‘Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: cooking on TV gets a decolonial makeover’

ABSTRACT

With the proliferation of food-based content on streaming platforms like Netflix and the decolonial turn in food studies, feminism and media studies, we see the emergence of programs that deviate from prior colonial tropes of food exploration. One such case study explicated in this article is Iranian-American writer and cook Samin Nosrat’s Salt Acid Fat Heat, based on a popular and equally ground-breaking book of the same title by her. A close reading of the four parts of the series, and its production content and choices helps unpack how it is moving toward manifesting a decolonial feminist approach with regards to narratives about food.

KEYWORDS:

• Food media
• netflix
• decolonial
• feminist
• cooking show
• Samin Nosrat

Introduction

This article closely examines the television performances of Iranian-American cook, writer and teacher Samin Nosrat to unpack how she is leading the manifestation of a decolonial ethic through her food media. Nosrat shot to fame through her cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (2017) which was subsequently made into a Netflix series of the same title a year later. The latter has been widely lauded for showing a different kind of food adventuring as well as food domesticity that does not subscribe to gendered stereotypes. Moreover, she pays homage to the cuisine of her native Iran even as she demonstrates mastery and expertise not usually associated with her ethnic identity. This is also manifested in the ethos and essays curated as part of her edited anthology, Best American Food Writing 2019.

Using a decolonial conceptual framework, the close reading lays bare the audio-visual and narrative strategies, as well as production choices adopted by Nosrat and her team to perform food differently. There is a significant body of literature on how the cooking and consumption of food in various sites can be looked to for “performing” identity, whether that is related to race, gender or class (Chakraborty 2013; Cairns et al 2010). Additionally, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the concept of allyship in relation to white/nonwhite relations has been critiqued as charitable rather than equitable (Dabiri 2021). However, there is a dearth of literature on how nonwhite communities can be equitable allies with other marginalized communities although this is an emerging area of interest in foodwork and food media (Khorana 2021). In the absence of substantial research on how nonwhite migrants interpret and perform a decolonial politics in an immigrant settler colonial context (such as the US where Nosrat is located), this article uses the framework of decoloniality and decolonial feminism laid out in the work of Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (2018), and of Maria Lugones (2010), respectively to analyze Nosrat’s series.

One of the key tenets of decoloniality as defined by Mignolo and Walsh in their seminar work, and as witnessed in the series is the manifestation of relationality which crosses cultures and organisms:

Relationality doesn’t mean that there is one way to do and conceive decoloniality … Its meaning references what some Andean Indigenous thinkers, including Nina Pacari, Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, and Félix Patzi Paco, refer to as vincularidad. Vincularidad is the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos. It is a relation and interdependence in search of balance and harmony of life in the planet. As such, and as we propose in this book and series, vincularidad/relationality unsettles the singular authoritativeness and universal character typically assumed and portrayed in academic thought. Relationality/vincularidad seeks connections and correlations’. (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 1–2)

Following this understanding of decoloniality as relationality, the article will unpack how Nosrat, her crew and key decision-makers at Netflix practice a positionality that is relational rather than assuming universal authority.

In her work on moving toward a decolonial feminism, Maria Lugones makes a similar plea to disavow the universal, in this case in relation to the category of “woman” (2010, 753). Instead, she emphasizes learning about others who are trying to resist coloniality. What emerges then, are coalitions that are premised on learning about each other instead of the othering relations than can emerge from the concept of allyship. Nosrat’s choice of locations, experts and dishes in the series will also be unpacked through this particular framing of decolonial feminism that is more reliant on coalitions across racialized and gendered differences rather than on assuming the role of the universal woman.

Before undertaking the analysis of the series, this article will contextualize this case study in the literature on decolonization in relation to food and women of color. This grounding is necessary to attend to the long tradition of women of color and Indigenous women working toward food sovereignty and self-determination (Peña et al. 2017) as well as what has changed in contemporary foodie culture and media. The final section of the article takes account of the growth of food television on online streaming services, and how the affordances of the technology itself is impacting what gets commissioned. This holds the door open for other food media creators, especially people of color, and new kinds of chefs such as those featured on series like Chef’s Table and Taste the Nation.

Decolonisation, women of color and ‘foodie’ culture

In the realm of food production and consumption, the notion of foodie culture has become associated with elitism (Hyde 2014). Foodie-ism and food adventuring in turn, particularly as witnessed in popular culture narratives about food have long had colonial connotations (Heldke 2003). This had led many scholars in food studies as well as those working on the ground in food justice movements to welcome the “decolonial turn” in food/foodie culture, as will be explored below. While this turn has so far entailed an emphasis on food justice and sovereignty for Indigenous peoples, and to some extent on sustainable diets and agriculture, I contend in this article that the proliferation of new kinds of food narratives is also an apt site to examine the discursive realm of what food decolonization could look like.

