In/authenticity and food-celebrity relationships in Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food and Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Food Revolution

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the role of the famous chefs Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver as celebrity food activists. Oliver’s and Pollan’s authority and legitimacy as food activists, it is argued, is crucial to the maintenance of their celebrity as such. I examine the basis of this legitimacy by investigating Pollan’s and Oliver’s concern with ‘fake’ or inauthentic foods, and how this concern ties back into and supports their own celebrity positions. Two texts that showcase their activism – Oliver’s TV show Jamie’s Food Revolution and Pollan’s book In Defence of Food – are analysed with a specific focus on the object of food itself, examining how this object works to establish social hierarchies in each text. My analysis, guided by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work on the simulacrum with specific attention toward relationships between human and nonhuman objects inspired by New Materialism and related scholarship, focuses on the relationship between food and social hierarchies in each text, as well as how the food-celebrity relationships here are intimately related to questions of authenticity. Finally, it is argued that this in turn reveals novel nuances in the relationship between suffering Others and celebrities in celebrity activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Food
• simulacrum
• Deleuze
• new materialism
• celebrity chefs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, I consider Pollan a celebrity because I understand celebrity as having ‘its material basis in recurrent media representations or accumulated media visibility’ (Driessens 2013, p. 550). Pollan, who is trained as a journalist, may appear to be a less obvious example of a celebrity than Oliver. However, in time, Pollan has moved beyond the newspaper page to become a highly visible figure in contemporary culture across different media outputs. Accordingly, he now has a strong personal brand and media presence, as is clear from, for example, his status as a bestselling author; the numerous profiles and interviews he has been the subject of; his personal website (michaelpollan.com); and notably, his starring role in the Netflix series Cooked (2016).

2. In recent years, growing obesity rates have been the subject of much media attention and concern, not least after the World Health Organisation began sounding the alarm in the 1990s about the emergence of a so-called ’obesity epidemic’ (see WHO 2017). In this article, I am inspired by the recent surge in critical thinking about obesity within cultural studies, which seeks to make sense of how culture plays into this concern and alarm. Here I am especially drawing on the new field of fat studies, which has an overarching interest in how this concern has ‘to do with preconceived moral and ideological beliefs about fatness’ (Gard and Wright 2005, p. 3). In particular, this line of thinking ‘enables the reframing of the problem of obesity’ (Cooper 2010, p. 1020), shifting the focus from the typical concern about the obesity epidemic (which Pollan and Oliver also voice) to instead considering the cultural and social production of this concern (in which Pollan and Oliver participate as activists).

3. Alice is eventually convinced of the legitimacy of Oliver’s Revolution, and in the season’s very last episode even acts as an active ambassador, thereby strengthening the legitimacy in his food activism by confirming the desirability of ‘Jamie’s food’, as Alice calls it, in the local community. Tellingly, her conversion coincides with a prolonged exposure to Oliver’s Revolution and the food and philosophy of eating that goes with it.

4. These three overall rules are followed by a long list of sub-rules, which I will be engaging with throughout the article. The full list of sub-rules reads: ‘Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food; avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose syrup; avoid food products that make health claims; shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle; get out of the supermarket whenever possible; eat mostly plants, especially leaves; you are what your food eats too; if you have the space, buy a freezer; eat well-grown food from healthy soils; eat wild foods when you can; be the kind of person who takes supplements; eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or the Indians. Or the Greeks; Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism; Don’t look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet; Have a glass of wine with dinner; Pay more, eat less; Eat meals; Do all your eating at a table; Don’t get your fuel from the same place as your car does; Try not to eat alone; Consult your gut; Eat slowly; Cook and, if you can, plant a garden’ (Pollan 2008, pp. 147–201).

5. While Pollan and Oliver spend much time pointing to the failure of political and social institutions in relation to obesity, it is ultimately the individual who in these narratives bears the responsibility of change. This neoliberal approach to individual responsibility is characteristic of Pollan and Oliver’s role as food activists, in which ‘individual triumph of character and resourcefulness’ (Hollows and Jones 2010, p. 314) – including their own – is emphasised as the solution to systemic issues. (For more on this in relation to Pollan and Oliver, see Guthman 2013, Hollows and Jones 2010; for more on celebrity activism and neoliberalism, see, Littler 2015.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katrine Meldgaard Kjær

Katrine Meldgaard Kjær is a postdocteral researcher at the IT University in Copenhagen, Denmark. In her PhD, she examined food advice in texts on obesity and overweight in popular culture. She has previously published in Food Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (2015), Food and Foodways (2017), Feminist Media Studies (2018).