Reclaiming authenticity in non-elite regional cooking shows
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper provides a discourse analysis of cooking shows, exploring the discursive practices revolving around the presentation of local regional dishes. Although the ‘local’ element has an important function, adding symbolic value and enabling the viewers to relate to the cooking practice, it has a potentially problematic nature because it can potentially be seen as ‘uncool’. Since many traditional dishes – particularly meat-based ones – are often considered as unhealthy, unattractive and even off-putting, their presentation in cooking shows provides a challenge to the production team. Adopting a multimodal discourse analysis perspective, the presentation analyses a dataset of YouTube videos from a Czech regional cooking show that systematically feature recipes of such local dishes, with the aim of identifying how the show’s producers reclaim authenticity of such non-elite food for the modern audiences. The analysis of the interaction between the protagonists of the show indicates that such authentication is typically done at the expense of the (evoked) elite food, which is both discursively and visually mocked. At the same time, the protagonists’ evident over-stylization, both in their performance and actual speech patterns, gives rise to a peculiar form of self-deprecating humour (cf. Matwick and Matwick 2017). The complex semiotic transformations between the elite gourmet experience on the one hand and the very mundane local food recipes presented on the show are explained as an instance of ‘scale jumping’ (Blommaert 2010): the elite becomes non-elite, the global is turned into local, and the serious changes into non-serious. I argue that such stylization and ‘downscaling’ helps to authenticate non-elite regional food, ultimately reclaiming the viewers’ interest in the regional, nonelite cuisine. |
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