A Mash Up of Contradictions

On how Britain got fed up

Introduction to Taste and the TV Chef, and the first in a series of extracts from my award winning 2020 book on the back story to the biggest story TV ever told - how to eat.

‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,’ wrote the epicurean Parisian lawyer and food philosopher, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1825. Since he threw down his gauntlet, Brillat-Savarin words have been spun into one of the most famous epithets of all time; ‘we are what we eat’.

But more than shape and size, we are what food itself has come to represent in society. Our diet is a signifier of who we are, what we would like to be and, perhaps more importantly, what other people think we are. It defines our peer group, divides the rich and the poor, the first world and the developing world and, increasingly, the billion bottoms and the bottom billions.  A lesser-known quote of Brillat-Savarin is timely: ‘The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves.’

Never has it been so important to dissect what that means for the future of the planet. An increasingly persuasive body of research can now plot a clear trajectory between the industrialisation of food culture, obesity and climate change. Activist storytelling such as the films Fed Up, The End of the Line, GMO OMG, Food Inc, A Place at the Table  have brought information previously only available in the boardrooms of the multinational food companies to a new kind of diner.

Being a foodie, once about aspiration and cultural capital, is now about taking responsibility about the provenance of food, where it’s going and how it gets there. The issue of peak oil, as told in the 2006 film The Inconvenient Truth, showed us that wasting precious oil reserves by buying shrink wrapped groceries really could bring about the end of civilization as we know it. Fed Up, the 2014 film made the same claims about sugar. 95% of Americans will be obese within two decades while private profit is placed ahead of national health in the American government’s agenda. ‘Years from now’ it predicted, ‘we’re gonna say ‘I can’t believe we let them get away with that.’’

The early 21^st century is a mash up of contradictions; an unprecedented era of apathy and activism, self-loathing and narcissism, slow food and junk culture is hurtling us into an uncertain future of climate change.  As the National Health Service buckles under the news that by 2050 obesity is predicted to affect 60% of adult men, 50% of adult women and 25% of children (Foresight 2007), a new dialectic around our relationship with food is emerging.

The internet has created a super-highway of open access and revolutionary spirit which is blasting open the doors of perception and democratising the media and viral campaigns name and shame industry heads and politicians who favour the interests of the food industry over public health; as documentary filmmaker Ross Ashcroft says in his 2013 film, Four Horsemen, ‘We need people who speak the truth in the face of collective delusion. To understand something is to be liberated from it.’

Could the answer lie in the humble, playful, delightful factual entertainment genre of Lifestyle TV? It has certainly transformed British food culture since the early 1990s with chefs like Jamie Oliver and Nigella influencing consumption patterns through a heady mix of aspiration, sex appeal and cool Britannia. The answers British producers have given me in this book could provide the answer for audiences all over the world; lifestyle, using the makeover formula of social aspiration to create a promise – a myth - of a better life, has a simple message; cook well, impress your friends and you too can have it all, from the girl next door like Jamie did or a candlelit dinner party like Nigella’s, with an extra bowl of ice-cream before bed.  It’s an international message for a global village.

Exploring how these narratives were ‘produced’ by TV’s bosses, and how audiences responded to what they represented and the power of their role in creating British food culture may help to understand just what TV can do to change the national diet again, and with it, save the planet.  With 60% of greenhouse gases created by the production of food, the health of the nation is increasingly about the health of the planet, and we’re running out of time.  To paraphrase Vivienne Westwood (2014), fashion’s late favourite activist, there’s too much to do to do nothing for much longer. As the world faces an unprecedented polarity between the haves and the have nots, and the combined threat from food security, peak oil and obesity is setting the agenda for global economies, this book looks at what TV food narratives can tell us about engaging audiences, changing consumption habits and storytelling for change.

So how does storytelling change the world? Stories about food tell us who we are and what we can be. How television narrates our own stories has been told before by academics and by TV producers, but in this first book to bring the voices behind Lifestyle Television to the debate about media narratives, both camps have been invited to the table to explore the construction of our modern world through food programmes.

In a series of interviews with some of the most influential game-changers in British TV, it examines the role of TV on food cultures around the world; from the make-over in British food by Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, for example, to the role of the copycat Jamies in reawakening food memories in Eastern Europe after the political ruptures of the 20^th century, this feat of storytelling on global economic, social and cultural frameworks is told by the people who made it happen, and those who analyse its impact.

Next: The Birth of the Cool: how BBC2 chiefs, Mark Thompson and Jane Root brought their fascination with food to encourage a new generation of TV producers to fetishize taste and romanticize ingredients which led to an explosion in supermarket sales.

From Taste and the TV Chef, Gilly Smith, 2020. Reproduced with permission from Intellect Books. You can buy the book here