Article Review: Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television

Hm, I am realizing that my posts are kinda long.  So I'll try to keep this one shorter.  As I have been blogging about various literature that present different perspectives about gender, food, and media, I thought I'd keep with the trend.  Today, I will discuss an article about Julia Child in comparison with today's cooking queens. 


Krishnendu Ray, author of Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television for Gastronomica magazine, writes that Child pioneered both cooking on TV and a unique domesticity.  While cooking on TV has grown immensely in the years since Child's start, according to Ray, domesticity is in recession in part because of Food Network.  Child's domesticity was simultaneously traditional and innovative: she wasn't terribly feminine or quiet, but she always talked about her husband and played up her marriage.  For Ray, Food Network's food porn stresses the focus on perfect aesthetics rather than real domesticity.  Ray calls Paula Deen, Ina Garten, and Giada De Laurentiis anti-domestic.  Rachael Ray demonstrates anti-domesticity too, by breaking her ties with home life (kitchen & husband) when she travels abroad. 


I don't really buy how the latter female hosts are anti-domestic.  Ray doesn't justify her statements, all of the mentioned women are set in daily cooking for family/friends scenarios-- which really is the definition of traditional domesticity, and the one about Rachael Ray doesn't make sense to me when I consider all of the times Rachael Ray travels with her husband or is working in the kitchen.