This interdisciplinary volume investigates American serial television, exploring how food serves as compelling. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food studies, media studies, cultural studies and literary studies.
This interdisciplinary volume investigates American serial television, exploring how food serves as compelling lens to examine cultural narratives, societal dynamics, and the artistry of storytelling.
As both a mirror and a molder of cultural values, television serves as a powerful platform for ideological discourse and public consciousness. Within this dynamic medium, the portrayal of food emerges as a fascinating lens through which cultural identities and social dynamics are both reflected and reimagined. This volume employs a rich array of methodologies to reveal how television shapes and reflects societal narratives, cultural norms, and personal identities. By intersecting literary and media studies with the vibrant field of food studies, a discipline that unpacks the intricate ties between food, culture, and identity, this volume explores how American identity is constructed, challenged, and redefined when food takes center stage in serial television. The chapters examine narrative-driven series such as The Brady Bunch, The Bear, Star Trek, Ted Lasso, Only Murders in the Building, Lessons in Chemistry, and others, emphasizing the role of food and drink in shaping characters, advancing plots, establishing settings, and driving conflicts to resolution. Through this exploration, the collection examines how culinary symbols on the small screen become a narrative device for interrogating the essence of American identity.
The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food studies, media studies, cultural studies, and literary studies.
The Mundane Made Meaningful: Introducing Food Studies Approaches to
Television 1: Televisions Literary Appetite: Tracing American TVs
Evolution, Academic PART 1: Reruns 2: The Post-Scarcity Dystopia: The
Evolution of Food and Cooking in Star Trek (1966-2024) 3: Porkchops,
Applesauce, and Escapism: Gender, Nostalgia, and Food Culture in The Brady
Bunch 4: Pastries, a Guilty but Harmless Pleasure in The Mary Tyler Moore
Show PART 2: Prestige Programming 5: The Serious Business of Cooking,
Feminism & Commercial Aesthetics from Lessons in Chemistry 6: Culinary
Contrasts in Shameless and Reflections on American Identity 7: Everyones
Welcome at the Yankee Doodle Burger Barn: Food, Identity, and Chosen Family
in Ted Lasso 8: Building a Monster out of Rib Bones: Barbecue and Barbarism
in House of Cards 9: Every Second Counts: The Bears Culinary Musicality
and Confused Temporality 10: Ballaboosta to Ballbuster: Jewish Female
Archetypes in the American Sitcom PART 3: Family Drama 11: I Cant Live on
Rabbit Food, Im a Warrior!: Small Screen Food and Supernaturals Sad Story
of that Afternoon 12: To Protect and to Servethe Food: Around the Family
Dinner Table in Blue Bloods 13: Latinxs Doing-Cooking on the Small Screen:
Exploring Representations of Food and Gender in Gentefied, Love, Victor, and
Pose PART 4: Comfort Watching 14: The Pie Hole: Traditions, Foodscape, and
Community in Pushing Daisies 15: Food, Loneliness, and Community in Hulus
Only Murders in the Building 16: Breaking and Making the Body: Subverting
Sad-Girl Food Narratives in Televisual Breakups
Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis is Associate Professor of Literary Studies, working at the Institute of English Studies at The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. She is the author of Race and Repast: Foodscapes in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (2022) and coauthor of Pathologizing Black Bodies: The Legacy of Plantation Slavery (2023).
Carrie Helms Tippen is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Education at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, USA. She is the author of Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (2018) and Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (2025).
