Making and breaking bread: the promises and pitfalls of migration discourse in food tour television

ABSTRACT

Food tour television has long allowed Americans to virtually visit domestic and global locations, vicariously tasting “authentic” and “exotic” foods from the comfort of their couches and under the guidance of intrepid hosts. Analyzing the history and evolution of the food tour genre offers a gauge of popular discourse surrounding the construction of taste and the formation of national cuisines. Two recent shows within this genre, Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi and No Passport Required with Marcus Samuelsson, are of particular interest given their thematic focus on migration – a focus missing within earlier food tour shows. In this paper, we ask how migrant narratives are portrayed within this new programming and how the shows and their hosts redefine American eating. We examined the aesthetic decisions, content choices, and actor involvement within the available episodes of each show. We find that Taste the Nation and No Passport Required successfully use their platform to bring attention to the hardships of the migratory journey and migrants’ contributions as tastemakers. However, within their redirection of the genre, these shows still frequently resort to problematic tropes of migrant deservingness, melting pot assimilation, and rugged neoliberal individualism characteristic of earlier programming.

KEYWORDS:

• Food tour television
• foodways
• migration
• travel

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the participants of the Culture Workshop and the Food on the Move seminar at Northwestern for their gracious comments and consideration of various versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As ideal types for the food tour genre, both Bourdain and Fieri have been critiqued for their conquest approaches of relating to their shows’ guests and their cuisines (Bergh 2016). Scholars attribute the hosts’ actions to their privileged positions as straight, white, overtly masculine, men who present as culinary experts and profit from the cultural productions of others (Ahn 2014; Contois 2020). Bourdain frequently treated global cuisines as foreign and exotic, and his performance as host has largely been understood as voyeuristic, and in some ways a neocolonial consumption of “the other” (Greene 2017; Workneh and Leslie Steeves 2019; Yoo and Buzinde 2012). Fieri’s persona as a “dude” centered on his mass appeal and allowed him to apply techniques of “culinary conquest” to the domestic locales he visited in a manner similar to Bourdain (Contois 2018; Johnston, Rodney, and Chong 2014). While the history of the food tour genre demands additional attention, the works of Fieri and Bourdain are a good metric for the genre and popular discourse more generally over the last two decades.

2. That said, in season two of TTN, the episodes pull back on this “food as the solution” sentiment and, instead, conclude with open critiques and raw realism about the state of migrant politics in the U.S.