not to loom as large in public discourses about supermarket food. From the supermarket’s perspective, the appeal of involvement in the Australian version of Recipe to Riches was less the opportunity to “debunk…the myths” (supermarket representative, 13 April 2015) surrounding conventional food systems and more to improve the public image of supermarket private label products. In contrast to dominant media accounts of private labels as simply low-cost alternatives to branded products that threaten the viability of traditional food manufacturers and suppliers (see Chap. 7), Recipe to Riches’ contributes to a reframing of private labels as sites of novelty and innovation—something which both the academic literature and the supermarket sector note has been going on for some time (see Burch and Lawrence 2007: 105–106). But by linking supermarket goods with the practices of ordinary home cooks, Recipe to Riches further reframes private labels as sites of inclusion, in this case enabling home cooks to access and contribute to the professional food manufacturing industry. Supermarket representatives describe Recipe to Riches as an attempt to “engage” customers and the community with the food production process, and thereby to emphasise supermarkets’ leadership in the development of new and innovative products (supermarket representative, 13 April 2015). As one supermarket representative explained: I think that a lot of people think that own brands and labels and the sorts of products we develop ourselves are just copies of what others are doing, and I don’t think that they have…enough understanding of the product development process that we go through. So [Recipe to Riches] was a good opportunity for us to showcase that, so that people were more interested

210  M. Phillipov in the inspiration and dedication we have to food and developing things that are different, and the significant investment in R&D that we go through. (supermarket representative, 13 April 2015)

To this end Woolworths would have preferred more factory and production footage that highlighted the new equipment and new production processes that the supermarket chain invested into get these new products to market than was possible within the parameters of the Recipe to Riches format (supermarket representative, 13 April 2015). While series 2 did consciously try to incorporate more of this type of footage (media producer, 18 December 2014), the result remained “betwixt and between” (supermarket representative, 13 April 2015): part promotional vehicle for Woolworths’ investment in product development, innovation and “community engagement”; and part entertaining gameshow about the trials and tribulations of ordinary home cooks. In place of more substantial insight into the processes of product development and manufacture are affirmations of the lengths Woolworths went to to replicate the taste, quality and integrity of contestants’ home recipes. For example, in the series 2 final, contestants were repeatedly asked to affirm how happy they were with the final products. When one contestant was asked what he thought of the “lengths that the supermarket went to to get your products on the shelves” by contracting factories on both the east and west coasts of Australia, he replied: “Amazing…I’m extremely happy with all the people that work behind the scenes”. Another said he was “really happy – over the moon” when asked how he felt about “how much care and attention went into making [his product]”. A third said that she was “so pleased [with the final result] because [she] expected the taste to be so different from what [she] cooked”. While this was perhaps designed to counter criticisms from some previous years’ contestants who were decidedly unhappy with their final products, Recipe to Riches’ repeated urging of contestants to confirm their satisfaction also (and perhaps inadvertently) reveals some of the risks of this type of television sponsorship model and the politics that it seeks to mobilise. This is because many of Woolworths’ key brand messages were not only obscured in the mismatch between their needs as a sponsor and the needs of the television production (to promote their product innovation, on the one hand, and to adhere to the conventions of an international television format, on the other), they were also

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affected by the differing expectations of contestants. This so-called marketer’s dream that was expected to unnerve Coles (Sams 2013a) never successfully mobilised the show’s contestants into replicating key brand messages and becoming the kinds of brand ambassadors for Woolworths that they might ideally have been. Unlike the contestants on MKR, who come to the show with a variety of motivations and goals—sometimes just to be on TV or to have a fun and interesting experience (e.g. television contestant 12 September 2014; television contestant, 28 September 2014)—the contestants on Recipe to Riches largely come with the specific goal of bringing their product to market. Some had spent a number of years in product development, but had been unable to raise the capital required to commercialise their product (television contestant, 28 November 2014). Others had been operating their food businesses on a small scale, but needed a vehicle like Recipe to Riches to build their business further. Quite unique to reality cooking show contestants, who largely say that they enjoyed their experience on the show (e.g. television contestant, 12 September; television contestant, 22 October 2014), former Recipe to Riches contestants enjoyed some aspects of being part of the programme, but were frequently dissatisfied with the final result. Crucially, they attributed blame for this dissatisfaction not to the Recipe to Riches show or production team, but to Woolworths supermarkets (e.g. television contestant, 18 November 2014; television contestant, 8 December 2014; television contestant, 9 December 2014). Contestants described their unhappiness with Woolworths’ perceived lack of commitment to their products, as well as with the lack of consultation in relation to product development. As one category winner put it, this lack of consultation left her shocked: I had absolutely no involvement [in product development] whatsoever, and I got the final product sent to me about three days before it was my segment on air…I actually rang them and was crying because…[my original recipe and the final product] looked nothing alike. It was just so upsetting. (television contestant, 8 December 2014)

Others described Woolworths’ involvement with Recipe to Riches as a cynical mechanism to grow its customer base and to raise the profile of its Woolworths Select own brand, rather than expressing a genuine interest in discovering or investing in new products and product developers (television

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contestant, 18 November 2014; television contestant, 9 December 2014). Contestants saw the purpose of the show as primarily to bring new products to market, and as a result, tended to be very focused on the outcomes they were seeking for their own products. In contrast to the contestants on MKR, Recipe to Riches’ contestants were typically far less familiar with the conventions of reality television and the multiple functions that a primetime television programme needs to perform (such as satisfying audiences with entertaining programming, satisfying sponsors and advertisers, and not just serving the needs of contestants). Contestants’ dissatisfaction could not hurt Woolworths or Recipe to Riches directly, as their contracts prohibited them from unauthorised disclosures of details of their relationships with either Fremantle Media or the supermarket retailer, but if one of Woolworths’ key aims in sponsoring Recipe to Riches was to boost customer and community “goodwill” towards the supermarket chain and its private label products (supermarket representative, 13 April 2015), the arrangement did not result in relationships between the television show, major sponsor and contestants that were as effective as they could have been. Despite much closer connections to the major sponsor, contestants on Recipe to Riches were less powerful brand ambassadors than they were on MKR. This can be seen most clearly in the social media activity associated with the show, which—unlike MKR’s Twitter conversation—largely did not replicate the frames, discourses and values of the original television text. For example, the affirmations of the heroic effort Woolworths made to preserve the quality and integrity of contestants’ products that we saw on the Recipe to Riches television broadcast are virtually absent from any of the official Facebook pages of the 18 category winners from series 1 and 2. When contestants acknowledge the help and support they have received, it is typically the customers who have bought the product, and not Woolworths or Fremantle Media, that are specifically thanked. For example, A.J. Mills shares her gratitude for all the “encouragement, support and love I have received along the way”, but only specifically thanks those who have bought her Mrs. Mills EasyBake Cookie Dough, not those who assisted in product development or in bringing her product

