The travelogue cooking show in a sub-state nation: Representing Scotland in British food television

Introduction

The relationship between food and national identity is the subject of a significant and ever-growing body of research in food studies. Most importantly, the literature establishes that this relationship is extremely complex – in particular, because each case offers a unique example of how the national and sub-national interact with ideas about self and other (Scholliers, 2001: 14–17). This article takes up the investigation in relation to the complex case of Scotland, a sub-state nation within the United Kingdom, heeding Scholliers (2001) insight that ‘matters of identity formation appear most clearly when two or more groups confront each other’ (p. 14). Historically independent, Scotland became part of the United Kingdom following the Act of Union in 1707. In the late 20th century, the Scottish independence movement led to political devolution and the establishment of a new Scottish Parliament in 1999. Scotland’s independence movement has continued under the devolved Scottish National Party (SNP) government, with an (unsuccessful) independence referendum in 2014 and continued pressure for a new one post-Brexit. In parallel with these political developments, the 21st century has seen Scottish cultural heritage and contemporary cultural production and creativity foregrounded, including in relation to food and drink. Post-devolution, the Scottish food and drink industry and closely related tourism industry – both highly successful and important to the Scottish economy – are served by dedicated national bodies (notably Scotland Food & Drink) which promote Scotland as a ‘Land of Food and Drink’ and build on long-standing Romantic constructions of Scotland, its landscapes and heritage (e.g. Huserkova and Tominc, 2015; De Jong and Varley, 2017). All these political and cultural factors make Scotland an especially illuminating case to explore in relation to food and its contemporary cultural representation.

Within the wider literature on food and national identity, this article is situated among research on food television, and specifically, the genre of travelogue cooking shows (discussed further below). Within this genre, Leer (2016) has noted the emergence of a sub-genre here termed ‘homeland’ travelogue cooking shows – in this case, British travelogue cooking series which include episodes about Scotland. In focussing on the ‘homeland’ travelogue cooking show, our article offers a contemporary analysis of this sub-genre and the specific questions of national identity and sub-national relationships that it poses. Food television – and travelogue cooking shows specifically – can represent a range of complex national cultural and political relationships, which in turn can be examined through the televisual text. Through three examples, this article demonstrates various ways in which cultural relations between England and Scotland, as well as the place of Scotland within the United Kingdom, were represented during two decades of significant political change – disrupting long-standing Romantic stereotypes of Scottishness and Anglo-Scottish relations (notably with reference to class and gender), notwithstanding continuity in the culinary iconography used to represent Scotland. The article shows how these apparently independent cultural representations of Scotland and Scottish food echo official images and narratives promoted by Scotland’s food industry and tourism marketing boards post-devolution while reflecting broader shifts in how food is symbolically represented in media and consumed in contemporary society.

Travelogue cooking shows and the case of Scotland

The television programmes discussed in this article were all produced in the United Kingdom, broadcast on UK television networks and feature British presenters. Nonetheless, they all treat Scotland as a destination for the roving presenter, who travels (implicitly or explicitly) from a southern English centre. Indeed, all the programmes analysed here form episodes in television series in which the presenter travels around Britain, with each episode featuring a different region or place and its food. The sample thus belongs to ‘a long-standing and well-established subgenre of the television cookery show that Nikki Strange (1998) calls “Tourism-Educational” or “Tour-Ed.,” a staged gastro-tourism in which the cook-presenter travels, meets people, and learns (or relearns) to cook the cuisines of the host destination’ (Bell and Hollows, 2007: 27). The genre is widely (and fondly) noted to have been instigated by British celebrity cook Keith Floyd, who ‘famously took the cameras out of the kitchen studio and into whichever exotic location he (iconic glass of wine in hand) happened to be cooking in’ (Rousseau, 2012: xvi), although it has its roots in early television travel documentaries, such as Viaggio nella valle del Po (Travels in the Po Valley) aired on RAI, Italy’s national public broadcast network, in the 1950s (Buscemi and Comunian, 2022; Tominc, 2022).

