Haptic routes and digestive destinations in cooking series: images of food and place in Keith Floyd and The Hairy Bikers in relation to art history

Abstract

Taking modern television travel cookery series as a starting point, the article investigates the cultural significance of food and place in visual culture. The examples are, respectively, The Keith Floyd Cookery Collection: Floyd Around The Med [2000. BBC DVD, 2007] and The Hairy Bikers Cookbook Series 1 & 2 [BBC DVD, 2006]. The series illustrate the strong connection between travel, food and place in tourist consumer culture, as well as the way motion and emotion are related to sensuous and digestive aspects of touristic food. The series also illustrate the emblematic connection between food and the media in which aesthetical, cultural and symbolic values are related to the way food is mediatised. The main argument is that cooking television series produce haptic images of place and food that include a specific sensuous and emotional relation between screen and viewer. The haptic imagery is reflected in popular visual culture and tourism as well as in art history and aesthetics.

Keywords:

• travel series
• cookery series
• visual culture
• art history
• haptic imagery
• place

Notes

^†Part of this paper has been presented at the international conference Emotion in motion – The Passion of Tourism, Travel and Movement, CCTC Leeds Metropolitan University July 2009, and at the conference Motion and Emotion Within Place, Aarhus University, October 2009.

Pallasmaa refers to Rasmussen's (1959/1964) classic book.

Jansson (2002) has a third concept: the contextual mode (e.g. golf tourism) in which the touristic experience is subordinated.

Throughout art history, it seems that the act of eating is seen to be repulsive. Only very rarely are people shown with food in their mouth. It is the exception to the rule (Bendiner, 2004, p. 23).

For the historical record, it remains to be said that the pictures do not show actual market locations, they are fictitious locations; however, they are reminiscent of real market scenes and depict ingredients that were produced locally in the Netherlands at the time. Only a few goods were imported from the Mediterranean. Though, the pictures can neither be used as historical documentation of the actual variety of goods sold at a single market nor as an indication of the diet of either the common or the noble man, they do represent local place (Falkenberg, 1996).

In those days, it was widely believed that certain fruits and vegetables contained aphrodisiac powers and therefore the connotations in the pictures are quite literal and not hidden in any way (Falkenberg, 1996),