Review: Food, Media, Senses

Food – Media – Senses: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Christina Bartz, Jens Ruchatz, and Eva Wattolik (editors). Transcript, 2023. 330 pps. ISBN: 978-3-8376-6479-9

Emily Contois (University of Tulsa)

In Food – Media – Senses, editors Christina Bartz, Jens Ruchatz, and Eva Wattolik consider the senses as a marginalized methodology and focus for studying food. The editors view the sensuality of eating—that is, all elements of food design, preparation, plating, presentation, and consumption—as “the starting point and basic premise” (p. 10), urging all who study food to center sensuality within their research and analysis. This centering transforms scholarship but it also requires additional development, as the editors assert, “Whereas tools for capturing the visual and auditory have been developed by scholars of musicology, art history, media studies or theater studies, a language for grasping the aesthetic and media-related properties of tasting and smelling has yet to be developed” (p. 11).

The volume and its sixteen chapters aspire to provide some of this needed language and research tools. Truly interdisciplinary in scope, the contributors bring diverse backgrounds to their chapters—spanning anthropology, art, art history, communication, design, food studies, history, languages, media studies, philosophy, and psychology—bringing rich texture to the book.  

I was excited to read and review this text, in part because I’m a food studies (among other disciplines) trained academic, who, given the whims of the academic job market, found a home as a professor in a media studies department. Questions of food and/as media animate my own research and writing, as both an abundant theoretical foundation and an existential defense. As such, I read with sincere interest the editors’ introduction and their theorization of food and/as media, which those outside of media studies might find a bit of a head scratcher.

The editors describe a medium as “an interface bringing food, the senses and culture into mutual connection” (p. 12). In this way, they “understand cooking as sensual design” (p. 12) and particular dishes as media, further acknowledging the “constitutive roles of menu, cutlery, tableware and dining room [as well as] … table decoration, furniture, interior design, music … [and] service at the table” (p. 14).  

Food also comprises a mediator, that which lies between us and reality, a something that intervenes and organizes our relationship to reality as we know it. The editors and contributors encourage us to consider how food’s raw ingredients, as well as its packaging and related consumption habits, all “constitute the mediality of food” (p. 13). Relatedly, food also functions as a mediator between our bodies and the world, both social and material.

Beyond this initial definitional and theoretical work, the editors provide three heuristics that also categorize the book’s three sections: 1) Food as Medium, 2) Food in Media, and 3) Sociality and Culturality of Food. As far as edited volumes go, this one acknowledges itself as a compilation of essays from the Food – Media – Senses conference, held online in July 2021. The editors’ introduction and each section’s chapters contribute multiple frameworks, examples, and provocations for the study of food, though they remain largely disconnected from one another.

The first section, Food as Medium, explores how “the framing of food serves to highlight its function as a medium which shapes sensory experience” (p. 17). To such ends, Felix Bröcker examines the relationship between taste and visuality in “European-style high cuisine” to explore food as a cultural medium (p. 39). Defining restaurants as media, Torsten Hahn focuses on their spatial dynamics, arguing that classical haute cuisine can be categorized as culinary pop art. Sven Grampp positions Space Race space food from the 1950s-1970s as a mediator for competing ideological worldviews in the USA versus USSR, while Charles Spence explores how contemporary space food’s multisensory qualities (or lack thereof) inform their media representations and marketing opportunities. Heiner Stahl explores how “media, senses, and food are interwoven” (p. 105), analyzing ice cream recipes in cookbooks from 1770 to 1830. Silvia Bottinelli analyzes several multimedia and deeply sensory artworks by Cuban artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons for how they counter “the distanced visuality of nineteenth century paintings” (p. 123) depicting sugar plantations.

The second section, Food in Media, explores food as media content in and across numerous media forms and genres. This exploration includes analysis of paintings (as in León Krempel’s chapter which explores how Nicolaes Maes’ paintings interpret all five senses), illustrations, food photography, recipes, and cookbooks (all of which Jens Ruchatz’s chapter investigates), food film (which Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli explore, arguing that film’s sensory experiences are intensifying, revealing the experiential blurring between eating and food film viewing), and social media (which Marie Schröer explores in her chapter on the sensuality of food photography on Instagram and food videos on TikTok). The editors also brainstorm other food as media content research possibilities, such as menus and dish naming conventions, food blogs and websites, food packaging, food fiction, food television, food criticism and reviewing, Mukbang- and ASMR-videos, and beyond.

In each case, the editors and contributors explore how these various mediums differently capture food’s complex sensuality. The editors push beyond the framing of representation, instead asserting that “the objective of food in media is typically not ‘representation’ but ‘evocation’: the purpose is to make the sensory experience tangible, even relivable in a sense. The method is, therefore, remediation, coupling a particular design of a sensory experience with a corresponding one” (p. 20). The editors also rightly assert that “media do not simply convey messages” (p. 13) but exert far more influence. Media structures our perceptions and experiences, as in Johannes Lang’s chapter exploring the aesthetic principles—nature and history—of ecological food cultures.

The third section, Sociality and Culturality of Food, seeks to build beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of taste (and Taste), as it explores how “the act of tasting has socio-cultural effects inasmuch as connections are produced” (p. 26). The editors’ section overview leans heavily on contributor David Sutton’s concept of “gustemology,” which names a “food-centered worldview” (p. 295) that documents how cultural experience shapes food’s taste, which cannot be fully isolated nor adequately assessed within the confines of the laboratory (p. 290). Resisting the static framing of much food criticism—whether on TripAdvisor or in the Michelin Guide (and often reduced to an image or single ranking)—Nicola Perullo argues in his chapter for a new gastronomic criticism that is “engaged and involved, processual and multisensory” (p. 247). Jens Schröter analyzes Jürgen Dollase’s essay, which calls for a national culinary art register, to examine the possibilities and problems of documenting and archiving food and cooking beyond recipes and algorithms. Through the case study of Jewish exile in Shanghai, Wei Liu explores food as mediator for history, memories, and experiences. Rather than a digestif or dessert, the volume ends with Michael F. Zimmermann’s study of decay and disgust in twentieth century art. 

Food – Media – Senses will be of interest for researchers and graduate students who study food and wish to further their abilities to analyze it with the additional perspectives and tools of media and the senses. While some of the text’s writing style and jargon make it less intellectually accessible or enjoyable to read for undergraduate or general readers, the book is available open access, thus wonderfully and democratically to all. What’s more, I was pleased to read the book from a print copy, which includes a significant number of color images printed throughout. Spanning multiple genres, time periods, geographies, and even into outer space, Food – Media – Senses affords a wide-ranging exploration of the many relationships and possible theorizations between food, media, and the senses.