Abstract
Mediatization was recently termed ‘media theory’s word of the decade’ (Corner, 2018) and it has also been proposed as an important contribution to social theory at large (Couldry, 2014). The term refers to how everyday life and society at large become increasingly dependent on various media. While scholars disagree as to whether this spread of a ‘mediatization vocabulary’ is for good or for bad (in relation to media studies as well as other fields), it is inarguable that the term has travelled far. It is commonplace today to see mediatization discussed in relation to things like fashion, tourism and work, and now also to food and ‘eating cultures’.
In a new edited collection, entitled Globalized Eating Cultures: Mediation and Mediatization, Jörg Dürrschmidt and York Kautt have gathered 15 chapters dealing with ‘food as a mediator of global culture against the background of mediatization processes’ (p. v). It was after a joint ‘rustic meal of German sausage and beer in Kassel’ (p. v) that the two sociologists became interested in how contemporary media play into the global (re-)coding of such a traditional phenomenon and decided to invite specialists from around the world to explore similar issues. It is not exactly clear whether the contributors were explicitly instructed to apply a mediation/mediatization terminology from the start, but according to Dürrschmidt’s introductory chapter, the book uses this key distinction as a theoretical pivot for scholars from sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to discuss contemporary dynamics of food and eating. This book should thus be of great interest not only to scholars of food, but also to media(tization) researchers, especially those adhering to socially oriented research agendas.
The contributions are grouped in four sections. The first section focuses on ‘Nation and Region’ and includes chapters on regional struggles concerning the spread of a national cuisine through Costa Rican cookbooks (Mona Nicolic) and the ways in which media images affect practices of infant feeding and, more broadly, parenthood in Hong Kong (Veronica Sau-Wa Mak). The second part of the book deals with ‘Tradition and Modernity’, revolving especially around the question of what is ‘authentic food’ and ‘authentic cooking’. There is, for example, an interesting study by Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz on how social media, especially YouTube, mobilize discourses on what is an ‘authentic’ Yucatecan (Mexican) recipe and how Yucatecan food is ‘really’ cooked. The third section contains three chapters on ‘Celebrity Culture’, discussing especially the media representations and contested cultural significance of celebrity chefs like Keith Floyd (David Inglis & Anna-Mari Almila). The final section includes four chapters grouped under the title ‘Social and Cultural Complexity’. This part includes Elspeth Probyn’s chapter ‘Mediating Fish’, where she scrutinizes the simplified and moralizing ways in which advocacy documentaries portray fish and fishing, as well as York Kautt’s concluding chapter, which is an ambitious attempt at bringing all the chapters together under the umbrella of ‘Mediatization and Global Foodscapes’.
Accordingly, Globalized Eating Cultures is a book with a genuinely global outlook and the ambition to unpack how ‘new’ and ‘old’ media represent and shape eating cultures on different levels and in different contexts. The overall theoretical and epistemological approach taken by the editors is exemplary. In the introductory chapter, Dürrschmidt advances what are, in my view, three particularly important points. First, he writes about globalization as something to be explained and studied in relation to ‘the deepest sense of the human condition’ (p. 5), rather than as a force of abstract flows. From this perspective, there is no doubt that a focus on food and eating is a good place to start looking for articulations of global processes – as well as the saturation of media in the everyday.
Second, Dürrschmidt points to the importance of seeing both globalization and mediatization as socially and culturally differentiated processes. This means that they should be studied in a situated manner and that researchers should trust the sociological value of fragments (i.e. the meaningfulness of smaller parts in relation to the whole). Finally, Dürrschmidt advocates the need to maintain a theoretical distinction between mediation (as a regular process of information sharing and/or transmission in time/space) and mediatization (the broader social changes and adaptations that follow from growing reliance on media in society and everyday life). In this way, the book valuably actualizes some of the conceptual developments that have taken place in media theory in recent years.
On the whole, the individual chapters do indeed do justice to the ambitions and theoretical cornerstones laid out by the editors. What I find particularly well-captured is the ways in which processes of mediation continuously intervene in struggles around territorial boundaries and cultural authenticities (Sections 1 and 2). The ongoing mediatization of eating cultures is indeed not a new thing, as demonstrated by Nicolic’s study of Costa Rican cookbooks. The very act of naming something a ‘national cuisine’ and, furthermore, to disseminate such a construct through a mass medium like the cookbook, will indisputably cause friction in local lifeworlds, and even regional protests against what could be seen as a hegemonic culinary power. This is exactly what happened in certain parts of Costa Rica in the wake of new cookbooks trying to protect the country’s traditional cuisine from cultural globalization. At the same time, as Ayora-Diaz shows in her chapter, social media instil new dynamics in these social and symbolic battles. On the one hand, social media may provide resources for a broader range of actors to claim their regional identities and ways of preparing and consuming food. On the other hand, the battles over authenticity may get even more heated and ultimately undermine senses of a shared tradition. While such long-term changes bear some evidence as to how transitions in media affect cultural processes on a general level, the chapters of the book also highlight how mediatization is negotiated and articulated ‘on the ground’.
As is often the case with edited volumes, however, the diversity of voices, themes and empirical entry-points comes at the expense of coherence and solidity. While Globalized Eating Cultures is certainly a book I would recommend to students and researchers with an interest in the dynamics of cultural globalization and mediatization, it is also a book with some obvious shortcomings. While I would refrain from identifying particular chapters as weaker than others, in coming from a media studies background I should at least stress that the handling of media theory and the key notions of mediation and mediatization is inconsistent. This applies both to individual chapters (some more than others) and to the aggregate of empirical chapters. In some chapters, the engagement with these terms, and the media perspective as a whole, is merely superficial. In several chapters, the meaning of key terms like mediation and mediatization is vague, often leading to formulations like ‘mediat(iz)ing’ and ‘mediation and mediatization of’. As mentioned earlier, the editors have done a great job in constructing and communicating the theoretical framework, but this conceptual clarity is not uniformly taken up or expressed across all the chapters.
The uneven treatment of mediation/mediatization is not necessarily a major problem, but it means that readers specifically interested in mediatization will have to draw some conclusions on their own. To the same readers, I would also recommend Kautt’s theoretically rich concluding chapter, which takes the individual chapters further and points to the critical implications of mediatized ‘foodscapes’ (extending Arjun Appadurai’s terminology). This concerns especially how mediatization plays into the stratification of culinary tastes and thus the (re)production of cultural power, and the interplay between mediatization and growing individualism and reflexivity within the realm of food consumption (p. 339). Here, the mediatization of foodscapes means that a steadily expanding range of media images partake in the modelling of consumer identities and moralities, which may, in turn, shape new (and varying) sensibilities among ordinary people when it comes to what to eat and how to eat. As such, Globalized Eating Cultures is a book that sheds new light on how mediatization shapes a contemporary politics of recognition even on the most basic level of daily human life.