Following Leer and Kjær (2015), we refer to this genre as the ‘travelogue cooking show’, a term we find more immediately transparent than ‘Tour-Ed’. As noted earlier, the programmes analysed here represent a further, recent sub-genre of the travelogue cooking show: those that tour the presenter’s own country (Leer, 2016) – in this case, Britain. Given the potential confusion of terms such as ‘home’ and ‘domestic’ in the cookery context, we refer to this sub-genre as the ‘homeland’ travelogue cooking show. Leer (2016) suggests that this phenomenon may ‘be read as part of a broader general trend that focusses on “local food” (p. 82). Key tropes of the genre include its focus on the rural and the contrast between the mobility of the presenter and the fixity of the locals featured – a trait also found in travelogue shows presenting foreign regions (such as the American South) to the UK audience (O’Connell, 2019). Discussing Cyril Lignac’s cooking show Le Chef en France, Leer (2016) writes:

Le Chef en France focusses on rural France, where traditional ways of living and being still exist, and each week Lignac visits a new region of the country. [. . .] Lignac’s rural compatriots represent the traditional way of life, a way of life that is closely related to site-specific, inherited practice. This opposition is central to the show, and Lignac is constantly associated with mobility as he is portrayed on his motorbike moving from one destination to the next. [. . .] The locals, on the other hand, are immobile and appear to live their whole lives in the same place, in the same way as their ancestors. (p. 82)

Leer (2016) further describes, for example, how Le Chef en France associates traditional rural life ‘with a certain type of masculinity and male body’ (p. 83) – shorter and stronger than Lignac’s urban male body. While these patterns of representation are, to some extent, nationally specific, Leer’s analysis nonetheless offers a helpful backdrop to our own analysis of British homeland travelogue cooking shows and their representation of Scotland, its people, and their food.

As Leer and Kjær (2015) note, ‘the travelogue cooking show ties into a more general debate [in food studies] on Western appropriation of “other” (non-white and more “primitive”) culinary cultures’ (p. 310) – a phenomenon we may refer to as culinary appropriation. As Johnston and Baumann (2010: 98) summarise, although culinary appropriation ‘represents a cosmopolitan interest in broadening the culinary canon and forming intercultural connections’, it simultaneously ‘builds on and reproduces certain neo-colonial inequalities’. For example, in the case of travelogue cooking shows, Leer and Kjær (2015: 323) analyse programmes by celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay (Jamie’s Great Escape and Gordon’s Great Escape), and find that both chefs seek ‘untouched’ and ‘untamed’ culinary encounters, ‘defined as situations that are decisively non-British/non-Western, and which are pre-modern, primitive and other’. In the homeland travelogue cooking show, although the chef-presenter and the locals are from the same country as one another, familiar constructions persist of the gastronomic Other as authentic, traditional, rural and fixed (see Bell and Hollows, 2007; and more generally, Heldke, 2003), offering inspiration (or even salvation) to the jaded presenter on his quest for self-discovery or renewal. For example, in Le Chef en France, Leer (2016) shows that such tropes carry through from the travelogue cooking show genre: ‘the lives of the rural lower class in France are romanticised and presented as inspiring a celebrity chef to rediscover his “lost” masculinity’ (pp.83–84). Similarly, in representations of the American South for the British audience, O’Connell (2019) shows how

ideas of rugged simplicity and links to the experience of the southern past are replicated in the representation of the region’s culinary culture, particularly in terms of ‘soul food’ and barbecue, which also point toward the gendered way in which this televisual South is predominantly masculine as well as historical. (p. 199)

In this article, we seek to problematise the debate on culinary appropriation with reference to the case of Scotland (a sub-state nation within the United Kingdom), using British ‘homeland’ travelogue cooking shows to explore contemporary Anglo-Scottish cultural relations. As critics of culinary appropriation, the research questions we pose nonetheless need to expand beyond whether or not a given text reproduces a neo-colonial relationship with the gastronomic Other (cf. Leer and Kjær, 2015). The programmes analysed in this article engage implicitly or explicitly in pressing contemporary debates in Britain about national identity, and specifically the contested relationship between Scotland and (the rest of) the United Kingdom, during a period of significant political change for Scotland. The complex political and historical relationship between Scotland and England disrupts familiar neo-colonial constructions of the gastronomic Other in travelogue cooking shows and elsewhere. Despite some common tropes of the genre, explored above, typical scholarly conclusions about culinary appropriation cannot be drawn for this sample. It is this which makes the gastronomic representation of Scotland within contemporary British culture especially valuable to explore, for both food studies and the wider sociology of nations and nationalism. Moreover, scholars of food media and culture have demonstrated convincingly that celebrity chefs (such as Jamie Oliver) wield significant cultural and political power, not least in promulgating a particular vision of the nation (Cusack, 2014; Tominc, 2023). This article thus speaks to scholarly debates about the relationship between food, celebrity, media cultures and national identity.

