This week our featured Fellow is Tasha Oren. Professor Oren is part of the English faculty at UWM, where she studies film and media, popular culture, television, and the history of media. Her recent projects include the study of food media, television and food culture.
Tasha, thanks for taking a moment to talk with me. I’m not sure if you remember this since it was years ago and I’m in the Creative Writing plan rather than Cinema and Media Studies, but you were actually the first faculty member at UWM that I ever met. We talked about the English PhD program, which I was thrilled to be accepted into, and it was in your office in Curtin that I made the final decision to come to UWM for my doctorate. My classmates speak highly of you and I’m very pleased to have a chance to work with you and get to know you as a scholar this year. Like you, I study popular culture in a broad and interdisciplinary sense, but I admit I’m unfamiliar with the scholarly discourses surrounding food. Can you tell our readers (and me) a bit more about your work in food media culture and where your interest in the subject came from?
Hi Mark, it’s a pleasure to be talking with you and so nice to see you both at CIE and in the English department! The project I’m working on is drawn from a larger book project on Food television. I’ve been a fan of cooking shows for years but really stumbled onto the topic through work I did for my last book on global television formats. When writing about formats that travel well around the world, I found that food competitions were really the ideal format to look at and their popularity in the past decades has been just astounding. Once I wrote about these competitions as conventions and format “software” for television around the world, I started thinking more specifically about the evolution of food programming on television—I’m always interested in the question “why did this happen in just this way?” as a means to consider how various fields interact, in often surprising ways, to produce cultural objects that are also commodities within industrial processes. This led me to write a few articles about the history of the food network and US cooking shows. Once my editor asked me to write a book length study on this topic, I started thinking more broadly about the role of television in making food culture into popular culture. Since I’m a media scholar, I was particularly interested in the notions of televisulaity and the modes and ways television engages with food culture both in a historical context and now—as the very idea of television expands onto various platforms and streaming services and popular preoccupation with food is as often digital as it is material. So, in this larger project, I’m really charting a kind of history of non-scripted television through food programming, from early daytime instructionals to cooking shows, to cooking competitions and finally to web and streaming content as I also examine the role of television in circulating, defining (and changing) cultural notions about identity, difference, taste, locality, what constitutes the foreign and the global etc. In short, how television conventions evolve together with popular culture and changing mores in a continuous dynamic feedback loop.
You mentioned your work this year will focus on part of this larger book project and on several chapters that more directly address our theme, diversities. Could you tell us more about this?
Sure, in my CIE fellowship year, I’m specifically looking at how food television participates in popular imaginings about ethnic identity, immigration, travel, and notions of locality, the regional, the national and the global. In terms of television history, I’m looking back at immigrant TV chefs and personalities from TV’s early days. I pay specific attention to the evolving notions of “ethnic cuisine” on television cooking shows with Asian American chefs as my working example. In a later chapter, I chart popular imaginings of the globe together with food travel programs.
So my work this year is certainly focused on ethnic and national diversities of cooks and cuisines as media content. However, as I follow television history, I’m also concerned with diversities of form. Here I mean not only what’s on TV but also the generic conventions of each “type” and, even more broadly, the diversity of content we think of as food television, and the diversity of platforms and ways we’ve come to consume food programming.
Even though I’m woefully behind on my reading about food-related culture scholarship, I do know that it’s a very popular academic topic right now, and that many dynamic voices are taking part in the scholarly conversation surrounding it. If you had to pick one book about this subject that every scholar should read, what book would that be?
Yes, food scholarship is certainly coming into its own in the past two decades (and enjoying a boom, no doubt related to the cultural status of food right now). However, one of the elements I find so compelling in food studies is that it’s not only itself a discipline but a broad area/object of study that lends itself generously to a host of other disciplines and approaches from sociology to literary studies, history, political science, philosophy, gender and ethnic studies, film—and well beyond that, of course. I wouldn’t call myself a food scholar then but a media scholar interested in the intersection of food and media. So limiting the recommendation to television and to a book (utterly self-serving here, since there’s just too much otherwise) I’d go with Dana Polan’s Julia Child’s The French Chef, a work that provides a terrific reading of Child’s performance and innovation while situating this pivotal figure within a history of American culture at large, and importantly, a history of television specifically.
As our readers may or may not know, our Global Studies Research Fellows often come to us with research in many states of completion. Some use the Fellowship to finish an ongoing project, and others use it as a spring-board to launch new research. Where are you in this process, Tasha, and what sorts of findings might we see in April at the conference?
In terms of the chapters I’m here to write, I’m at the beginning—in fact, just returned this week from an archival research trip and still sifting through notes and scanned materials. My original plan was to present this work on early (mostly 60s) pioneers of so-called “ethnic” or immigrant cuisine on television, and offer ways to think about industry histories of commercial and public US television along side evolving conception of immigration and national culture, and together with the shifting status of cooking as both work and entertainment, responsibility and pleasure. However, since I’m also working on the last chapter, and television as diversity of form, I may pivot instead to contemporary TV and turn to our current moment to talk about recent streaming food television, the global structure of the industry and its content and how these circulate in and inform contemporary food culture. I’ll probably decide a little later on, as our conference shapes up.
Since it goes almost without saying that food is an interdisciplinary topic, I thought it might be fun to ask: what’s the most wildly (or interestingly) interdisciplinary thing you’ve seen in the scholarship of food? Is there some unlikely thread of inquiry that we’d never expect until we encountered it? I’m curious to hear your take on how far the interdisciplinarity of food-studies extends.
Well, since food is object, subject and practice, deeply visceral and personal as well as social and relevant in many orders of habits, limits, rituals, locations, outcomes, systems and distinctions, it can really stretch very far indeed—I can’t think of work that I’d classify as straining the edges. As I mentioned earlier, it’s certainly one of the exhilarating qualities of doing this kind of research; everyone knows something about it and most have a certain stake in food, cooking, and how and what it means. That said, I’m tempted to tell you about some unusual work, but I’m sure someone is reading this on their lunch break, and so I won’t…
Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Tasha; and I’m excited to see how your research progresses. As always, I’d also like to remind our readers keep an eye on Intersections in the near future for more interviews with our Global Studies Fellows, opportunities to see them present at our colloquia, and information about the CIE conference on Diversities, April 20-21sr.