Food narratives like Nosrat’s examined in detail in this article take the form of “transcultural art,” making them particularly suitable for enacting the decolonial turn. According to Madina Tlostanova’s work on transcultural art, literature and decoloniality, “The aesthetics of transculturation is primarily a trans-modern aesthetics in the sense of overcoming modernity and its myths, values, taste norms and thinking patterns, thus decolonizing being, knowledge and perception” (2013, 12). Following this, transcultural art (which could arguably include creative media) is suitable for a decolonial turn as it links reason and emotions, thereby subverting many of the binary categories imposed by modernity. Additionally, she argues that such creations exist in a kind of “semiosphere” which allows meaning-making beyond “the extremes of absolute otherness and untranslatability of both cultural essentialism and post-modernist refusal to know the other” (Tlostanova 2013, 27). Following this, the trans-cultural elements of Nosrat’s series are particularly apt for a decolonial reading.

Looking sideways at the emerging literature on decolonial feminism in relation to food in particular, it is interesting to note that foodways have become crucial for recouping the agency of Indigenous women and women of color. Jessica Milgroom has elaborated on the central role of these women in advancing agroecology and transmitting recipes and stories:

One reason is the crucial role that women play in agriculture as seed keepers, domesticators of plants and breeds, and guardians of diversity. Women are creative food preservers, masters of nutrition, and transmitters of rooted history through their recipes and stories. Women secure and prepare food for their households and communities, they are caretakers, have agency, bring innovative change and build alternatives and social movements, yet they are largely excluded from economic opportunities and governance spaces … Feminisms, agroecology and food sovereignty are intertwined emancipatory movements and political projects that fight for autonomy, self-determination, egalitarianism, epistemic reconstitution and social justice.

(2021)

She further notes that what distinguishes the food practices of these women is that they nurture “a spiderweb of interdependencies and relationships that generate social resilience” instead of being driven by the “food as commodity” approach (Milgroom 2021). Such work in the food movement and decolonial feminism fields builds on existing studies of food narratives produced by people of color. There is now a growing appreciation that in the realm of foodwork, decolonization means recognizing the labor and recouping the agency of people of color (Khorana 2021). This especially applies to women and gender-diverse folk of color.

In line with the above focus on narratives that simultaneously manifest a relational and egalitarian approach to food and decolonial feminism, this article will focus on Samin Nosrat’s Netflix series as it enlists a range of women and women of color experts and diverges from traditional food television. Cheri Ketchum’s (2005) work has detailed how television shows centered on food fall into one of these four categories: traditional domestic instructional cooking; personality-driven domestic cooking shows; food travel programs; and the avant-garde (2005). The televisual and conceptual novelty of Salt Acid Fat Heat is that is combines and transcends all of these categorizations as Nosrat is traveling, instructing, relying on her engaging and approachable personality, and is innovative.

According to Caroline Framke in her review of the series for Variety magazine, Salt Fat Acid Heat gives hitherto underrepresented “matriarchs the spotlight and the space to express themselves and their traditions” (2018). In such scenes, Nosrat herself is not the center of the story or the recipe. Rather, she happily plays “sous chef to women who teach her how to make Italian pesto, Japanese miso, and Mexican turkey, all from loose recipes passed down over the years to become cemented in delicious tradition” (Framke 2018). In Kathryn VanArendonk’s view, the centering of others is a motif throughout the series (2018). Like any other television chef, Nosrat is certainly putting her own spin on every dish she creates and the aesthetic of rustic creativity and joy she does this with. In other words, she is not unique in altering traditional recipes or in exhibiting delight in the act of procuring and making food. However, “her ego is less central”, and she cares about people learning to cook far more than she does about her own legacy (VanArendonk 2018). What also helps with the familiarity in “foreign” places is that she appears to be conversant in Italian in the “fat episode” based in Italy, and in Spanish in the “acid” episode shot in Mexico. This means she is less of an outsider than many other food adventurers previously seen on our screens.