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to market.7 At best, Woolworths is mentioned simply as a place where the product can be purchased, such as: “[product] on special this week at Woolworths” or “[product] now available at [location of Woolworths store]”. At worst, Woolworths is mentioned only as the subject of discussions about where the product is available and why it is not being stocked. One contestant even set up a user-generated map to identify the Woolworths stores in which his product could be found because he did not know himself where his product was available. Another attributed the lack of communication about product availability to “woollies being woollies”.8 While none of these constitute explicit criticisms, contestants’ focus on their product’s availability, rather than on its market innovation or other characteristics, conveys a notable lack of enthusiasm for either Recipe to Riches or its supermarket sponsor that is at odds with their proclamations within the programme itself. As a result, although Recipe to Riches was broadcast at a time when supermarkets were seeking to boost the status and cachet of private label product lines and against a backdrop of media and public concern about supermarkets’ control of the retail market and their treatment of suppliers, the programme’s attempt to link supermarket products with the “homes, recipes and artisanal cooking skills of ordinary Australians” (Lewis and Phillipov 2016: 106), and private labels with discourses of engagement and innovation, did not generate the ‘cut through’ required to successfully enlist contestants, audiences and other stakeholders in endorsing and replicating the show’s—and Woolworths’—key brand messages. Few contestants’ products have been successful enough to maintain a permanent place on Woolworths’ shelves; even the products of the two series winners are no longer available through the supermarket chain. Woolworths itself is also unconvinced about the success of the partnership; while it worries about “closing the door” to people who have good ideas for products but would not be able commercialise them without the vehicle of a primetime television show, the disappointing ratings mean that it is still “working out the value” of its partnership with Recipe to Riches (supermarket representative, 13 April 2015).

7 For full post, see https://www.facebook.com/mrsmillseasybake/posts/869645766414120, accessed February 2017. 8 For full post, see https://www.facebook.com/MichaelKingofSausages/posts/825408630869215, accessed February 2017.

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The Supermarket Soft Sell Where the success of Coles’ partnership with MKR lies in its capacity to harness the compatible practices and agendas of the various stakeholders involved and to align these with politically desirable messages about Coles’ practices, Recipe to Riches’ deceptively more simple brand partnership model actually tied the fates of stakeholders more closely together in ways that resulted in less successful outcomes for the television production, the supermarket sponsor, the contestants and—if we take into account ratings figures—the audiences. While both models of sponsorship resulted in bringing more customers into the two supermarkets, they did not have equal ‘cut through’ with audiences. MKR’s ‘Farmer’s Choice’ episode addressed an issue of key public and media concern (major supermarkets’ treatment of farmers) by offering counter-narratives that aligned Coles’ fresh produce with MKR’s foodie credentials and with contestants who appreciate and value the work of Australian farmers. The combination of satisfied contestants, judges and farmers on ‘Farmer’s Choice’ was accepted by key sections of MKR’s audience, who replicated many of the frames, discourses and language choices of the episode in the social media conversation that forms such a crucial part of the show’s audience engagement. While Recipe to Riches also attempted to ameliorate public criticism through counter-narratives (in this case, by presenting supermarket private label products as a space of innovation and community engagement), it was unable to effectively enlist contestants and audiences to the same degree. In fact, their dissatisfaction, while not resulting in explicit criticisms, probably hampered the success of the brand partnership. Recipe to Riches’ concern with reshaping the meanings associated with private label products perhaps reflects a case in which criticisms of supermarkets can be less easily incorporated and food politics discourses less readily appropriated than was the case for MKR and supermarkets’ treatment of farmers. This is because while connotations of the ‘handmade’ can be effective in mobilising an alternative food politics within the artisan space (see Parts 1 and 2), the practices of supermarket suppliers—even when reframed and reimagined as ordinary home cooks—can be much less easily aligned with the discourses and practices of alternative food. These differing levels of success are suggestive of both the possibilities and the limits of a food politics mobilised through food media’s representational strategies and new media and food industry alliances.

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CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: A New Politics of Food?

Media and Food Industries has sought to understand how media’s intensified interest in food, and the food industry’s growing interest in food media, are shaping the production and circulation of food media texts and their food politics. The chapters and case studies throughout this book have traced an increasingly coherent set of representations across food media texts through which ‘good’ food is invested with specific kinds of meaning and value and is associated with tradition, with artisan and alternative production processes, and with idyllic locations and lifestyles. These representations are frequently explicitly or implicitly political in nature, but it is a politics that is less about critique or exposé of the ‘bad’ than it is about presenting the ‘good’ as desirable and pleasurable—as a source of what Kate Soper (2004: 112) has called “alternative hedonism”. Some food media texts do advance critiques of conventional food systems through images of “agribusiness apocalypse” (Newbury 2012: 87), but the focus is primarily on the utopian alternatives—on the sense of connection that comes from producing or sourcing ‘good’ food (Chaps. 2, 5, 6 and 8), on the food products and experiences that seem to arise ‘naturally’ from the conventions of media texts (Chaps. 3 and 4), and on the cheerful celebrity identities unconstrained by economic or other concerns (Chaps. 3, 4, 5 and 7). As the case studies throughout the book show, food media’s tendency to present audiences with appealing (and seductively simple) solutions to food systems problems is part of what has contributed both to the production of media texts with large © The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0_9

