Abstract
This chapter examines the contemporary Czech foodscape, especially its media, from a discursive perspective. After description of the Czech culinary press, it analyses the formation of discourse of culinary tradition in gourmet magazines Apetit, Gurmet and F.O.O.D. Traditionalism tries to renew and legitimate the national cuisine and identity after the fall of socialism and preserve them in the age of globalisation and consumerism. The renaissance of Czech gastronomy is based on searching for its pre-socialist “roots”, nostalgically referring to “golden age” of “honest” cooking. Culinary traditionalism also uses family as its medium, glorifying the grandmothers’ dishes and building ones’ culinary genealogies.
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Notes
- 1.
The ecological connectedness of food may sound like it is firmly tied to a place. As a result of the emergence of new forms of mediation (online media) and associated transformation of earlier tertiary and secondary media, and following intensification and diversification of the forms and processes of mediatization, the unequivocal localization of a foodscape has become doubtful, especially due to the current proliferation of foodscapes in disembodied virtual environments (food blogs/vlogs) and the global distribution of (culinary) TV formats.
- 2.
Ferguson (2004, p. 147) suggests a similar internal tension in the “French culinary discourse” (discourse used in singular form): “cooking and chefing, the domestic and the public, the feminine and the masculine, the bricoleur and the homme de métier, the professional and the domestic.”
- 3.
The terms culinary and gastronomy are themselves often used interchangeably. Drawing the boundary between the two categories is difficult, if even possible, which is actually symptomatic of contemporary popular media, hybridized in content, forms of presentation, implied audiences, and ownership.
- 4.
The reduction of media representation of food to recipes is one of the reasons for the analytical preference of the gourmet segment. Of course, it is more difficult to search for discourses in the “plain” recipes of cheaper periodicals, if we omit the general discursive expulsion of the lower classes from even thinking of high-valued, broadly contextualized food as its general ideological dimension. However, a legitimate objection to the elitism of choosing gourmet media for one’s research could be raised.
- 5.
Apetit is published in cooperation with UK’s best-selling culinary title BBC Good Food, and many of the recipes and photographs are adopted from it (which Apetit inconspicuously declares in its binding). The resemblance between Apetit and its British model has even come under criticism by readers familiar with the original, especially at Apetit’s beginning (Kuciel 2006). The existence of such a critique points to the restructuring of media competences in a globalized environment—whether physically traveling or just browsing the web, it has become easier for media users to recognize formerly separate media/culinary landscapes and compare them personally.
- 6.
By their participation on various discursive and social spaces, magazines operate not only at the level of discourse but also at the level of dispositive.
- 7.
In its use of food blogs and food bloggers, traditional media take advantage of recent trends in food presentation evolving in the online environment. However, this could also be, conversely, interpreted as penetration of more traditional media discourses by the personalized environment of new culinary celebrities forming from the bottom-up.
- 8.
Egry and Miklós (2015, p. 112) reasonably point out that changes made during socialism provided people with “better nourishment at the price of lower standards.”
- 9.
Tivadar and Vezovnik (2010) summed up well the nostalgic principle of traditionalist discourse in the title of their study on socialist Slovenia’s foodscape: “on the road from a bright future to an idyllic past.” The problem with nostalgia (of whatever era) is that of obscuring imperfections of the past, as Mannur warns us in relation to food conceptualizations in the Indian diaspora: when looking back, we can see “a past that is blind in some ways to structural inequities and forms of difference” (Mannur 2007, p. 15).
- 10.
Despite the feminine conception of food, when it comes to professional cooks, especially chefs, men prevail over women. Swenson speaks of “[t]he separation between the discourse of feminine cooks who prepare food everyday out of necessity and the haute culinary discourse of male professionals…” (Swenson 2013, p. 140).
- 11.
The Czech Television, a public-service broadcaster, used such personalized narrative in its cooking show Deník Dity P. [Dita P.’s Diary] (based on a homonymous cookbook), in which Dita Pecháčková, the first editor-in-chief of Apetit and respected food journalist, prepares her favorite meals. Individual episodes of the show are linked by a storyline of Pecháčková’s life, stylized as the Bridget Jones’s Diary, a 2001 film starring Renée Katheleen Zellweger (the show utilizes Pecháčková’s resemblance to Zellweger). During the first season (2013), the host meets her partner, get married to him, and in the second season (2016), she gives birth to their son. The narrative moments are used to contextualize food, for example, a trip to countryside in the Vlakem [By Train] episode (premiered on October 25, 2013) is accompanied by cooking of “take-with” meals like meatloaf and fried chicken, which have been associated with traveling in the Czech Republic for generations (during socialism, fast-food services were limited and shops were closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays). Thus, through culturally familiar narratives, Dita P. mediates between food on one hand and meanings like nationality, genderidentity, family, and friendship on the other.
- 12.
In this case, one must prefer social to individual view of the food relations. Notably, the presentation of fair trade constantly oscillates between individualization of distant food producers and approaching of food from a global perspective.
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Bočák, M. (2019). Cooking the Past: Traditionalism in Czech Culinary Magazines. In: Dürrschmidt, J., Kautt, Y. (eds) Globalized Eating Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93656-7_8
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