Food media across the Global North has tended to be gendered and racially stereotyped, with few people of color positioned as hosts or experts of more than their ethnic cuisines. According to Jenny Zhang, there are particular archetypes of “who gets to eat on TV” that Nosrat is significantly digressing from:

For years, the answer to the question “Who gets to eat on TV?” has always been the same: male explorers and happy homemakers. The power of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is that it provides a new effigy. Nosrat is not a man, one of those typically white heroes of travel food shows and food media at large who promise to introduce new worlds and cuisines to the viewer.

(2018)

Furthermore, her appearance and clothing is also a departure from onscreen feminine stereotypes of domestic goddesses or queens of the hearth who rarely venture out of the home kitchen. In an Eater Upsell podcast, Nosrat reveals the following about her aesthetic choices, I wear Birkenstocks and weird overalls, and my house is a little bit messy, and I make a huge mess in the kitchen. I’m not perfect, I’m not Martha Stewart, I’m not Alice Waters. It’s different, I’m different, and those are actually things to celebrate, rather than try to scrub out (cited in Zhang 2018). This quote suggests that Nosrat’s feminism is “highly invested in geographical, geopolitical and geocultural forms of belonging” (Ballestrin 2022). Moreover, there is no sense of apology about taking up space and consuming food in relational settings, and this thread of storytelling merits further attention in research on decoloniality.

How media stories can contribute to decolonial futures

Before examining and analyzing the series in detail, it is worth flagging the “decolonial turn” in the discipline of media studies across the Global North and the Global South. This has not only impacted knowledge production in the realm of academic research and scholarship, but it is also influencing storytelling and its media forms. According to Last Moyo in his book focused on the decolonial turn in media studies in Africa and the Global South in particular, the focus of this discipline should now be on not having a singular center:

The central and enduring problem for the interdiscipline has been how to transform the field from the grip of Eurocentric, Western-centric and monocultural universalism to a more progressive cultural politics of a multicultural, inclusive, emancipatory theory and pedagogy … such an intervention is a necessary moral and political project in order to reanimate and decentre the act of theory building from the West and create a possibility for a new trans-epistemic knowledge paradigm.

(2020, 2)

Also akin to decolonial feminism, the decolonial turn in media studies imagines a new kind of storytelling which is situated instead of assuming a universal perspective. In essence, decolonial thinking is mindful of the politics of positionality and “does not hide its locus of enunciation” (Moyo 2020, 6).

In addition to the discipline of media studies and its meaning-making, the creative and communicative practices the discipline is committed to examining are also integral to manifesting the decolonial turn. Such practices enable “knowledge from the periphery” to be rendered visible (Agung-Igusti and Sonn 2020). This increased visibility also means that we can then apply critical theories to analyze how communicative storytelling practices and their mediums “may resist and challenge the hegemonic institutions produced by the historical and material conditions of colonialism” (Agung-Igusti and Sonn 2020). In settler colonial contexts such as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it becomes equally essential for all storytellers to also be reflexive about their own positionality in relation to Indigenous peoples, and to use media to “imagine alternative possibilities” (Wiebe 2019, 33). According to Sarah Marie Wiebe’s research on environmental justice and decoloniality in Canada, mixed media storytelling has become “one possible avenue for communicating across diverse geographies, translating situated bodies of knowledge for decision-making audiences, and contributing to ongoing dialogue about settler-colonialism and environmental injustices that affect communities in Canada and around the world” (Wiebe 2019, 33).

Finally, while making this media and imagining different futures, it is important to not just critique coloniality, but also to forge new kinds of alliances with marginalized communities as also laid out in Lugone’s understanding of decolonial feminism. For instance, Carla Rice et al suggest working through the overlaps between feminist and Indigenous studies to make possible “new perspectives on what is necessary for decolonizing institutions” (2020, 652). They also gesture toward new kinds of activism and stories based on “intersectional alliances, such as alliances among feminist, two-spirit, racialized and Indigenous youth, rather than assuming alliances can only happen amongst certain homogenized groups of people – namely, women or Indigenous peoples” (Rice et al. 2020, 652). Such a decentering of Eurocentric paradigms through new kinds of narratives, activism and collaborations is made visible in the four 45-minute long episodes of Nosrat’s series as explicated below.

Samin Nosrat on screen: Netflix persona of vivaciousness and the approachable ‘brown girl’

Salt Acid Fat Heat premiered on the global streaming platform Netflix in October 2018. Each of the four episodes is dedicated to an element of cooking and shot in a location that exemplifies how that element is best explored in the local cuisine. The series received excellent reviews from food media reviewers and general audiences alike, with many identifying that it was a new kind of culinary TV due to the high proportion of women and home cooks featured (Morabito 2018). In this section, I will undertake a close textual reading of each of the four episodes using the frameworks of decoloniality, decolonial feminism and transcultural media in relation to the decolonial turn as described above. As I will demonstrate through the subsequent analysis, Nosrat is performing a decolonial feminism that is not exploratory in a colonial sense, but that travels while being situated in place and in the web of relationships that it entails.