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mainstream audiences and to food media’s appeal to industry actors across the artisan–conventional spectrum. This has seen food media’s framing of politics-as-pleasure adopted equally enthusiastically by small-, medium- and large-scale food industries, by those genuinely invested in an alternative food politics, and by those with more questionable commitments to ethical or alternative consumption. The media–food industry relationships that are produced by, and underpin, food media texts have provided new sources of income and ‘talent’ for media industries. They have provided significant opportunities for the artisan and alternative food sectors to increase awareness of their products and production practices, and to make their politics more visible, accessible and appealing to people with varying degrees of investment in food politics. They have also provided increasingly sophisticated brand management strategies for conventional producers and retailers, who have used food media to boost their economic and political capital and to reframe some of the activist discourses designed to challenge their own control of the food system. As the examples in this book show, this has made food media an important force for shaping the terms and frameworks through which alternative food politics is enacted and critiques of conventional food systems mitigated. Media’s investments in the pleasures of food have done a great deal to put political questions about food and food systems on the popular agenda, but they have also contributed to what this politics can do ‘outside’ the text. The idyllic nature of the identities and practices we see in food media is a part both of their appeal and of their political power: it is what activates nostalgia and tradition as imaginative resources for reworking the meanings associated with food and for producing new ethical and political subjectivities; it is also what allows us to reimagine the work of food production as insulated from the challenges and economic constraints associated with other types of work. But the fact that food media’s idyllism is always a constructed idyllism—one disconnected from the more unpleasant or messy realities of contemporary food production and consumption—is part of what allows it to be mobilised for a range of different political purposes. The utopian solutions of the locavore literature, Gourmet Farmer’s imagined Tasmania, the celebrity brands that emphasise experiences of affect rather than economic exchange, all perform symbolic work within diverse markets even as they mask the class and economic capital they involve (see Rebrovick 2015). Likewise, the images of happy and fulfilled farmers are

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part of how ‘alternative’ food is constructed as desirable, but these representations also offer a set of symbolic resources that work to discipline farmers and to enable their appropriation within the advertising and marketing strategies of major food retailers. There is already a significant literature examining the ways in which food and lifestyle media discipline consumers (Zimmerman 2015; Ouellette and Hay 2008), but the examples throughout this book show how these texts also discipline a range of other actors in media and food systems—not only farmers and food producers, but also media producers, whose work is increasingly governed by hegemonic representations of food designed to appeal to media industry, food industry and audience needs. To the extent that food media texts blur political and economic agendas, merge incommensurate political orientations within a narrow set of media representations, and limit the terms in which food systems can be debated and understood, it reflects some of the unintended—and possibly inevitable—consequences of a food politics invested in pleasure. While pleasure can be effective in engaging a wide range of people, it can only ‘do’ so many things, and the nature of its representational strategies can be readily subsumed by the hegemonic. However, while food media’s politics-as-pleasure perhaps limits the potential of contemporary food politics, the terms in which it does so are not monolithic. I have shown how attempts to capitalise on, and appropriate, the growing mainstream interest in food politics is not uniformly successful—when critics or food producers challenge the representations of various media texts, as reflected in the criticisms of the locavore literature and Gourmet Farmer, for example, or when texts like Recipe to Riches fail to mobilise contestants and audiences in the replication of core brand messages. These suggest “moments of possibility” (Barnes 2017) for contemporary food politics. Food media’s emphasis on pleasure and its idyllic representations of food production and consumption may facilitate appropriation by a range of industry actors, but only in specific ways. For example, as Chap. 5 showed, external actors are rarely successful when attempting to leverage the popularity of texts like Gourmet Farmer for ends that are not aligned with the text’s genre conventions. Similarly, as Chap. 8 suggested, large retailers may successfully link themselves with the discourses of ‘connection’ between farmers and consumers, but their failure to successfully do so in the case of other types of food producers is suggestive of limits to this type of appropriation.

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This gives us reason to be critical of the terms in which food media articulates its food politics—specifically of the ways in which the emphasis on personal pleasure and choice (rather than structural considerations) on the part of alternative food discourses provide a vocabulary that can be deployed for a range of political purposes. This is a vocabulary that can be used, for example, for a progressive politics centred around investing food with new kinds of meaning and significance, but these same terms can also be used to co-opt meanings for more reactionary ends. In some cases, the invocation of nostalgia and tradition can distance food from economic connotations in ways that open up a new potential for food politics (as they do in the case of artisan celebrity brands); in other cases, these same tropes can be used to obscure more problematic economic relationships (as they do in the advertising and marketing strategies of major supermarkets). Food media’s rich imaginative repertoire can shape the terms in which contemporary political positions with respect to food are enacted and understood, but in order to realise its full potential as a food politics, we must be careful not to assume that particular types of representational strategies necessarily deliver us to particular political positions ‘outside’ the text. Instead, we need to be attentive to the shifting and contingent politics that arise as representational strategies move across and between different types of media texts, and as they shape, and are shaped by, different media and food industry imperatives. While much of the scholarship in the field (and many food media texts themselves) have focused on the personal food practices of consumers, contemporary food politics cannot be primarily located in consumer behaviours. As the examples in this book show, contemporary food media, and the practices of ethical and alternative consumption they promote, sit within a web of relationships that involve not just consumers, but also media and food industries, the genre conventions of food media texts, audience expectations, and economic and political agendas—some of which are aligned, and some of which are not. Media and Food Industries has aimed to show how this nexus of relationships is producing a new politics of food in which textual strategies, media economies and food industry practices converge. This has contributed to diversification in both the food and the media industries at a time of significant structural change, and it has been driven in part by the affordances of food media texts and the cultural work of media and food industries involved in shaping the tropes and discourses of popular food

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politics. In these respects, media are now actors in contemporary food systems whose “agency” (Bennett 2010) needs to be better understood. That is, food media does not simply ‘mediate’ debates about food politics or relationships between production and consumption; it also helps to construct them. Attention to the representational strategies of food media texts and the industry relationships that underpin them is crucial to understanding the ways in which food media has become a space to reimagine and remake, sometimes also to constrain, the pleasures and possibilities of contemporary food practices.

