Shifting Perspectives
What Do Cowboys Eat?: Red River - the Cooked and the Raw View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Denner
The American Western film is mostly about food and sex. The "ur-Western" that defined the genre was Howard Hawk's RED RIVER, which recounted the founding of the Chisholm Trail, a way to bring Texas beef to Eastern markets in 1865, immediately after the US Civil War. Hawk's film -- starring John Wayne in the role that established him as a type -- was released in 1948, in the wake of WWII. RED RIVER comments simultaneously on the world created by the Civil War and by WWII. The film's repeated references to food provide a way of decoding the meta-narrative of all Westerns - it is through masculine violence that we overcome violence, arriving at a new authority, a feminized violence that offers makes an alternative world epitomized by food.
Queering Commensality: Imagining a Queer Food Culture through the Indigiqueer Poetry of Tommy Pico View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Caleb O’connor
This paper explores the ways in which indigenous queer (indigiqueer) poet Tommy Pico rethinks his relationship to food outside of commodity networks and attempts imagine a sustainable food culture through the act of queer commensality. Tommy Pico’s Feed (2019) will be read to appreciate the intimate relationship which contemporary foodscapes and food cultures share with histories of indigenous and queer oppression, and to elucidate how food can be appropriated as a technology through which alternative foodscapes can be fostered. This paper explores the ways in which Pico writes about the highly contested High Line in New York City, a location which offers queer eco-urbanism a space to foster a non-capitalist food culture yet faces the threat of gentrification. By exploring the concept of ‘emulsification’ which Pico coins as a radical methodology for rethinking the ways in which queer culture interacts with food, this paper elaborates on the ways in which indigiqueer urban food ecologies reimagine food culture.
Featured Beyond "Real" Food: Terroir as a Framework for Alimentary Performance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elizabeth Schiffler
This focused discussion invites food studies scholars to critically examine the term “terroir” as it has become a popularized and globalized term. Often used to describe the qualities imbricated in a particular foodstuff by its environment, terroir often suggests an extra, “real” aesthetic in food. This discussion asks, when “imagining the edible,” how does terroir as a concept change? When theatricality, spectacle, and creativity are a part of food, what changes in its terroir?
What’s in a Name?: Toward a Common Understanding of Food Media, Messages, and Content View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Isabelle Cuykx
Food media contents are popular among both their audience members and academics. Multiple studies have been conducted on all types of media (TV, magazines, social media, blogs, etc.) to investigate their link with food-related attitudes and behaviors. Consequently, concepts such as ‘food media’, ‘food content’, and ‘food messages’ are regularly mentioned by scholars but are also often used without proper clarification or even with conflicting interpretations. This might result in confusion as to what their terminologies exactly cover. Comparability is crucial in science; thus, we strive for a widespread common understanding to enhance comparisons among future studies’ findings and suggested implementations. Therefore, this scoping review investigates how the concepts ‘food media’, ‘food content’, and ‘food messages’ are referred to within academia. Based on the PRISMA ScR-guidelines, a research protocol has been developed to screen four scientific datasets on articles mentioning food media, content, and messages within the interpretation from a media studies’ perspective. Results indicate that even though all included studies (n=301) mention at least one of the three search terms, only 19 of them effectively explain or define them. Additionally, the review analyzes in which fields of study these terms are most often mentioned, as well as which methodologies, target groups, and investigated media (contents) are most common in food media research. This study invokes to aggregate this information and use it to establish a shared interpretation of ‘food media’, ‘food content’, and ‘food messages’, to reinforce the vital comparability of the results from diverse sources.
