Vicarious Comsumption: Food, Television and the Ambiguity of Modernity

"In case you just landed from another planet, I'm Emeril Lagasse." So begin many episodes of Food Network's number one show, "Emeril Live." The vivacious, boisterous chef yells and waves his arms, talks back to his studio audience, and engages at-- home viewers with his humorous and sarcastic remarks. How did this Massachusetts born, Louisiana restauranteur become a celebrity-chef? What does his quick rise to fame and the increasing popularity of food television reveal about contemporary American culture? This article considers the role of food television in American popular culture. After tracing the growth of the television industry, I explore the growth of food television in the United States, growth which, during the late 1990s, progressed from simmering to a rolling boil with the success of Food Network.1 Food Network is the first and only channel to date completely devoted to food and entertaining. Consideration of Emeril Lagasse, one of the network's most well-known personalities, reveals ambiguities in food television's message about food and cooking. This article contends that food television incorporates the vicarious pleasures of watching someone else cook and eat; the emulsion of entertainment and cooking; the jumbling of traditional gender roles; and ambivalence toward cultural standards of body, consumption, and health. Food television also addresses and simultaneously perpetuates the stresses of social expectations, and sprinkles sexual innuendoes in a venue traditionally associated with maternal security. These ambiguities, I contend, are part of what makes food television increasingly popular among American consumers. I situate the current interest in food television, and a parallel interest in ready-made meals, in the ambiguity of modernity, a symptom and consequence of real and perceived time-pressures, increasingly complex social networks, and an ongoing hunger for comfort and security, traditionally sated in the home kitchen and encoded in home-cooked food.2 This essay is not about food consumption, per se, but about the consumption of food television and what that pattern of consumption suggests about contemporary American culture. I. The Growth of An Industry Television secured its place as "the primary site of exhibition" in the years following World War II (Spigel 1). By 1950, the nascent television industry was booming, benefiting from increased spending power of most American families, manufacturing improvements that made televisions affordable to more consumers, and technological advancements that improved the industry's ability to provide programming across the country. By 1955, nearly two-thirds of the nation's homes had at least one television set, completing the transfer of spectator amusements from the public space of the movie theater to the private space of the home (Ibid). In television's early years, three broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) provided a majority of the nation's programming. As audiences grew, America's broadcast networks responded with programming designed to win the loyalty of viewers. They succeeded: one hundred million viewers watched the final episode of "Cheers" in 1993 ("It's the end of the world as we know it"). As the television industry matured, additional networks and cable stations fragmented a nation of viewers while offering seemingly endless special-interest channels to its media-savvy audience. Fewer than seven percent of households in the United States received cable television in 1970; in 1975, the median household got six channels. By 1995 more than 66% of American households subscribed to cable television, enabling them to choose from more than 30 channels (Samuelson 58, 221). By the early 1990s, basic cable, digital cable and satellite service offered American viewers a cornucopia of program choices for modest fees. Given the incredible range of viewing alternatives available, television is, more than ever before, about consumer choice and control. …