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Williams, Richard. 2011. What top chefs hated eating as kids. Sunday Times (Perth). 24 July: 1. Willoughby, John. 2010. Try a little tartness in a medieval staple. The New York Times. 27 October: 9. Woolworths. 2013. Woolworths and Jamie Oliver to inspire a healthier Australia (media release). Woolworths Limited. 4 October. Woolworths Group. 2011. Woolworths Limited annual report 2011. http:// www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/investors/our-performance/reports/ Reports/Annual_Reports/Annual_Report_2011/. Accessed 1 May 2017. Woolworths Group. 2012. Woolworths Limited annual report 2012. http:// www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/investors/our-performance/reports/ Reports/Annual_Reports/annual-report-2012/. Accessed 1 May 2017. Woolworths Group. 2013. Woolworths Limited annual report 2013. http:// www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/investors/our-performance/reports/ Reports/Annual_Reports/annual-report-2013/. Accessed 1 May 2017. Woolworths Group. 2014. Woolworths Limited annual report 2014. http:// www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/investors/our-performance/reports/ Reports/Annual_Reports/annual-report-2014/. Accessed 1 May 2017. Young, Katherine E. 2014. Adorno, gastronomic authenticity, and the politics of eating well. New Political Science 36: 387–405. Zimmerman, Heidi. 2015. Caring for the middle class soul: Ambivalence, ethical eating and the Michael Pollan phenomenon. Food, Culture & Society 18: 31–50.

Index

A Abalone, 123 Abbott, Tony (MP), 167 ABC. See Australian Broadcasting Corporation ACCC .See Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Advertising, 8, 91 in form of travelogue, 108, 124, 127. See also media tourism integrated across media, 12, 94–96, 193–214 Affective economics, 13, 80, 82 Affective economy, verjuice as part of, 88–89 Affective labour, 139–142 in ‘alternative’ food, 95–96 discourses of, 178 Agrarian Kitchen (cooking school), 123 Agribusiness. See also Industrial food production concealed in media representations, 199 dystopian images of, 31 hardships for farmers, 149

reframing critiques, 220 visions of apocalypse, 35, 219 Agriculture schemes, communitysupported, 6, 155 Aldi (Australia), 158 Allan, Wally (farmer), 138 ‘Alternative’ as construct/discourse, 80, 101– 102, 220–222 ‘Alternative’ food, 99 blurring with mainstream, 185 discourses appropriated by supermarkets, 159, 177–179 practices and politics, 1 ‘Alternative hedonism’, 31, 42, 219 America Farm to Table (Batali and Webster), 134 Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Kingsolver), 30–48, 32, 35–39, 40–44, 46–48 Animal welfare, 11, 54. See also Beef cattle; Chickens; Concentrated animal feeding operation Appalachia, 36 Apples, 126, 173 Apricots, 36

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 M. Phillipov, Media and Food Industries, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64101-0

247

248  Index Armchair travel. See Media tourism Arnott’s biscuits, 164 Artisan/-al foods, 1, 4, 12–13, 63, 99 branding strategies, 89–92 businesses, 109 commercialisation of, 85, 87 expanding market for, 111 in food media texts, 133 marketing of, 122 recipes/products, 84–86 Tasmania as locus of, 120–127 Artisan food producers, 12, 99 in food media, 13, 111, 220 producing real and symbolic goods, 135 Austerity, pleasurable versions of, 42 Australia, 4–5 Australia Day Coles’ announcement of milk price cut, 165 cooking for, 93 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 91–92 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), 96–98, 158–160, 163, 168 AUSVEG (vegetable growers’ peak organisation), 183 Authentic celebrity brands defended as, 102–103 connections between people and products, 18, 80 emplaced food experiences, 107 food production methods (in the Barossa), 99 ‘good’ food constructed as, 1 Authenticity, 1, 32 for affluent urban consumer, 101 of artisanal food cultures, 99 avoiding commercial promotion, 90 contrasted with agribusiness, 32

drawn on in celebrity brands, 79 economic value of, 101 of Gourmet Farmer, 119–121 ideas of, shaping industry activities, 81, 83 peasant traditions mobilised by Maggie Beer, 100 personal passion rather than commercial promotion, 90 symbolic representations of, by supermarkets, 157 and trustworthiness, 96 undermined by commercial strategies, 128 of verjuice, 101 of whisky tours, 123–124 B Barossa Food (Heuzenroeder), 99 Barossa Valley, 81, 88–89, 93, 96–101 Batali, Mario, 134 BBC Good Food Magazine, 61 Beck, Ulrich, 6 Beef, 174, 179 Beef cattle, 32, 33–34, 177 Beer, Colin, 84 Beer, Maggie, 79, 80, 95–96. See also Maggie Beer Products Bestsellers, food books as, 30 Beverage producers, 122, 125–126. See also Food producers Big Food. See Agribusiness; Industrial food production Billy Kwong (restaurant), 134 Bi-Lo supermarkets, 193 Biodynamic foods, 134, 137 Biscuits (rosemary and verjuice), 96–98 Blair, Tony (Prime Minister), 65 Blumenthal, Heston (chef), 171 Blythman, Joanna (journalist), 155

Index

Boutique food producers. See Artisan food producers Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), 5, 55 Brand protection by supermarkets, 170–171, 194 Brand Tasmania, 116 Brand tie-ins, 12 Brands as ‘placeless’, 97 shaping media culture, 102 Brawn, preparation of, 58 Bread, white, 36 Bryant, Simon (chef), 90 BSE. See Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, 00 C CAFO. See Concentrated animal feeding operation Carr, Kim (Industry Minister), 167 Carrots, 169, 203 Case studies, 15 Cattle. See Beef cattle Celebrities, 102. See also Chefs; Celebrity Celebrity brands, 72–73, 79–103 Celery, organic, 141 Chefs, celebrity, 9, 10–11, 53–73, 134, 159 partnering with supermarkets, 159 profiling food producers, 134 Chickens, 35, 69, 181 Chinese cookery, 137 Churchill, William (AUSVEG), 183 Cider, 126 makers, 125–126. See also Beverage producers Citizen-consumer, responsibilised, 7 Citizenship, 10 Class privilege, 58–59

