Gridiron Gourmet

Spice talk: An Orientalist register in Nigella Lawson's cooking shows

“…The exotic, “culinary Other” often surfaces in “foodie discourse,” and Johnston and Baumann (2014, p. 87) maintain that this frame “builds on and reproduces certain neo‐colonial inequalities, while at the same time representing a cosmopolitan interest in broadening the culinary canon and forming intercultural connections.” As Fellner (2013, p. 244) maintains, “the marketing of exotic foods as pleasurable delights has become commonplace,” which can be situated in bell hooks's (2015, p. 21) potent indication that “within commodity culture ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” For instance, Veri and Liberti (2019, p. 122) capture how “ethnic food” serves as a marker of the racial Other in cookbooks, often serving to “reify racial and ethnic stereotypes and generalizations.” López‐Rodríguez (2014) similarly outlines how food functions as a site for the enacting of nationalism and the demarcation of us vs. them , allowing for the reproduction of racist metaphors through their embedding in food, just as Wagner (2007) spells out how food in the context of “boutique multiculturalism” can symbolize the “consumable exotic.” Oh and Oh (2017, p. 705) argue that food vlogs by White expatriates living in South Korea can be understood within a framework of White supremacy that generates clout through the consumption of “exotic, ‘authentic’ flavors.” Finally, Leer and Kjær (2015), in the analysis of two British “travelogue” cooking programs—Jamie Oliver in Italy and Gordon Ramsay in India—maintain that the pursuit of “authentic ethnic food” serves primarily as a means of reinforcing intercultural difference and upholding social hierarchies. A salient theme emerges: “ethnic food,” often marked by the presence of “exotic” spices, is discursively constructed in food media as the food of the Other, and these media and the patterns of commodification and consumption they depict have material effects in that they reproduce systems of social and racial inequality.…”