The three series we discuss here have, for the most part, not received sustained scholarly attention. Buscemi’s (2014, 2018) analysis of Jamie’s Great Britain focuses on similarities and differences in its representation of England, Wales and Scotland. Buscemi (2018) argues that ‘Oliver represents Scotland as a premodern country, without any influence from modernity, and in which food culture originates exclusively from the Vikings’ (p. 267). However, when compared with representations of Scotland in earlier British food travelogue shows, our own analysis shows that Jamie’s Great Britain is, in fact, remarkable for situating Scottish food culture (also) in contemporary urban settings.

Two of the series we examine feature presenters whose other work has been explored by scholars in media and cultural studies. Bell and Hollows (2011: 183) point out that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s subsequent River Cottage series constructs a persona which ‘disavow[s]’ and ‘de-emphasise[s]’ his upper-class background and position. In relation to Jamie Oliver, Hollows (2003) argues that ‘Britishness plays an important role in the construction of Jamie Oliver’s image’ (p. 235) in The Naked Chef, drawing on traditional and nostalgic British recipes as well as British pop music. Yet, Warin (2011) also shows that Jamie’s Ministry of Food (in which Oliver attempts to transform the diet of families in the socioeconomically depressed northern town of Rotherham) relies on and reinforces long-standing stereotypes associated with the north of England, negatively constructed as Other, marginal, industrial and poor (see also Hollows and Jones, 2010; Jackson et al., 2012). In this article, we explore how these issues of food, class, nation and place play out elsewhere in the television work of these two celebrity chefs.

Media, culture and food in Scotland

Scotland’s status as a small sub-state nation makes for a complex media landscape which combines national (London-centric) and indigenous Scottish production. In relation to television drama, Cook (2008: 108) describes this as a ‘three ring circus’, distinguishing between programmes ‘about’, ‘by’ and ‘for’ Scotland, whose categories may or may not overlap. Recent research on media in Scotland focuses on indigenous cultural production, a welcome scholarly turn. However, attention to extrinsic British television representations of Scotland remains critically important, given their national and international distribution and influence. This article therefore builds on the relatively limited body of previous scholarship which highlights key tropes and patterns in the extrinsic media representation of Scotland (Blain and Hutchinson, 2008). Work in the sociology of sport, analysing British media representations of Scottish teams and players, also highlights the continuing reliance on cultural stereotypes and the ongoing construction of Scotland and the Scots as national Others (e.g. Black and Whigham, 2020; Reid, 2010).

Research on the relationship between food, culture and national identity in Scotland is increasing but remains limited. Within tourism studies, Burnett and Danson’s (2006) work on the marketing of Scottish food and drink links this to wider analysis of Scotland ‘the brand’ (McCrone et al., 1995), pointing out that ‘[t]he tourist image is overwhelmingly skewed to constructions of rurality, tradition and heritage, much derived from “Highlands and Islands” references [. . .] with [their] symbolic associations of “pastness” and “peoplelessness”’ (Burnett and Danson, 2006: 111, citing McCrone et al., 1995). Likewise, as De Jong and Varley (2017) argue,

a certain characterisation of Scotland as wild, untouched, and unspoilt dominates national policy discourses and images [. . . K]ey tourism industry bodies (such as VisitScotland) have worked to distinguish certain types of food and drink aligning with this version of Scotland. (p. 216)