The first episode of the series on fat is based in Italy. It begins with the production of olive oil, and then moves on to cured meats (such as prosciutto) and how their oils add favor to “simple” Italian recipes. Nosrat is also seen in a cheese factory where she assists with various aspects of the production process and highlights how fat and salt help transform milk into flavorful parmesan. She tests parmesan that is 24 months, 36 months and 40 months old within the premises of the factory a bit later in the episode. This tasting is a sensual experience for her, as witnessed in her facial expressions and the words she uses to describe each cheese. Unlike what male food adventurers in shows like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Guy Fieri’s Diners, Dive-ins, and Drives might have done in a similar setting, she does not shy away from being expressive as well as descriptive. The viewer comes away thinking that not only is she enjoying the experience of the tasting, but also that she has the audience in mind at every point as she is trying to re-create the experience for them.

In the final segment of the fat episode, Nosrat can be seen in a home kitchen in Italy which presumably belongs to Benedetta Vitali. Vitali is a well-known chef from Florence who Nosrat trained with during her two-year stint in Italy in her youth. Nosrat recalls how as a young cook at the establishment, she was provided with complicated recipes for pasta in terms of how various flours needed to be mixed with eggs using a range of techniques. She then demonstrates how Vitali taught her a rather simple and rustic way that works every time. They go on to mix hard and soft flours and combine these with eggs in a gentle manner on the kitchen island surface. In the meantime, ragu is also being cooked in the kitchen to go with the pasta, beginning with sizzling olive oil as no other fat would generate the same flavor. The closing shots show her enjoying the final dish with her Italian friends and no precise recipe is documented or explained to the audience. The focus of the camera is on the process of kneading the dough, rolling it with a large rolling pin and the sound that is produced while doing so, as well as the roasting meat and vegetables in the ragu pot.

The second episode on salt begins and ends with Nosrat’s proclamation about salt uniting all global cuisines. She mentions that Japan is the ideal location for exploring this element of cooking as despite not having enough warm weather and sunshine to produce sea salt through traditional processes of evaporation, they have invented their own ingenious methods of using seaweed. Nosrat then leads us to one such plant where the essence of seaweed is extracted to get salt crystals, followed by a drying process. She tastes the salt thus produced and also thoroughly explores other “umami,” or savory flavors associated with the island nation, such as miso, dashi and soy sauce.

Another memorable segment of the episode is the traditional method of producing soy sauce which only accounts for a fraction of the total global production, albeit some artisanal producers are keeping it alive. This entails keeping crushed soy beans with other ingredients like salt in large barrels and allowing micro-organisms to do their work over long periods of time. She then goes on to taste the final product which is used to season toasted rice and chicken (both cooked over a hibachi grill). In addition to complimenting the deep, caramel-like flavor of the soy sauce, Nosrat notes that she also grew up eating very similar toasted rice in her Persian mother’s kitchen in the US.

Throughout the episode, Nosrat is at pains to understand and visit not just the source/place of origin of ingredients such as dashi (smoked fish), but also to delve into artisanal methods of production such as the one above with the soy sauce. Where possible, she sources women from the culture or with the traditional knowledge of age-old recipes to demonstrate these processes. For instance, in the case of producing miso from scratch, we see a Japanese woman showing us her ancestral way of making it from mashed soya beans that are fermented for at least two years. We later also see an American food writer who has been living with her Japanese husband for decades using miso to add flavor to boiled eggs, showing the technique used while also explaining how she embraced the culture through food when she was struggling with the language in her early years in Japan. On the one hand, the choice of a white American woman as one of the “key informants” in this episode may appear questionable and designed to appeal to a Western audience. At the same time, Nosrat’s central message about food being a global language seems to resonate through all the chosen stories, recipes and unconventional “experts”. In the final segment, we see shots of her enjoying a meal with friends in Japan cross-cut with those of her cooking ribs with Japanese umami ingredients in her (presumably) Californian kitchen and teaching her African-American friend how to layer flavor. Once again, she presents these flavors as translatable and universal while paying homage to their provenance. This is not the colonial universal position, but one that links transcultural similarities through situated food sites and stories, thereby decolonizing the food TV genre.