  249

in food market, 39–42 in media ideologies, 30 Coburn, Simon (AUSVEG), 183 Coca Cola in media coverage of supermarket bullying, 161 Coles Supermarkets Australia, 157–159 accused of bullying suppliers, 160–162 brand management, 202–207 and Curtis Stone, 171–179, 185 ‘Down Down’ campaign, 165 media coverage of ACCC investigations, 160–162 messages accepted by audience, 205–206 milk price cut, 165–167 responses to media criticisms, 175–178, 196 sponsorship of My Kitchen Rules, 195–207, 214 sponsorship of television shows, 194–195 use of celebrity endorsement, 171–175 Coming Home to Eat (Nabhan), 30–48 Commercialisation of artisanal products, 85, 87 Commodification attempts by tourist bodies, 118, 121 of celebrity, 80 of experiences, deliberate, 123 of Gourmet Farmer experiences, 120 of media properties, unauthorised, 119–120 and non-commodified audience experiences, 111 of peasant traditions, 101 of rural/pastoral idyll, 60–63 Community-supported agriculture schemes (CSAs), 6, 155

250  Index Concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), 33–34, 35 not eating meat from, 40 Connection, discourses of, 41, 42, 48 Conservatism of locavore food politics, 38 Consumer alienated from sources of food, 10 Consumer choice food politics of, 7, 38 political potential of, 30–31 problematic, 41 Consumer trust, 157 supermarkets’ attempt to manufacture, 159 Consumption, vicarious, 202 Convenience foods, 67 Cook and the Chef, The (television series), 91–92 Cookbooks, 5, 134 Cookery, Chinese, 137 Cooking at home, 68, 208–209 from scratch vs convenience foods, 67, 208 Cooking schools/classes, 60–62, 123 Cooking shows, 3, 13, 17, 58, 64, 65, 72, 95, 102, 159, 178, 180, 193–195, 198. See also Food media; Reality television product placement on, 3 Cooking with Verjuice (Beer), 100 Corbin, Pam (River Cottage), 60 Corn, 32–33, 34 Cornwall, Rick Stein in, 112–113 Cows. See Beef cattle CSAs. See Community-supported agriculture schemes Cult geographies, 122, 124–125, 127–129 Cultural capital, acquisition of, 9 Cultural studies methodologies, 14–16 Cygnet, Tasmania, 113–114

D Dairy foods, 68, 69 Dairy industry, 166, 167 David, Elizabeth, 84 Disease, diet-related, 33, 36, 65, 68 Domestic goddess, 47 Dunn, Rodney (chef), 123 Durkan, John (Coles), 162, 165 E E. coli, 6, 34, 56 Edgell, 164 Egg producers, 181–182 Eggs, 173, 181 Elgaar Farm, Tasmania, 115–116 Emotion. See Affective economy; Affective labour Emotional capital, 13 Entrepreneurial self, strategies of, 144, 149 Escape to River Cottage (television programme), 55–58 Essential Media and Entertainment, 109, 120, 122, 124 Ethical capital of star chefs, 19, 172–173 Ethical consumption, 29, 39–43, 42 ‘Ethical’ food, 29 meat, 40–41 in supermarkets, 170–171, 174 Ethics of food production, 1 Evans, Matthew (Gourmet Farmer), 109, 113, 115–119, 121–126, 198 F Facebook. See Social media Fans as tourists. See Media tourism Fantasy food literature opportunities for, 47–48 role in media tourism, 125

Index

Farmers, 13, 17, 19, 32, 43, 57, 134, 141, 144, 146, 148–150, 156, 158, 165, 166, 169, 170, 172, 175–179, 182–184, 186, 196, 198–207, 214, 220, 221. See also Food producers in Dorset, 57 fantasy of their work, 128 presented in Gourmet Farmer, 121–122 role in cooking shows, 198–199 as stewards of the land, 121 suicides among, 149 treatment from supermarkets, 165 Farmer’s Choice episode. See My Kitchen Rules Farmers’ markets, 40, 147, 155 not available to all, 175 rise of, 6, 31 Fast food, 30, 32–33 marketing, 3 Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh, 11, 55–63, 72–73 Federal Court actions against Coles supermarkets, 158, 160–164, 170, 183 Feildel, Manu (chef), 198 Feminism, 43. See also Gender and food provision, 43 Film tourism. See Media tourism Finish dishwasher products, 195 Follow Donal to Europe (television programme), 9 Food chain, rehumanising of, 134 ‘Food from Nowhere’, 2, 156, 206 Food Inc. (film), 6 Foodies appeal of verjuice for, 81, 85 boom, 4 as target market, 92 in Tasmania, 113, 128 Food industry, 3–6, 11–18, 31, 33, 43, 48, 54, 55, 65, 72, 73, 79,

  251

81–83, 95, 99, 101–103, 107, 110, 111, 128, 129, 135, 157, 169, 176, 197, 208, 219, 221, 222. See also Agribusiness; industrial food production critique of, 8 as a culture industry, 83 global food giants, 36 practices revealed by infections, 6 relation to media tourism, 110 stakeholders in Gourmet Farmer, 107 Food labour gendered nature of, 43–48 as political choice, 59 Food manufacture, presentation on television, 208 Food market, change through personal consumption, 39–40 Food media, 1–15 adopted by food industries, 220 advantages for food producers, 11–12, 109 appeal to wide range of actors, 220 chef and producer genre, 134 definition of, 14–15 disciplining consumers, 221 emphasis on personal choice, 222 food styling on television, 200, 202 generating tourism practices, 107 genre conventions, 221–222 genres of, 9 historical change in, 5–6 as impetus for travel, 112 inviting affective responses, 108 large audiences, 219–220 politics of, 219–223 representations, 219 roles of, 9–10 as saviour of publishing, 2 television, 53–73 Food packaging images, 157 Food politics, 1–4, 107

