Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

In the last ten years, cooking shows and food focused TV channels have become hugely successful worldwide, showing ‘democratic’ representations of people with a diversity of genders, ethnicities, and ages rarely seen before (Ketchum 2005). However, it is important to analyse to what extent this seemingly equal power-geometry corresponds to the reality of people working in the food industry in global cities such as Los Angeles or Sydney. The plethora of happy faces in these reality shows – somewhat reminiscent of Disneyland’s It’s a small world – lies in stark contrast to the reality of restaurant workers in ‘the-back-of-house’ who are often used as a workforce coerced into accepting low wages and hard working conditions (Wilson 2018). Nepali immigrant communities in Australia have become a reliable workforce for the Australian food industry, similar to the experience of recent Latino/a arrivals in the U.S.A., recreating what Cantazarite (2000) calls “brown-collar” work. In this paper I explore the disconnection between representation and reality in television shows such as Master Chef Australia and suggest that underneath the equal power-geometry they promote lies an asymmetrical global reality that point to an often ignored dark side of global people flows.