‘Someone has to keep shouting’: celebrities as food pedagogues

ABSTRACT

In a recent interview with the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver stated that ‘Food is the most basic issue […] it’s about health […] someone has to take responsibility for this. Someone has to keep shouting’. Oliver’s statement reflects his position as a chef, a public pedagogue and, importantly for the purposes of this article, a celebrity. Oliver’s is one of many voices that have entered the public realm to educate the public about the dangers of unhealthy eating. In this article we discuss the work of three celebrities: Jamie Oliver. Sesame Street Workshop’s character Cookie Monster and Australian food celebrity Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Foundation for schools. Whilst acknowledging that these three food pedagogues represent only a few of the voices that seek to intervene in the food consumption habits of citizens in contemporary times, they can be understood as a public pedagogical response fuelled by the obesity epidemic. We argue that whilst on the surface it appears that our three food pedagogues offer benevolently inspired propositions, we understand such posturing as deeply political. Specifically we are interested in examining the educative effects of these messages and their troubling implications for how individuals understand and experience food-related imperatives. We ask readers to consider who is metaphorically ‘shouting’ whilst drawing on various pedagogical forms and devices and we ask who is being ‘shouted’ at, and to what effects. We suggest that these celebrities function as powerful pedagogues who seemingly attempt to offer particular visions of health, consumption and citizenship, and, above all, attempt to cultivate a moral duty to eat well.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• celebrities
• public pedagogies
• audience
• health
• obesity epidemic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Fifteen is a restaurant.

2. Jamie’s Money Saving Meals, Channel 4, Monday 2 September 2013, Chicago, IL.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily M. Gray

Emily M. Gray is a lecturer in Education Studies at RMIT’s School of Education. Her interests within both research and teaching are interdisciplinary and include sociology, cultural studies and education. She is particularly interested in questions of gender and sexuality and with how understandings these identity categories are lived by individuals and experienced within social institutions. Her key research interests lie with questions related to gender, social justice, student and teacher identity work within educational policy and practice and wider social justice issues within educational discourse and practice. She is also concerned with popular culture, public pedagogies and audience studies, particularly with online ‘fandom’ and with media and popular culture as pedagogical tools.

Carolyn Pluim

Carolyn Pluim’s research interests are focused around the intersections of sociology of education, curriculum studies and educational policy, specifically as these relate to school health policies, practices and pedagogies. She explores the ways in which contemporary school health policies are negotiated and experienced by students and school personnel. A central theme running throughout Carolyn’s research is the relationship between discourse and social dynamics as this bears on sociological understandings of health, illness and the body and influences the responsibilities and obligations of public schools.

Jo Pike

Jo Pike is Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies at Leeds Beckett University. Her research is primarily related to the ways in which space is implicated in the production of children self-governing healthy subjects, with a particular focus on school foodscapes. Her work seeks to explore the social, cultural, moral and affective dimensions attached to educative programmes and interventions which seek to shape the health behaviours and food choices of young people and their families. Her most recent book The Moral Geographies of Children, Young People and Food with Peter Kelly takes Jamie’s School Dinners as a starting point for examining idealised views of parenting, nutrition, health and well-being as well as public health ‘crises’ such as obesity.

Deana Leahy

Deana Leahy is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests are framed by a concern about the political and moral work that is ‘done’ under the guise of improving the health of children and young people in educational settings. Her research draws from Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian writings on governmentality, to consider the various mentalities that are assembled together in policy and curriculum and how they are translated into key pedagogical spaces.