252  Index consumer choice as motor of system change, 38 education about, in TV programme, 120 implications for, 15 location in consumer behaviour, 222 mainstreaming of, 3, 6 reworking meanings of food, 13–14 Food producers asked to contribute to promotion costs, 183 benefiting least from media participation, 125–126 bullied by suppliers, 160 challenges for, 147–148 in Coles advertisement, 177–178 goals and agendas of, 122–123 happiness essential to good food, 144 identities fused with products, 145 images of, 142–143 imagined lives of, 133 long hours, 141, 148 media presentation of, 121–122, 145, 149–150, 199 sense of vocation, 138 suicide of farmers, 149 waste forced by supermarket policies, 169 Food product brands, collapsed, 161 Food production concerns about, 1 hardships of, 141 idealised, 142–143 labour invisible, 142–143 as labour of love, not work, 142–143, 146 pleasures of, 139–148 work represented as easy, 138 Food products biographies of, 83 Food provisioning as women’s work, 43–45

Food quality signified by beauty, 202 Food safety, 6 consumer anxieties about, 5 scares, 55 Food system transformation of, 31 Food tourism, 55, 60–62, 72, 128– 129. See also Media tourism Food waste avoiding, 100 forced by supermarket policies, 169 Foodwork men’s role in, 45–47 traditional, as political choice, 59 women’s role in, 43 Foot-and-mouth disease, 5, 56 Foraging, 61 For the Love of Meat (documentary), 126 Fossil fuels, 35 Free-range. See Chickens Fremantle Media, 195, 212 Freshness, discourses of, 180 Frogmore Creek Vineyard, 138 G Gardening, 37 Gender, 30, 31, 43, 44, 46. See also Men; Women cooking and masculine identity, 64 in ethical choices, 43 in labour market, 140 politics, 30, 43–48 roles in farming, 44 Genetic modification (GM), 35, 36 Geography, cult. See Cult geographies German heritage of Barossa Valley, 99, 100 Gibbs, Julie (publisher), 88, 136 Global Culture Industry (Lash and Lury), 82–83 Goddess, domestic, 47

Index

Good life, imagined reconstruction of, 59 Gourmet Farmer Afloat (television programme), 109 Gourmet Farmer (television programme), 32, 107–129, 108–111, 113–129 Goyder, Richard (Wesfarmers), 162 Grant, Matt (NSW Farmers Federation), 182 Greens, native, 36 H Hackberry, 36 Haddow, Nick (cheesemaker), 118 Hadler, Robert (Coles), 168, 176 Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain (television programme), 9, 108 Hardt, Michael, 139–141 Hedonism, alternative, 31, 42, 219 Heinz, in media coverage of supermarkets, 161 Helping Australia Grow campaign, 196, 198 Hewitson, Iain (chef), 193 Holden, 195 Home as utopian space, 47 Home cooking linked to supermarket goods, 208–209 as means to healthiness, 68 Honey producer, 122 Hopp, Steven, 35 Housewifery, 47. See also Gender; Women pleasurable fantasies of, 47 How to Be a Domestic Goddess (Lawson), 47 Huey’s Cooking Adventures (television programme), 193

  253

Hugh’s Chicken Run (television programme), 57 Hummus, 83 I Idyll, 3, 57, 61, 100, 115, 117, 121. See also Labour idyll commodified, 60–63 Idyll, rural. See Rural idyll/-ism Idyllism, unreflexive, 38 IGA, 158 Ill-health, diet-related, 33, 36, 65, 68 Images on food packaging, 157 Immaterial labour, 139–141 Imports of food products, 164 In Defense of Food (Pollan), 44n, 155 Independent Grocers of Australia (IGA), 158 Indigenous food traditions, 36 Indigenous produce, 136 Industrial food production, 1, 29, 55, 99, 178. See also Agribusiness; Food industry concern about, 55 consumers’ lack of knowledge of, 32 hazards of, 6–7 invisible on television, 56–57 Industry practices. See Food industry; Media industry Informational economy, 139–141 Insects as food, 136 Interviews, 15–16 It Tastes Better (Kwong), 134–139, 149–150 J Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (television programme), 65, 68, 69, 71. See also Oliver, Jamie ‘Jamie’s Garden’ promotion, 182

254  Index Jamie’s Great Italian Escape (television programme), 108 Jamie’s Ministry of Food (television programme), 65, 67, 68, 71 Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals (television programme), 67 Jamie’s School Dinners (television programme), 11, 64, 65, 67, 68 Jegen, Tjeerd (Woolworths), 179 Job market, insecurity in, 140 Junk food promotion, 12. See also Convenience foods; Fast food K Kellogg, 164 Kingsolver, Barbara, 29–48 Kingsolver, Camille, 43 Knowledge economy, 139 Koyama, Masaaki (sushi master), 123–124 Kurtz, Paul and Virginia (farmers), 141–142 Kwong, Kylie (restaurateur), 134, 136–139 Kylie Kwong Heart and Soul (television programme), 136 My China, 9 Recipes and Stories, 136, 137 Kylie Kwong’s Simple Chinese Cooking Class, 137 L Labour, immaterial, 139–141 Labour idyll, 133–134, 145 in contrast to professional foodwork, 133 Lamb, 199 Land, spiritual connections to, 36 Lantern Books, 88, 136

Larder. See Pantry clean-out Lardo di Collonata, 83 Lark, Bill (whisky maker), 123 Lark, Distillery, 123 Lash, Scott, 82 Lawson, Nigella, 47 Lee family (farmers), 177 Lettuces, 169, 177 Lienert, Colin and Joy (farmers), 138 Lifestyle advertising, 67 instruction, 41 television programmes. See Food media; Reality televisionLocal food as community connection, 37 Locavore diet not deprivation, 36 Locavore literature, 29–48 ‘Food from Somewhere’, 107 problems and solutions, 32–39 textual strategies, 31–39 Lury, Celia, 82 M Mad cow disease. See Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) Maddams, Tim (chef), 60, 61 Maggie Beer Products, 79–103 sanctioned by ACCC, 96–98 Maggie’s Food Club, 85 Maggie’s Harvest (Beer), 88–89 Maggie’s Verjuice Cookbook (Beer), 88 Manbulloo Mangoes, 175 Mangoes, 177 Manure, role in farming, 33–34 Marketing as education and information, 92–94 Markets, change through personal consumption, 39–40 MasterChef Australia (television programme), 8, 93–95, 136, 172