As mentioned in the section above, Salt Fat Acid Heat is a significant departure from the bravado of male-led food shows, including on online streaming services. According to Ally Betker, what makes Nosrat likable compared to these male hosts is her “ability to not only put her subjects, such as the grandmotherly pesto maker Lidia and the ‘miso master’ Kazumi, at ease, but to bring the audience into her fold of familiarity, too” (2021). In the same vein, while she is very knowledgeable about cooking and storytelling, she is never too prescriptive in her recipes and this makes her know-how of food more accessible and less aspirational. Her method of choice is using her senses to gauge if a particular item she is cooking is cooked or seasoned enough, therefore implying a decolonial approach that is processual, embodied, and relational. According to Jenny Zhang, this focus on the senses over precise recipes makes her relatable because she also tastes other people’s food and is never apologetic about eating on camera:

… she also indulges, asking a butcher for “a little more” raw pork fat to sample, swiping a finger through the soft inner crags of a meringue before buckling down to assemble a pavlova, and sneaking a bite of stewed meatball while glancing mischievously at the cook, as if asking for permission that it’s too late to give.

(2018)

Through these acts of sensual pleasure and indulgence, Nosrat charts her own path for being a woman (and a woman of color) on food television that is less scripted and resonates with a broad range of audience members. Such a focus on the senses and recipes that have evolved based on the location and available ingredients is more aligned with decolonial feminism than the sensual yet colonial exploration of male chefs and cooks. This is because in the case of the former, there is a deliberate passing down of recipes from women ancestors which may be oral and self-determined (Peña et al. 2017, 44).

Also worth noting are motifs that become more evident in subsequent episodes of the series, such as Nosrat’s use of the food travel genre to explore similarities rather than differences across cultures. This is explicitly mentioned in one of her interviews after the premiere of the show:

What I tried to do with my show is convey this idea that good food around the world is more similar than it is different, and that we, as humans, are more similar than we are different. The idea was that, maybe by learning about somebody’s food culture, maybe you’ll have some more compassion for them.

(Nosrat cited in Rosner 2020)

While food exploration may have had colonial connotations that Nosrat is acutely aware of, she deliberately set out to not just critique this mode of exploration but also to imagine a different reality by creating a series which attempts to “connect the dots” (Nosrat cited in Rosner 2020). She added that, “Going out into the world, meeting people, seeing how different cultures use different ingredients to achieve the same end – that is part of this big story that is really my ulterior motive in all of my work, which is that humans are more similar than we are different” (cited in Betker 2021). Nosrat also sought to connect these dots not to Eurocentric, American foods and ways of cooking, but to her own Persian-American household and the dishes she grew up eating. This is a crucial point that distinguishes her from other food adventurers/western celebrity chefs and food media personalities who usually use the west and/or American-centric foods as their primary frame of reference. Moreover, the position she assumes is not one of an authority figure, but that of an expert who is interested in an equitable exchange of knowledge and pays due respect to each culture and the origins of recipes as per the tenets of decolonizing food.

The third episode of the series, titled acid, especially draws out connections between her Iranian-American cultural identity and other cultures. She begins this installment of her categorization of the elements of cooking by acknowledging that she feels an affiliation with Mexican culture and its acidic foods as she grew up with similar flavors from Iran, such as lime, pomegranate and yogurt. Nosrat then goes on to explore a variety of these acids that are used in Mexican cooking, and particularly in foods in the Yucatan province, such as sour oranges, limes, honey, tomatoes and a range of salsa dressings. This specificity is important for western as well as some non-western viewers who may not be familiar with regional Mexican cuisines and the provenance of ingredients they may have only seen commercial versions of in their own contexts.

Similar to the previous episodes, Nosrat is at pains to draw on the knowledge of women-identifying home cooks as well as chefs where it is feasible to do so. Noteworthy in this episode is the older Mexican lady who makes nearly two hundred fifty corn tortillas by hand on a daily basis. The camera shows her taking the corn mixture to a local mill to be ground where others are also doing so and waiting for this to be turned into perfectly round, cooked tortillas when passed through a machine. The lady in question can then be seen using her ground flour mixture to turn them into tortillas so that the moisture is not absorbed through a commercial process and Nosrat joins her in this process. In the final segment of the episode, a Mexican female chef who has been trained in a French cooking school is shown preparing a three-course meal and layering the elements of acid in every component. These include marinated fish and charred vegetables, an accompanying salsa, and a dessert course of pavlova with citrus fruits, chocolate and acidic honey. The parting shots of Nosrat enjoying the meal with local friends serve to include her as a respectful visitor rather than as a tourist who is solely focused on the “exotic.”

