This talk explores the articulation of food and television through an analysis of the soap opera genre and their transmedia cookbooks. Whilst debates on food & literature and food & film have been researched extensively, the relationship of food & television remains relatively underexplored (Murray, 2012; Oren, 2003). This limited work has tended to focus on the cookery programme genre (Strange, 1998; Bonner, 2009) or on the rise of digital food television (Phillipov, 2022; Matwick and Matwick, 2019).
The recording of the recent webinar on the Taste of Soap Opera given by Sarah Gibson, which some of you were interested in, is now available here:
Sarah Gibson: A Taste for Soap Opera (Webinar)
The focus of this research is on the articulation of food and television through the genre of the soap opera. I will explore how the women’s genres of soap operas and cookbooks are key sites for exploring the project of nation-building. Both soap operas and cookbooks are also key cultural texts associated with the construction of femininity and which have been reclaimed by feminist scholars. The paper focuses on the ‘fan cookbooks’ as a form of transmedia storytelling, through a close comparative analysis of the Coronation Street (UK) and 7de Laan (South Africa) soap opera cookbooks. Whilst Coronation Street represents a distinctly regional (‘Northern’) identity, 7de Laan instead represents a nostalgic Afrikaner ethnic nationalism. These ‘fan cookbooks’ offer fans of the soap opera the opportunity to participate in the fictional community of the soap opera through being able to share the recipes of the characters as well as to be able to cook and eat the food through a mediated culinary tourist experience.
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Sarah Gibson is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Communication and Media in Society [CCMS] at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She has previously taught at Surrey University and Lancaster University, and originally hails from Formby. Her research interests focus on cultural studies, critical theory and the new mobilities paradigm. Her current research projects are diverse, including work on food cultures, soap operas, the railways, cultural memory, and mobilities & pedagogy.