Index

Coles’ sponsorship of, 194 MasterChef (television programme), 4, 8–9 Maude (restaurant), 172 McLeod, Ian (Coles), 168 Meat ‘ethical’, 40–41, 173–174 mechanically reclaimed, 69 organic, 137 Meat and Livestock Australia, 179 Media, food. See Food media Media industry, 8, 14 Media pilgrimage. See Media tourism Media producers’ perception of audience desires, 126 Media promotion disappointments for producers, 125–127 Media tourism, 107–129 converted to real tourism, 127–129 to Cygnet, Tasmania, 113–114 definitions, 111–112 places as sites of pilgrimage, 107 role of stakeholders, 110 Mediatisation, 83 Mediterranean tradition Jamie Oliver’s cooking, 67 Jamie Oliver’s products, 66 Maggie Beer’s products, 100 Maggie Beer’s style of cooking, 86 peasant cuisines, 81, 84 Mehigan, Gary (chef), 98 Meller, Gill (chef), 60, 61 Men, 43–46, 59. See also Gender role in foodwork, 45–47 Meredith, Dairy, 138 Meredith, John (farmer), 138 Methodology, 14–16 Middle class food practices, 7 Milk, 69–70, 115 price cuts (‘milk wars’), 159, 165–167

  255

Ministry of Food. See Jamie’s Ministry of Food Minnesota, 36 MKR. See My Kitchen Rules Movie tourism. See Media tourism Murray River Salt, 138 My China (Kwong), 137 My Kitchen Rules (television programme), 4, 172, 195–207 Coles’ sponsorship of, 194, 195, 197–207 contestants endorsing brand messages, 201–202, 204 Farmer’s Choice episode, 196–197, 198–207 participants’ clothes, 199 production practices, 201 social media engagement with audience, 204–206 N Nabhan, Gary Paul, 29–48 Nachos as wholesome food, 67 Naked Chef, The (television programme), 64 Native Americans, 36–37 ‘Natural’, discourses of, 69–70 Negri, Antonio, 139–141 Neoliberalism, 41 transformation of citizens, 39 New Labour (UK), 140 Niche food sector, 84. See also Artisan/-al foods; Artisan food producers Nike brand, 82 Nolan, Dee (farmer), 142 Nostalgia, 7, 43–48 adopted by industry, 7, 11–12 commodification of, 101 conveyed in food media, 108, 115 employed by Gourmet Farmer, 115

256  Index and escapism, 59 food media’s investment in, 54 images invoked for present purposes, 57 investing food with meaning, 48 linked to desire for commodities, 62 offered to city dwellers by products, 100 part of affective economics, 82 pastoralism in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 38 for peasant agrarian life, 58 in popular representations of ‘alternative’ food, 99 reframing conservative tradition, 17 reimagining of 1950s housewife, 47 reimagining of tradition, 38, 155 in River Cottage, 57–58 in rural idyll, 121 as theme of locavore literature, 29–48 for tradition and connection, 41 for traditional food production, 46 use in food advertising and labelling, 11–12 used to obscure economic facts, 222 used to resolve competing ideologies, 30, 31 and women’s role, 47 Nowhere, Food from, 2, 156, 206 NSW Farmers Federation, 182 O Oakeshott, Rob (MP), 167 Oates cleaning products, 162 O’Donoghue, Ben (chef), 172 Olive oil, 83, 100 Oliver, Jamie, 54–55, 63–73 activism or profit-making, 65–66 brand identity, 66 business activities, 64

food product range, 66, 68 hybrid class identity, 64–65 juggling politics and business, 72–73 as political campaigner, 65 relationship with Sainsbury’s, 179 relationship with Woolworths, 159, 179–186 supermarket products, 67–71 transformation, 63–64 wealth, 63 O’Meara, Ross (chef and farmer), 118 Omnivore’s Dilemma, The (Pollan), 30–48 O’odham communities, 36, 37 Organic foods, 40, 137 Orr, Mal and Lola (farmers), 141–142, 143 P Packaging, images on, 157 Paddock to Plate (television programme), 108 Padstow, Cornwall, 112–113 Pantry clean-out, 35–36 Pastoral idyll, 48, 61, 115. See also Rural idyll/-ism as commodity, 61 of Tasmania invoked by Gourmet Farmer, 115 Peasant as imagined ‘other’, 101 Peasant traditions, 81, 100, 101. See also Nostalgia romanticised, 81 Penberthy, David (journalist), 98 Peppermint Bay, Tasmania, 118 Perry. See Cider Pheasant Farm Restaurant, 84 Piccone, Marie (farmer), 177 Pigs, 34, 58, 138 Pleasure

Index

as dimension of food politics, 35 in food media texts, 221 Politics of food. See Food politics Politics of representation, 149–150 Pollan, Michael, 6, 29–48, 209 Polyface Farm, 34–35 Pork, sow stall free, 174 Potatoes, 141–143, 147 Poultry, 68, 137, 138. See also Chickens Private label products improving public image of, 209 as space of innovation and inclusion, 197, 208–210 in supermarkets, 163–165 Processed foods, 32–34, 68–72 presented as version of home cooked recipe, 208–210 ‘Proper’ eating, politics of, 137 Prosciutto, home-cured, 115 Provenance (of food) as comfort, 36 growing interest in, 31 labelling laws, 96–97 Q Queensland Dairyfarmers Organisation, 166–167 R ‘Real’ food movement, 155. See also Artisan/-al foods; Slow Food Reality Ravings (blog), 94–95 Reality television, 93–95. See also Specific programmes audience acceptance of product placement, 206 contestants on, 207–208 features of the genre, 200

  257

Recipe to Riches (television programme), 195–196 availability of contestants’ products, 213 contestants’ endorsement of brand messages, 211 contestants’ goals and motivations, 207–208, 211 contestants’ views, 210–213 low ratings, 207, 213 social media activity, 212–213 Woolworths’ sponsorship of, 194, 195–197, 207–213 Representation, politics of, 149–150 Restaurant cookbook genre, 134 Reza: Spice Prince of India (television programme), 9 Rick Stein’s India (television programme), 108 Risk society, responses to, 6–7 River Café (London), 54, 55 River Cottage Canteen (Axminster), 108 HQ, 60, 108 spin-off products, 60 River Cottage Every Day (FearnleyWhittingstall), 61 River Cottage Handbook (collection), 60 River Cottage—Spring (television programme), 56 River Cottage (television programme), 11, 32, 55–63, 72, 100, 108 River Cottage Veg Every Day! (Fearnley-Whittingstall), 61 Rosella (tomato sauce makers), 161 Rural idyll/-ism, 34, 53–63 of Barossa Valley, 99 in Coles advertisement, 177 constructed by food media, 220 contrasted with agribusiness, 32, 34