In the final episode centered on the element of heat, Nosrat heads back to her home kitchen in the town of Berkeley, California to put into practice what she has learned so far as well as share it with her closest family and friends. While we have thus far seen her embracing the food travel show genre, once again she charts her own path in the formulaic world of food television by also returning to the home (albeit not in the same way as white female celebrity chefs). The episode kicks off with a return of sorts to the kitchen of Chez Panisse in California where Nosrat began her cooking career, and where the woman-identifying head chef demonstrates how to harness heat to grill a perfect medium-rare steak. However, this is the only foray into a restaurant kitchen as the rest of the segments take place in Nosrat’s own house or in seemingly accessible supermarkets and produce stores. Chez Panisse is likely included in this episode due its enormous legacy in pioneering seasonal cooking, attention to sustainable farm produce, and producing an impressive alumni of cooks and innovators (including Nosrat) herself over the years (Breijo 2021).

The feast Nosrat prepares for her own friends entails various courses like roast chicken, a salad incorporating beans and oven-grilled vegetables, as well as Persian crispy rice, also known as tahdig. She is shown inviting friends (including her book illustrator, Wendy) over and cooking aspects of the meal with them. This is interspersed with a trip to the supermarket where she discusses the types of salt, as well as another lesson on “cooking with the senses” and not just following instructions on setting the oven at a particular temperature and letting it be. The most memorable segment of this episode is where Nosrat and her mother cook tahdig together and fuss over the details and the process. Not only is this reminiscent of previous episodes where Nosrat is learning recipes and cooking with older female home cooks or chefs, but it also foregrounds her own food biography and provenance. This segment is interesting as the series closer because it roots Nosrat in the culture while acknowledging that she has used these experiences in her mother’s household to then branch off into other cultures and cuisines which share similar elements. At the end of the episode (and the series) she is shown handing aprons to her visiting friends as they all assist with dinner preparation. Nosrat’s voiceover declares that her journey may have commenced with food, but it is now much more centered on what happens at the dinner table. In other words, her purpose now is to use food as a tool to bring people together and teach them how to nourish themselves and each other. These parting words are the anti-thesis of a regular food show where the emphasis is either on an inaccessible experience (due to distance or wealth), or on home cooking as centered on a heteronormative family.

The platform, the genre and the production process: collaborating, curating, reflecting

In this final section of the article, I will consider how the context of commissioning and production aids or limits the decolonial potential of Nosrat’s series. There is now emerging work on how Netflix as an online streaming service with high production values is attesting that it manifests the “future of television” that HBO once lay claim to (Tryon 2015). While its promise of textual novelty and new storytelling practices (Tryon 2015) may be well-suited to the kind of transcultural media that can be decolonial, its association with prestige could be a limitation. For instance, Daniel Binns notes that the documentary “house style” of Netflix is most visible in the food-based series Chef’s Table and that it exhibits the attributes of “slow media” (2018, 64). He further adds this this style consists of “smooth camera movements, super slow-motion shots, soft-focus or bokeh cinematography, the use of computer-controlled camera rigs, and a presentation of food that is comparable to the arrangement of props for still-life painting” (Binns 2018, 64). In other words, it is worth considering in future research whether such a stylized approach which has become synonymous with the platform, and especially its food content is most appropriate for the equitable principles of decolonial storytelling. Netflix food shows with a global audience like Chef’s Table have also been noted for re-framing gender in relation to food by featuring female chefs engaging in activities like barbecue (Leer 2022). Salt Fat Acid Heat builds on this play with conventional gender roles, and takes it a step further through its production choices and crew, as explained later in this section.

Before considering the platform-focused decisions, production process and crew of Salt Fat Acid Heat, it is also necessary to consider the niche but increasing more prevalent genre of food cum travel shows led by women of color situated in the Global North. In other words, there are a few food-oriented programs that center their women of color hosts and the stories of marginalized communities on other online streaming platforms. These are similarly attempting to decolonize the travel food genre, albeit with different foci. Such shows include Indian-American food writer and television host Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation on Disney+, Malaysian-Australian Poh-Ling Yeow’s Poh’s Kitchen on the Road on Australia’s ABC iView (the video-on-demand offshoot of public broadcaster ABC), and British-Bangladeshi cook and author Nadiya Hussain’s various food and travel shows on the BBC that were produced after she won the Great British Bake Off reality show in 2015.

