Edible Regeneration

Today marks the first of what we hope will be a series of posts from a range of guest bloggers whose research we find exciting. We're delighted to welcome our first guest blog from David Bell (University of Leeds) who has written numerous books on subjects ranging from food, cultural policy and lifestyle to cybercultures, queer geographies and technology.

On Sunday July 19th this year, a reported two million people participated in The Big Lunch, a nationwide street party scheme organized by the Eden Project. You may have seen the associated Mastercard commercial – Mastercard was one of the key corporate sponsors – with its byline, 'Turning our streets into neighbourhoods'. Across the UK, it seems, the shy and isolated occupants of normally desolate streetscapes enacted a very particular form of hospitality, and reclaimed their streets as sociable spaces.

The Big Lunch belongs to a growing tradition of using cooking, eating and drinking as agents of regeneration. As the project of regeneration has become 'softer' and more concerned with people than buildings, so new tools are being co-opted by regeneration agencies. These tools aim to fix the 'problems' of communities and to encourage people to meet, mix and mend their broken social spaces and social lives.

We have already seen the many ways in which 'culture' has been used as an agent of community rebuilding; the DCMS report Culture at the Heart of Regeneration makes bold claims for art’s power to bring people together, raise self-esteem and civic pride, and address socio-economic problems. Of course, culture is also comparatively cheap (the bill for 2012 notwithstanding). Arts projects have therefore long been seen as quick and cost-effective ways to address certain 'problems'.

Now joining the arts is food and drink. I have been exploring the logic behind some of the numerous community regeneration projects that have centrally used cooking, eating and drinking together as agents of change. There have of course been some high profile campaigns, such as Jamie Oliver’s Pass It On, seen as offering the possibility of fixing 'Broken Britain', and indeed The Big Lunch. Less caught up in the media spotlight, other projects are also doing interesting things with food. Here’s just a couple of examples.

Middlesbrough’s Town Meal, for example, grew out of a scheme across the northeast which supported community projects. The Middlesbrough scheme, initiated by David Barrie, also a key broker in the Castleford regeneration project featured on Channel 4’s Kevin’s Big Town Plan, began as an urban farming initiative, encouraging various local groups to grow their own food on any patches of underused land that could be found in the town. At the end of the year, a Town Meal provided food that the urban farmers had grown, accompanied by various other projects.

In the USA, the group Spurse establishes what it calls provisional restaurants, using abandoned buildings and locally sourced (often foraged) foods to produce free meals in an 'artsy' setting. Spurse’s broader aim is to ask questions about waste and excess, and its Public Table provisional restaurants draw attention to the 'waste' that can be creatively reused – wasted buildings, wasted food, wasted skills, wasted people. Spurse is unequivocal in seeing Public Table as a public art project, cementing the food-art-regeneration equation.

Part of what interests me about this work is this food-art-regeneration equation itself; the ways in which both food and art are seen as magic solutions to seemingly intractable socio-economic problems. In a policy context, this gets boiled down to measures of 'success', benchmarks and key indicators, but no-one in that realm pays too much attention to deeper issues. Food, like art, 'works', and nothing more needs to be known. Just as swimming reduces crime, according to the DCMS, so eating together can rebuild community feeling and a sense of belonging.

But I am interested in this regenerative role of food (and art), and thinking about it through the lens of hospitality. While work on hospitality and regeneration has tended to focus on commercial hospitality (bars, restaurants, hotels), these food projects are based around a different notion of the hospitable city, as a site of generosity and reciprocity, and of the role of cooking, eating and drinking in binding people together – turning our streets into neighbourhoods. Exploring in more detail the 'social work' of hospitality gives us a new way of thinking about the uses and meanings of the seemingly mundane acts of cooking, eating, drinking and sharing.

(Photo credit: The Ginger Gourmand. Permissions)

What Jamie Did Next…

Joanne Hollows blogs about some recent developments in the world of Jamie Oliver.

Back in April we wrote about Jamie’s Ministry of Food and since this point we’ve noticed a couple of developments that people interested in the impact of the tv chef might want to keep an eye on. First has been the low-key (by Oliver’s standards) launch of Recipease, a mini-chain of stores which, according to Jamie’s website, are ‘beautiful food and kitchen emporiums which are able to sit within neighbourhoods and serve people really well’. This ‘special project’, with its emphasis on locality and community, was launched on the back of Ministry of Food and initially seems to fit with the campaign to get people cooking healthy foods. The shops offer cooking classes and instructions and assistance on making quick and easy meals from the produce on sale there.

