For our up coming assignment we are required to produce an annotated bibliography. So to help us in finding academic articles we were given an exercise to get us familiar with the library resources.
The task was to: Find some starting academic references if you were looking at Jamie Oliver, in particular, as an exemplar of the media celebrity chef.
First I searched using the library search tool through the RMIT website and then used google scholar for a more broad search. I looked first at sources more broad to the topic, so ones on cooking shows in general and then looked for ones specific to Jamie Oliver. I found a few different articles, some looked at “how the Food Network Constructs Consumer Fantasies” and others were more research based. By this I mean, they conducted a study looking at the effectiveness of a ten week cooking program which intended to make people more confident cooks and improve eating habits. This particular program was run in Queensland and put in place by Jamie Oliver.
From the articles I read, it was clear that Jamie Oliver is considered to be very successful within his field. He is said to have numerous best selling cook books and is compared to other celebrity chief such as Nigella Lawson. In one of the bellow articles he is described as “the always charming and candid celebrity chef.”
The following is a section of the abstract to Oliver’s Twist. Leisure, Labour and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef:
“Drawing on Marjorie DeVault’s work, in which she argues that cooking is a way in which women construct themselves as `recognizably womanly’, the article argues that in The Naked Chef cooking is constructed as `recognizably manly’ through association with `recognizable masculinities’.”
Thus, it is clear that some have looked into Jamie Oliver’s cook books and studied them in terms of masculinity and gender roles.
Below are links to some of the articles I found doing my research:
Oliver’s Twist Leisure, Labour and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef
The Essence of Cooking Shows: How the Food Network Constructs Consumer Fantasies
Constructing ‘Reality’: ‘My kitchen rules’ and reality TV cooking shows
Methods for the evaluation of the Jamie Oliver Ministry of Food program,Australia
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