The Carnivorous Mission of the Celebrity Chef

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how celebrity chefs support meat consumption. Every day in Europe and in the USA, on myriads of food shows, celebrity chefs, TV presenters, journalists, and amateurs cook, recommend, and eat meat. On the face of it, this seems benign in a “carnist” culture,¹ as people are free to decide what to cook and eat in front of the camera. However, what television hides in these frequent representations is that for the last 20 years the scientific community has been considering meat as a problem for both the external environment and the human body. I will return to this division between the external environment and the body at the end of this chapter. What is important to note here is that disease, pathogens, medical costs, pollution, and animal suffering are among the issues linked to meat consumption. These issues are hard to question, as many studies adopting different methodologies, perspectives, and theories point to the fact that meat eating contributes significantly to all of them. Among the many examples, Joseph DesJardins, Sjur Kasa, and Philip Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott² offer a good overview and provide useful literature on all of this. The present chapter focuses on why these studies, and many others demonstrating the dangerousness of meat-eating, have not changed the media perception of meat.