On any given day of the week, viewers can turn their televisions on and find a plethora of reality cooking shows. These shows make cooking look rewarding. Whether it be pukka tucker from Jamie Oliver or lascivious offerings from Nigella Lawson, the message is that if it’s seasoned, sautéed, stuffed or stirred with enough love then the whole family will think all the more of the person who prepared it. But these shows portray a modified and highly influenced form of activity which rarely equates to the reality of domestic cooking. Fiction writers have a responsibility to their readers to present realistic domestic themes in relation to the preparation and consumption of food in order to overcome false notions of gastronomic bliss.
Media Representations of Cooking Deludes Domestic Reality
For some domestic cooks, the kitchen is indeed Hell’s own place. While cook-off contestants and celebrity chefs enthusiastically bone, truss and poach their way through another tantalising series, most domestic cooks have a vastly different experience. And while the food prepared on reality cooking shows is artfully plated for television and tasted with business-like detail, viewers are denied a perspective on the real purpose of the food’s preparation and delivery: that of eating the meal, usually at a shared table.
It is not so easy for the domestic cook to switch off the purpose of their culinary efforts at the end of an hour-long performance in the kitchen. Their culinary work is consumed and judged in the context of the social dynamic within which it is served. With this in mind, fiction writers can explore the mechanisms of power which operate in the domestic space as it relates to food, and well beyond that of simply getting a one-minute head-start in the Masterchef pantry.
Across most cultures cooking is a female activity and the culinary practices they perform are situated at the most rudimentary level in the hierarchy of domestic work. In contrast, reality cooking shows portray cooking as an elitist occupation usually dominated by men.
Cook-off competitors and celebrity chefs have access to an unlimited pantry with obscure and expensive ingredients which most domestic cooks can neither source nor afford. They also have a vast array of cooking paraphernalia at their disposal, such as blast freezers, sous vide appliances, multiple ovens, mixers and blenders, and dirty dishes miraculously disappear in commercial breaks.
On the domestic front, those responsible for cooking operate within a limited budget and space. The touch of raw meat might make some cooks physically ill but they have to defer to family preferences and prepare it regardless. Others might object to certain food smells or need to juggle allergies or eating disorders in their food planning. For some domestic cooks food is a trigger for domestic violence.
Food can not be isolated from the full social, cultural and physical experience of real life as it is on reality cooking shows. It is a fiction writer’s job to transcend the false reality displayed in these shows and examine the lived experience of domestic cooking, burnt pans, thrown pans, no pans and all.
Dramatic Possibilities for Fiction Writers
Cooking is the biological engine which made us human, according to Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University. But it also created a sexual division of labour. Because while cooking has provided considerable nutritional benefits, Wrangham believes that for women “cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority. Men were the great beneficiaries.”
Humans are the only animals who cook and the only primates who share their food. Shared meals provide fiction writers with an important narrative opportunity in which to examine a range of social and cultural phenomena. Food – the traditions and rituals surrounding its preparation and delivery, its origins, availability, affordability, consumption, preferences for, refusal of – can be used to explore social and individual conflicts, oppressive systems of power and the motivations behind actions or non-actions, from both female and male perspectives.
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” claims Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the famous French epicure and gastronome, in his seminal work The Physiology of Taste. Even when first published back in 1825, Brillat-Savarin seemed to be on to the semiotics of food. If fiction writers recognise that the delivery of food is made up of a complex system of signs and symbols then they can use it to position their characters more strongly in time and context.
Additionally, the symbolism surrounding culinary activities enables fiction writers to help readers understand the personal, social and cultural dynamics of their characters. For example, how does food function as a means of recall and memory for characters? In what way does the food prepared and consumed by a family define that family’s structure? What habits, gestures, weaknesses and strengths do the characters display when they come together to prepare or consume food? How do these habits and actions define the interrelationships of those at the shared table? Who holds the position of authority? Who is trying to gain it? How? Why?
Famous Fictional Meals
A number of authors have used the shared table to provide a discourse around the preparation and consumption of food. In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay oversees a dinner party which demonstrates how women’s work can be defined and exploited by a patriarchal society. But it also portrays women as a civilising force capable of creating a sense of community and collegiality at an otherwise disparate Victorian table.
Lilian, in Lilian’s Story by Kate Grenville, must share family meals in the oppressive presence of her father who monopolises any exchange of table talk and menacingly assumes a position of authority. He demonstrates his latent physical and sexual violence in the way he consumes meat and how he controls the distribution of food to his family. Lilian, who chooses to be fat and clever rather than a “mediocre pretty girl”, uses her obesity as a bulwark against her father’s authority.
Another literary work demonstrating how appetites other than those for food can be exposed and manoeuvred at a shared table is Margaret Atwood’s 1960s feminist social satire, The Edible Women. In this book Marian rejects meat as a means of rejecting the dominant male social order under which she is expected to operate.
These works of fiction demonstrate that food and eating need not just be literary motifs which provide incidental realistic touches to a fictional work but can be used as a representation of personal, social and cultural phenomena.
Fiction writers can help dispel the populist impression portrayed by reality cooking shows that cooking is an act of love, requiring specialist techniques and artistry. Instead, they can demonstrate how eating and drinking can function as literary metaphors which explore the political doctrine that often operates in the “real” domestic space where food is prepared and consumed.
Sources
- Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human. New York: Basic Books.
- Brillat-Savarin, A. (1825) The Physiology of Taste. Electronic English translation version available here.
- Woolf, V. (2009). To the Lighthouse. Melbourne: Penguin Books.
- Grenville, K. (1985). Lilian’s Story. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
- Atwood, M. (1980). The Edible Women. London: Virago.
Sally Piper - Sally Piper is a published writer whose fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Australia and the UK.
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