From River Cottage to Chicken Run: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the class politics of ethical consumption

Abstract

Lifestyle television provides a key site through which to explore the dilemmas of ethical consumption, as the genre shifts to consider the ethics of different consumption practices and taste cultures. UK television cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's TV programmes offer fertile ground not only for thinking about television personalities as lifestyle experts and moral entrepreneurs, but also for thinking about how the meanings and uses of their television image are inflected by genre. In this article we explore how the shift from the lifestyled downshifting narrative of the River Cottage series to the ‘campaigning culinary documentary’ Hugh's Chicken Run exposes issues of celebrity, class and ethics. While both series are concerned with ethical consumption, they work in different ways to reveal a distinction between ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ consumption practices and positions – positions that are inevitably classed.

Keywords:

• celebrity
• ethical consumption
• lifestyle television
• River Cottage

Notes

1. There have been numerous series set here, including Return to River Cottage (2000), River Cottage Forever (2002), Beyond River Cottage (2004), The River Cottage Treatment (2006), River Cottage Gone Fishing (2007), River Cottage Spring and River Cottage Autumn (2008) and River Cottage: Winter's On the Way (2009). Fearnley-Whittingstall's cookbooks are also linked to the River Cottage brand. These include The River Cottage Cookbook (2001), The River Cottage Year (2003), The River Cottage Meat Book (2004), The River Cottage Family Cookbook (with Fizz Carr, 2005), The River Cottage Fish Book (with Nick Fisher, 2007) and River Cottage Everyday (2009). There are also River Cottage Handbooks on specialist areas such as bread, mushrooms and the hedgerow.

2. None the less, there is a case to be made for the construction of ‘poshness’ as ‘ordinary’ in the United Kingdom (and England in particular) in recent years. The current Conservative government has made strenuous attempts to downplay its association with poshness and elite institutions, with politicians such as Cameron keen to show how they are ‘just like us’.

3. The extent to which green lifestyle programming constitutes a coherent genre is debatable, but this term has acquired some currency as a means of describing a sub-genre of lifestyle programming which incorporates ethical issues (Lewis, 2008b; Bonner, 2010; Parkins and Craig, 2010).

4. This position has shifted and, in more recent series, while Hugh still advocates the pleasures of producing your own food, there has been an increasing emphasis on consuming responsibly. This became particularly clear in the Chicken Out campaign.

5. The smallholding that formed that original River Cottage has now grown into a significant business enterprise that sits alongside Fearnley-Whittingstall's writing and television activities. This includes an extensive range of cookery courses, a canteen in Bath and a canteen and delicatessen in Axminster which form part of the wider ‘more than profit’ organisation, a phrase which neatly combines the deployment of cultural and economic capital in moral entrepreneurship (http://www.rivercottage.net/about/).