Abstract
Integrating popular culture into educational materials, especially for concepts like intercultural/cross-cultural communication, allows students to better visualize and understand cultural and other communication processes. How can instructors best utilize food-culture reality TV shows in our classrooms to expand and illuminate cross-cultural topics with students? Docuseries such as Hulu’s Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation, PBS’s La Frontera with Pati Hinich, and Netflix’s High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America, are designed to educate and entertain. The programs review regional dishes/ingredients while appreciating historical food origins. These shows describe how ingredients, dishes, and preparations have been assimilated/appropriated into local, majority, and dominant cultures. The authors draw on recent and future undergraduate course modules highlighting these shows and various cultural/racial/political issues. Students thoughtfully engage with the material through both classroom discussions and written assignments. The authors hope to spark conversations about how indigenous communities, minoritized ethnic groups, and smaller co-cultures maintain their ingredients and traditions while the dominant culture borrowed, assimilated, poached, and transformed their heritage foods. How can a non-dominant culture know & experience their heritage foods while surrounded by the dominant culture? How are heritage foods recovered and remade by members of a diaspora? To what degree are change and adaptation inevitable in a world marked by commercial trade, human migration, geopolitics, changing tastes, and food fads instigated by social media celebrities? We envision this presentation as a discussion of how to use what is available on reality television while respectfully recognizing local cuisines.
Presenters
Mary Helen MillhamContributing Faculty, School of Communication, University of Hartford, Connecticut, United States Karin Haberlin
Student, PhD Candidate, University of Connecticut, Connecticut, United States Diana Rios
Faculty Communication and EL Instituto: Latino-Latin American Caribbean Studies, University of Connecticut, Connecticut, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Identity, Food, Non-Dominant Identity, Assimilation, Appropriation, Reality TV, Cross-Cultural Communication