258  Index food producers’ lifestyles, 128 Tasmania as, 110, 114–117, 120–121, 128 of traditional farm life, 34 verjuice as part of, 88, 99–101 and women’s role, 47 S Said, John (farmer), 177 Sainsbury’s supermarkets, 179, 185 Salatin, Joel (farmer), 34 Salmonella, 6, 56 Salt production, 138 Scherer, Tony (winemaker), 143 School Dinners (television programme). See Jamie’s School Dinners School meals, 11, 65, 69 Screen tourism. See Media tourism Seafood, sustainable, 136 Sea urchin, 123 Self-sufficiency, rural, 56 Shaming, used in television programmes, 65 Shopped (Blythman), 155–156 Simple Chinese Cooking (Kwong), 137 Slow Food, 57–58, 99 Social life of things, 82–101 Social media, 198–199, 204 Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), 109, 118, 119, 122, 124 balance and diversity requirements, 121 codes of practice, 116 SPC (fruit and vegetable brand), 164 SP Exports (tomato grower), 169–169 Stein, Rick (chef), 112 Stone, Curtis (chef), 159, 171–179, 185 Suicide of farmers, 149 Supermarket food presented as version of home cooked food, 208–210

Supermarket Monsters (Knox), 169 Supermarkets, 155–186 Australian duopoly, 4, 157–158 as authorities on food, 174 customer focus, 169–170 discursive claims-making, 157 effects of television partnerships, 214 endorsement of by celebrity, 173 ‘ethical’ product lines, 170–174 exposés of practices, 155 framing pro-farmer messages, 170 and integrated advertising, 193–205 international tactics to squeeze suppliers, 160–162 limited appeal for food media, 156 media criticism of, 160–171 milk discounting, 165–167 private labels, 161, 163–165 as public face of industrial food, 155 reframing critiques, 220 reshaping their brands, 158 response to consumer concerns, 7 response to media criticisms, 170–174 role in restructuring food industries, 156 strategies to manufacture consumer trust, 184–186 treatment of farmers and suppliers, 149, 158, 159 trying to ethicalise their brands, 158 undifferentiated in Australia, 156–157 voluntary code of conduct, 161 Sustainability, 1, 2, 6, 7 T Takeaway food, 71. See also Fast food Tasmania as a brand for promotion, 110–111, 116–117, 124, 127

Index

branding as clean and green, 116 as discursive space, 114 food producers’ lifestyles, 128 in Gourmet Farmer, 109–111 gourmet food experiences, 114 reimagined through artisan food, 127 as rural idyll, 110, 114–117, 120–121 Wilderness World Heritage Areas, 114 Taste as motivation for ethical choice, 39–40, 42, 115 in Kylie Kwong, 134, 142, 144 in Michael Pollan, 30, 35 TasVacations (travel company), 117–121 Tatman, David (farmer), 141–142 Television programmes, 5, 8–9, 53–73 . See also Food media supermarket sponsorship of, 193–214 Tessman, Brian (dairyfarmer), 166 Textual analysis, 14–16 Tourism. See Food tourism; Media tourism experiences, real and constructed, 124 practices, 107–129 virtual. See Media tourismTourism Tasmania, 116–121 Toys, branded, in fast food marketing, 3 Tradition, 32, 36. See also Nostalgia symbolic representations of, by supermarkets, 157 used to obscure economic facts, 222 Travelogues, culinary, 107–129 . See also Media tourism Trust, manufacturing of, 157, 184–186

  259

Turkey Twizzler, 68–69 Turkeys, 35 Twitter. See Social media U Unibic (biscuit makers), 161 Utopian food narratives, 31–32, 56, 219 impulses in food media, 42 solutions in food politics, 38, 220 theme of locavore literature, 48 visions, 29 V Verjuice, 79–103 definition, 79 international revival, 85–86 Maggie Beer’s promotion of, 80–82 marketing success, 85 media representations of, 80 origin, 84, 86 as part of lifestyle, 88 product placement, 91 in recipes, 90, 91, 93–95 as a seasoning, 87 semiotic openness, 86, 102 Vicarious consumption, 202 Vino cotto, 92, 94, 95 W Wall, Peter (winemaker), 85 Waste. See Food waste Watermelon, 201 Webster, Jim, 134 Wesfarmers, 161–163 What’s the Catch? (documentary), 126 Wilderness World Heritage Areas, 114 Winemakers, 84–85 . See also Beverage producers

260  Index Winter’s on the Way (television programme), 60 Women, 5, 43–47, 59, 65. See also Gender carrying burden of eating ethically, 43 Woods, Tiger (golfer), 82 Woolworths (Australian supermarket), 3, 157–159, 207–214 accused of bullying suppliers, 161, 163–165 ‘Cheap Cheap’ campaign, 163 and Jamie Oliver, 179–186, 185 media coverage, 160–161, 163–171 milk price cut, 165–166 television contestants’ view of, 211 Work, 2, 4, 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 29, 40, 42, 46, 47, 53–56, 58, 62, 64, 70, 72, 82, 87, 88, 93, 96, 101, 111, 112, 115, 122, 126, 128, 134, 139, 140–149, 157, 169, 173, 178, 181, 183, 197–200, 207, 210, 214, 220, 221. See also Labour

nobility of, 142 occupational cultures, 144–145 passionate, 140, 149–150 in people’s emotional and symbolic lives, 135 pleasures of, 139–148 representations of , 134, 135. See also Food producers; Labour idyll represented in food politics, 134 Work-life balance, 47 Wright, John (River Cottage), 60, 61 X X-Files, The (television programme), 111, 112, 119