Beginning with Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation, it has been noted that the show “presents a fundamental redirection to popular discourse on American eating – one that promises to centre migrants and migration narratives within their content” (Bascuñan-Wiley and Brockway 2023, 2). In this way, it is seen as expanding the very genre of the conventional food travel program as migrants are presented as “tastemakers” rather than mere cultural objects to be sampled. In terms of the domestic political context in America, the show was also viewed as an antidote to “a post-Trump political climate of nativism and strong anti-immigrant sentiments”. Lakshmi herself foregrounds her activist persona in the show by celebrating celebrating the food cultures of Indigenous people, immigrant communities and the descendants of enslaved people’ (Rao 2020) and using the medium of food to comment on their socio-political histories in the USA. Rao also suggests that unlike white, male food and travel hosts who embody a sense of entitlement, “as Ms. Lakshmi enters farms, homes and community centers across the country, she seems acutely aware that she is a guest”, thereby showing a radically different way of engaging with “otherness”.

Also significant in the public and food persona of Lakshmi and Ling-Yeow is the articulation of maternal cultural influences on their work and sense of self. In the former’s case, she cited her mother and grandmother as her “biggest role models” and adds that beyond teaching her how to cook, they were huge influences her life as both were very independent for their times (Lakshmi cited in Karim 2021). Lakshmi also mentions looking up to television presenter and cook Madhur Jaffrey as a teen as “It was nice to see one brown face out there” (cited in Karim 2021). Malaysian-Australian TV host and cook, Poh Ling Yeow similarly credits her maternal legacy, through her mother great aunt, for turning her into a ‘certified feeder’on the blog for her show, Poh’s Kitchen (Ling Yeow 2011, 8). According to Jovanovski (2017), this comment highlights not just the web of maternal relationships that have played a seminal role in informing Ling Yeow’s food identity, but also that it has enabled her to carry on her cultural traditions in the absence of children of her own (2017, 129).

In the case of both Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation and Ling Yeow’s shows on the ABC, the public-private distinction in the realm of food is blurred. This happens as “restaurants become places of belonging and representation and home kitchens become places for community” (Bascuñan-Wiley and Brockway 2023, 8). When traveling through Australia and Asia for her own show, Ling Yeow’s lens is that of cultural similarity rather than spotlighting differences. She writes,

I’ve been on the road, all over Australia clocking up some pretty fantastic food experiences, some not for the faint hearted, but all definitely unique! Right now, I’m writing from Bangkok and last week I was in Singapore and the week before that, I was in the Flinders ranges. I spent all today at a Muslim klong (or canal) community watching the women make Nam Prik. It felt so similar to my day at Chef Ismail’s kampong, watching all the matriarchs in his family chat and cook together. The food and ingredients were familiar - shallots, garlic, dried shrimp, tamarind.

(2011)

This excerpt is also noteworthy for mentioning how a chef’s technique is similar to that of the family matriarchs she observed in a Thai village. In this way, the home cooking of women is put on the same level playing field as that of “professional” chefs rather than being represented as any less sophisticated.

Finally, the appearance of Nadiya Hussain on BBC’s Great British Bake Off and the subsequent series she has fronted on the public broadcaster merit a mention despite not being hosted on a video-on-demand platform. This is because like Lakshmi and Ling Yeow, Hussain is very much at the center of the shows she hosts, while also acknowledging the legacy of her Bangladeshi/South Asian ancestors (through the use of flavor and spices), her baking teacher, and her own immediate family. According to Lagerway, “Nadiya is the central figure of her own star text and her affective labour supports her own narrative, not serving as character development for anyone else” (2018). Like in the case of Taste the Nation, Hussain is seen as acting against the prevalent anti-immigration and Islamophobic current in UK politics (Bilefsky 2015). Given her non-celebrity origins, she is also seen as having evolved in her public persona and has begun using her platform for more political ends. For instance, in an interview during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 when the Black Lives Matter protests were also underway around the globe, she said that she now acknowledges that she can never “blend in” in a white middle-aged industry, and that it was better to “create space” for others like her to follow (cited in Nicholson 2020).

