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Notes
[1] Food entertainment and a more general interest in cuisine are ascendant worldwide. New Zealand is hardly unique in this respect, but the prominence of food-related programming in prime time distinguishes it from sites such as the United States and Canada where food programming is relegated to niche subscription-based broadcasters.
[2] Although Mrs Beeton was English, she was and remains a popular icon in New Zealand. Her book ‘Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management featured detailed instructions on such useful topics as how to poach an egg (with or without a poacher), how to make an omelet and how to tell whether fish is fresh’ (Stringer 2000). Later in the article, Stringer refers to Beeton's instructional tenor,–‘her skills were those of an editor and teacher, lending firm but gentle guidance to the new housekeeper, a role more needed in the industrial mid-19th century than it had been in earlier centuries, when people were more likely to settle close to home’ (Stringer, Citation2000). One of the reasons for the popularity of this book in New Zealand was perhaps the isolation that new migrants felt. ‘This book was designed for the woman who was separated from the advice of family, whether by the distance to the next village or of an ocean’ (Stringer, Citation2000).
[3] A significant body of cultural studies research focused upon food (Ashley et al., Citation2004; Bell & Valentine, Citation1997; Counihan & Van Esterik, Citation1997) as well as media representations of food more specifically (Negra, Citation2002; Poole, Citation1999) has emerged in the last decade.
[4] Finkelstein expresses a similar sentiment when she writes: ‘while eating practices have never been culturally simple, in the consumer-oriented societies of the late twentieth century, when food production and marketing have become highly sophisticated, the consumer's relation to food has been repositioned to address a variety of cultural desires’ (Finkelstein, Citation1999, p. 130).
[5] Pearson (Citation2002) defines British post-settler societies as ‘those in which aboriginal peoples have distinct juridical and political status; where there is a set of relationships (informed largely by historical imperial connections with Britain) between successive flows of British migrants and subsequent generations of local born settlers’ (Pearson, Citation2002, p. 989), and where immigration policy now includes a broader ethnic range of potential ‘citizens’.
[6] Maori food was featured in at least one episode of Taste New Zealand (29 October 2003), and there have been at least two cooking series on Maori Television: Citation Pa Tucker and Citation Kai Time on the Road .
[7] Lifestyle programming, or what Corner has referred to as documentary ‘lite’ (Corner, Citation2000, in Brunsdon et al., Citation2001), constitutes a significant proportion of prime-time factual entertainment.
[8] Transformations in public service broadcasting referred to here do not necessarily signal an unproblematic shift in how television viewers are conceptualized and constructed or how television documentary has been eroded.
[9] Large-scale migration from Pacific nations occurred substantially earlier in the 1960s and 1970s, when New Zealand underwent a period of limited industrialization.
[10] The rules of engagement for ethnic minorities in British post-settler societies such as New Zealand are summed up by Pearson, who writes:
In terms of belonging, ‘multicultural citizens’ were now free to choose their cultural allegiance, with two important state provisos: the right to maintain one's own culture was balanced by duties not only to recognize the private cultural rights of others, but also publicly to acknowledge the primacy of national core languages, institutions and values. (Pearson, Citation2001, p. 198)
[11] Admittedly, these are stereotypes but they remain common icons, particularly in screen production.
[12] Heldke (Citation2003) describes the ethnically marked power dynamics of food adventuring when she writes:
… there are important differences between, say, the acquisitiveness of a white adventure eater in a Burmese restaurant and that of a Korean adventurer in an Indian restaurant, differences that do not preclude the possibility that the Korean eater is engaged in cultural appropriation, but that do not allow the two instances to be conflated in a single phenomenon either. In the United States, white privilege is a ubiquitous feature of the society, influencing every interaction taking place in it … Whites do not have a monopoly on ignorance or acquisitiveness, but the impact of our ignorance and acquisitiveness is different from (and generally greater than) that of persons of color, who, whatever else characterizes their actions are always also on the receiving end of racism. (Heldke, Citation2003, p. xxii)
These dynamics are relatively similar in New Zealand.
[13] Narayan (Citation1997) also refers to appropriation and self-aggrandizement.
[14] Allison James refers to how consumers fail to critically analyse or reflect upon their motives when she writes about how ‘the exotic fruit now routinely available on supermarket shelves may be used to casually enhance a traditional English fruit salad—a careless cosmopolitanism invoked through ignorance or choice’ (James, Citation1996, p. 92).
[15] The alternative would be to slavishly reject all new culinary (and cultural) experiences.
[16] Narayan argues
that western eaters of ethnic foods need to cultivate more reflective attention to complexities involved in the production and consumption of the ‘ethnic foods’ they eat. They might, for instance, reflect on race and class structures that affect the lives of workers who prepare and serve that food, and on the implications of class differences between immigrants who own these restaurants and the immigrants who work for them. (Narayan, Citation1997, p. 182)
[17] ‘Sunday mornings have noncommercial status by government decree. Therefore broadcasters tend to ghettoize shows that have good public relations potential but negligible “bottom line” returns during this time’ (Pearson, Citation1999, p. 366).
[18] Pearson (Citation1999) discusses how virtually all New Zealand television production must have bi-modal or multi-modal appeal due to the small size of the national television viewing audience.
[19] According to Asia Down Under's Executive Producer, Melissa Lee, this website receives considerable traffic. This is significant considering that the programme's ratings are so small as to be unquantifiable (Kothari et al., Citation2004).
[20] Taste New Zealand aired (on and off) between 1998 and 2005.
[21] CitationPeta Mathias’ pedigree for presenting this type of programme is established by her food writing, particularly her food memoir Fête Accomplie: a New Zealander's Culinary Romance (1995).
[22] I am not suggesting that this type of cosmopolitanism is superior to other forms discussed in this paper. The presenter Kothari interacts with her subjects in this documentary within matrixes of class, ethnicity and relative power. Her cosmopolitan identity and practice is different from those signalled by Pakeha presenters.
[23] The poll tax in New Zealand was abolished in 1944.
[24] This group of women in A Taste of Place also mentioned that Chinese cooking required extensive preparation, which was difficult for their families during the course of a workday.
[25] Pearson suggests the ease with which British descendants acquire ‘denizenship’ in New Zealand more easily than descendants of visible ethnic minorities, when he writes: ‘… of course, the children of British migrants were automatically accepted as members of the “nation” if they were born in settler states’ (Pearson, Citation2002, p. 995).