However, the similarities between this and Ministry of Food quickly begin to unravel. Unlike the Ministry of Food centres for which Oliver tried to attract public funding, these are business ventures. The locations are far from the working-class Northern towns of the series: the shops have so far been rolled out in the extremely affluent Southern sites of Battersea and Brighton which offer far greater opportunities for profit than Rotherham. The cooking classes (which last approximately an hour) are priced from £17.50 for ‘Knife Skills’ to £35 for ‘Get Creative: Pasta’. The audience for these sessions appears to be far from the ‘welfare dependents’ that featured so heavily in his initial campaign to get Britain cooking again. What’s more, the stores don’t just offer the opportunity to buy ingredients and equipment or learn to cook. While Oliver claims that ‘the main idea is to service you: the locals’, the shops also offer ‘Easy to Go’ where the recipes you can learn to make have been pre-prepared in the form of an upmarket ready meal. In place of the Doner Kebabs from Rotherham’s take-aways we have ‘Zesty Chicken Kebabs’ to take home and pan-fry at £4.45 a serving without pitta or salad (or chips!)

The shops therefore offer convenience foods that were one of the main targets of the Ministry of Food campaign. But, of course, not all convenience foods are born equal. Jamie’s ‘Easy to Go’ range enables customers to consume a little bit of Jamie whom, it has already been established through widespread media coverage, is nutritious and good for us. They also enable the consumers who can afford them (in the high-rent neighbourhoods in which they’re located) to use convenience foods while demonstrating care. As Alan Warde has pointed out, care and convenience are usually seen as antithetical: the former associated with the warmth and personal attention of the private sphere and the latter associated with an impersonal world of industrialized production. However, because Oliver’s star image is so closely centred around the fact that ‘Jamie Cares’ then buying one of his ready-meals enables people to buy convenience food imbued with a higher order of care. This must be reassuring for the residents of Battersea if not for the residents of Rotherham who are represented as having a weakness for a diet of care-less kebabs.

The second development has been the news in the past week that some hybrid offspring of Ministry of Food and Jamie’s School Dinners is to be launched in the US in early 2010, focusing on one of the nation’s ‘fattest cities’. In terms of genre, it appears that the show will break with the kind of format used in the UK as Jamie’s vision will also be mediated by the presence of a co-host Ryan Seacrest (most famous as host of American Idol). How the politics of class – and ‘race’ and ethnicity – will unfold in the US remains to be seen. Ouellette and Hay’s work would suggest that the differences between manifestations of neo-Liberalism in the US and UK and the key differences in attitudes to welfare and the State will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the ways in which Jamie’s moral entrepreneurship is mediated. Its also unclear how Seacrest’s presence will transform the format of the Oliver campaigning documentary (although having heard Seacrest’s voiceovers on ‘Idol Gives Back’, this sounds a particularly scary prospect!) Maybe it will help launch Recipease stores in the Hamptons?
(Photo credit: Downing Street. Permissions.)

'At Least He's Doing Something': Jamie Oliver and 'Broken Britain'

Last Sunday, in the Observer newspaper, Jamie Oliver was announced to be the Observer Food Monthly's Food Personality of the Year. Yesterday, the Guardian newspaper declared him to be 'the people's chef' and 'a proper national treasure'. As these plaudits come in the wake of last year's Jamie’s Ministry of Food, Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones reflect on the significance of the show.

In autumn 2008, during our casual readings of the blogosphere, Jamie Oliver was a persistent presence. There was a seemingly endless stream of articles and user-generated comment about his latest series, Jamie’s Ministry of Food, and the wider significance of Jamie’s role in public life. In particular, a consensus appeared to have emerged that, unlike British people in general - and unlike the Government in particular - at least Jamie ‘was doing something’ about a range of social problems.

In our current work we’re trying to make sense of both the series and the reception of it. We’re exploring how Jamie Oliver’s celebrity image has been transformed. He is no longer simply a lifestyle expert within the culinary field but increasingly operates as a moral entrepreneur involved with a range of social enterprises from his charitable ‘Fifteen’ foundation (the subject of Jamie’s School Dinners) to his more recent attempt to teach the whole of Britain basic cookery skills to improve the health of the nation.

If Jamie’s Ministry of Food focused on the ‘problem’ of a British people without culinary skills, damaging their health with a diet of junk food and takeaways, then it also represented a particular portion of the British people – the working class – as the source and embodiment of this problem. We’ve been struck by the similarities between the show and earlier forms of ‘social exploration’ conducted by middle-class reformers among the working class. There are also similarities between the aesthetic strategies used in the programme and those found in the cycle of British social realist films from the late 1950s and early 1960s. These help us to understand how the series works to represent contemporary working-class cultures as pathological and in need of intervention and ‘reform’.

Finally, we’re interested in how Jamie’s Ministry of Food articulates with a wider series of concerns that are being played out in the political sphere about ‘Broken Britain’, aided by Tory leader David Cameron and The Sun newspaper. The series provided a focus for debates about the state of the nation which had been played out in the media and political rhetoric during 2007-8. Jamie Oliver’s willingness to ‘cut through the crap’ and ‘get things done’ resonated with the notion that Britain was a society in need of healing, and that local and national government were incapable of remedying this situation. We want to suggest that the representations in the show of fast food, obese bodies, sink estates, and poverty of aspiration and welfare-dependence delineated a general crisis which demanded direct action by an inspirational figure. In this way, the show legitimated Jamie’s new role as a moral and social entrepreneur who was an inspiration to the nation.
(Photo Credit: Matlock. Permissions.)