In the case of Salt Fat Acid Heat, the Netflix house style is also apparent, but with an even greater focus on the senses, on process, and on the origins of food/recipes/ingredients in feminine spaces. I argue that this is in line with a new genre of culinary television which shows the chef as a cultural crusader and an intermediary (Santos and Mansey 2022). It demonstrates a focus on the senses that is also evident in new kinds of “ethnic” restaurants in the US. According to Hall (2021), “dominant analytical frameworks in critical food studies literature often ignore or underplay the role of the senses for chefs and eaters”, and hence it is important to consider emerging phenomenon such as a Peruvian American chef’s efforts to translate Peru’s gastronomic boom and “Peruvian flavor profiles” for New York eaters

(2021). In the food television landscape, a sensual approach to lifestyle documentary television with a political or social message may have first emerged in the early 2000s. However, it is more noticeable in the era of online streaming platforms which have access to broader but also more niche audiences. This means that a series like Nosrat’s can take more risks and move toward a decolonial food and feminist agenda as it doesn’t have to compete with cooking shows on national, commercial television networks.

The production process of the series also uncovers conscious choices to manifest a decolonial feminist approach. As noted earlier, it amalgamates several genres rather than simply mimicking the trope of the travel food show, usually led by a white male. Its director, Caroline Suh and the crew deliberately sought “the kinds of people I don’t see on food TV” to “make a series that didn’t fall into one of the genre’s two most common categories: the gorgeous, aspirational shows and the nuts-and-bolts working manuals” (Saraiya 2018). Nosrat and her team wanted something that was “both beautiful and accessible” as she wondered, “Why can’t the regular cook have the beautiful thing?” (Nosrat cited in Saraiya 2018). Combining high production aesthetics with accessible stories may help disavow the issues of prestige that can prevent Netflix shows like this from becoming synonymous with cultural capital rather than embodying the democratic potential of decolonial food media.

The emphasis on collaborating with other creative women of color on the series extended beyond what was visible on the screen. One of the key decision-makers for getting the series commissioned was Lisa Nishimura, the head of the documentary studio at Netflix who also happens to be the only Asian American woman who was a studio head in Hollywood at the time of production (Brara 2018). Nosrat saw Nishimura as a champion who is committed to humanity and diversity, and has brought other interesting diverse content to Netflix. She also mentioned that everyone on the production team for the show was a woman of color (Brara 2018), and their collective ethos is manifest in what becomes visible on the screen.

Finally, Nosrat’s own choices around representing herself “as she is” appear to be inspired by her personal biography as a “brown kid” growing up in a white world (cited in Rosner 2020), and the desire to inspire others like her. She has commented that she wants to pave the way for other women as this is key to continuing the story of change:

With Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Nosrat made it a point to feature female cooks wherever possible, often sending producers back out into the field to keep looking when they came up short of women subjects. “I was like, ‘oh, this is my shot,’ you know? What I wouldn’t have given as a little kid to see a person like me on TV, so if I can be that for other little brown kids … woah,” Nosrat says, adding, “If I can help facilitate that for women, that’s amazing”.

(Nosrat cited in Betker 2021)

The issue of legacy in Nosrat’s case, then is not just about being a celebrity who others look up to because she is an exceptional auteur, but to use that to create a platform for others like her who may not seemingly fit the bill. Such conscious attention to who is included and to helping facilitate the careers of other women of color embodies the decolonial ethic in terms of creating coalitions at the site of difference rather than relying on allyship.

Conclusion

This article began by unpacking the decolonial turn in both food studies and media studies to find an overlapping space in decolonial feminism and its foodways as well as narratives about food. I then explored Iranian-American cook, writer and media personality Samin Nosrat’s Netflix series, Salt Fat Acid Heat through a close textual analysis to unpack how it is doing food television differently and thereby moving toward a decolonial approach in both food media and feminist narratives. Such an approach is defined as being situated, relational, embodied and process-oriented. While commercial food media has largely been gendered, with male chefs exploring and innovating and female chefs remaining in the domestic kitchen and connoting tradition, some food-based programming on Netflix has begun to play with these stereotypical and colonial representations. In the example of Salt Fat Acid Fat discussed here, the production context (in this case, the online streaming platform Netflix) and choices also aid the decolonial ethos of the series and merit further research in relation to other content commissioned by such platforms.

In the concluding comments, it is worth adding a note of caution about decolonial narratives, whether about food or not that profess to be “authentic” (Levin 2020). The decolonial turn is about representing as many marginalized stories as possible rather than expecting authentic or Indigenous folks to live up a Western ideal of what counts as the singular narrative of a community. This also extends to non-western communities critiquing their own representatives and policing their creative or cultural outputs. For other makers of color following in Nosrat’s footsteps, following her template and ethos would entail finding like-minded collaborators and supporters and using food to tell othered stories.

Disclosure statement

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