Notably, industry bodies highlight high-quality primary produce such as Angus beef, Scottish salmon, and soft fruits, representing Scotland’s outstanding ‘natural larder’. Yet, in contrast to these official marketing discourses, everyday Scottish diets are, on average, nutritionally poor and their reputation historically negative (De Jong and Varley, 2017: 216) – a widely recognised ‘Scottish paradox’. Knight’s work on representations of Scottish food and diet in the British press focuses on these negative stereotypes, especially deep-fried foods and the notorious deep-fried Mars bar (Knight, 2016a, 2016b). Knight shows how such stereotypes link moral and class-based judgements about purported diet and health behaviours to the Scottish nation, and demonstrates their continuity with 18th- and 19th-century ‘food slurs’ against Scotland that emerged during earlier periods of British political change and Anglo-Scottish tension (Fraser, 2011; Fraser and Knight, 2019). However, Knight’s research has also found that the indigenous Scottish press ‘pushes back’ against negative stereotyping, and that an increasingly confident narrative about Scottish food and cuisine has emerged in Scottish media since devolution. It is in this context that celebrity chefs, such as Jamie Oliver, negotiate their own take on Scotland and its food in their homeland travelogue cooking shows.

Methods and data

The cooking shows discussed in this article were identified through the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive, searching for items under Subject categories ‘cookery’ and ‘food’, and using Synopsis search terms ‘Scottish’, ‘Scotland’ or ‘Scots’. Within the results, we manually selected for national British television programmes (extrinsic representations) as relevant to the research questions here. Selected Scottish programmes were also viewed for comparison, but are beyond the scope of this article. Three programmes were chosen as snapshots through which we can consider and compare representations in relation to the changing cultural and political context:

The BFI Archive holds the largest accessible collection of British television shows, including off-air video recordings of programmes not otherwise available for research. Within the collection, we did not sample deliberately for travelogue cooking shows; this was an incidental feature of the sample that then led the theoretical approach to analysis. While other British television programmes depict Scottish food (e.g. Two Fat Ladies, Hairy Bikers’ Best of British, The Incredible Spice Men, and – more recently – Nadiya’s British Food Adventure), not all of these fall into the travelogue cooking show genre, nor do they all offer clearly extrinsic representations (where presenters are Scottish or live in Scotland). We accept, however, that there may be other similar shows available for analysis. Nonetheless, the selected programmes offer personalities who are well known UK wide (as indicated above), along with a range of production dates, implicit political perspectives and class positionings – thus showcasing a diverse range of the genre itself. Our analysis focuses on textual representations and especially considers the depiction of Scottish food, visions of the nation and national identity (Scottish and British), the construction of the Anglo-Scottish relationship and ‘the way the [. . .] protagonists imagine, meet and evaluate their respective locations and locals’ (Leer and Kjær, 2015: 312).

Representing Scotland in British homeland travelogue cooking shows: three snapshots in time

The three cooking shows discussed here represent a range of modes of Anglo-Scottish relation, some more stereotypical than others. Across the board, class and gender are key mediating factors. Furthermore, the Anglo-Scottish relationship is explicitly explored in two of the three programmes: both Cook on the Wild Side and Jamie’s Great Britain tentatively (and sometimes anxiously) explore Anglo-Scottish history, contemporary tensions and Scottish nationalism. Across the three examples, there is clear evidence of change over time, although such claims are necessarily limited given that the programmes analysed here represent snapshots rather than a continuum. While the pre-devolution example relies (albeit ironically) on a Romantic conception of Scotland tied to the Highland landscape, tartan and tweed, the post-devolution shows feature a much wider range of contemporary Scots, lesser stereotyping and notably different relationships between presenter and locals. ¹ Nonetheless, there is remarkable continuity in the representation of Scottish food itself, relying on a limited set of iconic Scottish ingredients, and all three programmes consistently deploy archetypal Scottish landscapes to represent the Scottish nation and place. As noted earlier, only the most recent programme, Jamie’s Great Britain (2011), represents urban Scotland at all, with its focus on Glasgow and the Clyde.

Conclusion

The three British homeland travelogue cooking shows discussed here display diverse constructions of Scottishness and the Anglo-Scottish relationship, demonstrating ways in which wider trends in food, tourism and politics may be observed through British food television, in terms of genre, gender and nation – from the timeless ‘Scotland’ of lochs, wild Highlands and rugged masculinity portrayed in A Cook on the Wild Side to the vibrant dynamism of contemporary Glasgow represented in Jamie’s Great Britain. Likewise, we see changing constructions of Scottish food itself: Don Roaming and Jamie’s Great Britain offer deliberately new twists on traditional dishes to bring Scottish food ‘into the new millennium’. We also see a shift in the imagined location of Scottish food, from the rural Highlands to contemporary urban foodscapes. In relation to class, one strand in the extrinsic construction of Scottish food has historically been tied to a particular (classed) conception of Anglo-Scottish relations, derived from an upper-class British cultural history within which Scotland features as masculine Romantic escape. As we have shown, in these relatively recent television programmes, a loosening of the class framing enables Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to play ironically with these conceptions of Scotland and Anglo-Scottish relations in A Cook on the Wild Side, and subsequently allows Monty Don and Jamie Oliver to create alternative representations of middle- and working-class Scottish food and cuisine in the 21st century. Although beyond the scope of our analysis here, it is worth noting that the project of expanding available representations of Scotland and its food – in terms of class, gender and ethnicity – is subsequently taken up in later travelogue cooking shows such as Nadiya’s British Food Adventure (2017).

Among other implications, all these representational developments open up a wider range of gender roles for Scottish subjects in relation to food. Romantic visions of Scotland and its food are almost exclusively male, and serve to bolster upper-class (English) masculinity. However, more recent and more nuanced representations of Scottish food include more women, and appear to serve Scottish femininities. In Don Roaming, in particular (and occasionally in Jamie’s Great Britain), we see women as food and cooking authorities, whose cultural and practical knowledge is respected and given voice. By contrast, men continue to be represented mainly as food producers, with strong connections to land/scape. It remains notable, however, that it is only in Don Roaming that an authoritative Scottish voice (that of Marion MacFarlane) is enabled to speak extensively on Scottish food, and where a Scottish subject takes the role of host rather than a ‘bit part’ in the representation of Scotland’s food. While this is partly a practical challenge of the travelogue cooking show format, with multiple local contributors to each programme, it also reflects the taken-for-granted contrast in travelogue cooking shows between the fixity of the locals and the mobility of the presenter (Leer, 2016). Likewise, the nature of the genre, and the centralisation of British television production in London, inherently construct Scotland as marginal to a national centre elsewhere – yet this is also a familiar geographic relation in the British cultural imaginary.

Thus despite changes over the period, the extrinsic representations discussed here remain a far cry from indigenous Scottish food programmes of the 1990s and 2000s – notably Scotland’s Larder with Derek Cooper (Cinécosse, 1998) – which present an unselfconscious and highly detailed picture of Scotland’s diverse food industry and culture. Across the three programmes analysed here, there is a consistent and relatively limited range of foods, drinks and dishes that are used to signal Scotland. Alongside traditional desserts such as cranachan and cloutie dumpling, key ingredients include salmon, smokies, shellfish, game, haggis, neeps, tatties, oats, barley, soft fruits and whisky. ⁸ We also see the persistence of a long-standing Romantic iconography of Scotland, notably archetypal Highland landscapes of loch and mountain. Over time, these persistent culinary and visual tropes are increasingly linked to emerging local food discourses that extend well beyond Scotland, and which here parallel the official (and highly successful) marketing campaigns of Scottish food and tourism industry bodies highlighting Scotland’s outstanding ‘natural larder’.

To what extent we can make claims for wider change over time in the representation of Scottish food culture, based on these three cases, is debatable. However, the developments observed here are certainly suggestive and align with findings elsewhere. Further research is needed on intrinsic Scottish representations of food and drink in both the pre- and post-devolution periods, including the post-Brexit era with its fresh demands for a further independence referendum. Our analysis here also suggests further research avenues in relation to the industry contexts of production shaping both extrinsic and intrinsic representations, and audience reception – not least given the profound changes in the political landscape over the last decade, as well as the rise in social over traditional media forms, with active ‘audience’ participation in the creation of representations on Instagram, TikTok and other popular platforms. Unlike television, these offer Scottish audiences (as well as others) opportunities to examine and represent Scotland and its food in all the diversity in which it is perceived – further complicating the already knotty representational politics of Scotland in relation to the United Kingdom.

This article, however, shows that it is critically important to continue research on extrinsic cultural representations of Scotland, alongside attention to indigenous cultural production. In demonstrating how the complexity of the Anglo-Scottish relationship plays out on food television, our analysis contributes to the ongoing scholarly exploration of food culture as a new critical lens onto contemporary sub-state national relationships. Conversely, Scotland serves as an important example for food scholars, showing how homeland travelogue cooking shows and celebrity chefs construct changing national identities and national relationships through food and cuisine.