This article aims to describe and theorize the role of food television in cultivating popular understandings of the relationship between food and race. Although there is burgeoning research on representations of food and identity, scholars have devoted much less attention to representations of race in food-related television programming. This article highlights the necessity of doing so through a comparative examination of shows that aim to expose viewers to racial and ethnic communities through their foodways. We ask to what extent these shows deliver contact across racial difference in hierarchical and egalitarian ways. We found that these shows convey manifestations of “eating with the Other” by providing viewers with a warm and respectful entrée into the everyday realities of racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities. Simultaneously, the shows embody bell hooks’s notion of “eating the Other,” as they commodify the experiences of marginalized communities for the vicarious pleasures of their viewers, and gloss over larger social, political, and economic inequalities. This article offers insights into the ways in which contemporary food television is dealing with issues of ethno-racial differences and inequalities, and discusses the potential of this medium to act as a form of critical intervention.

Between 1947 and 1958, B.C. Sugar—western Canada’s largest sugar manufacturer—ran six major advertising campaigns that depicted Black people as laborers on sugarcane plantations. One of these campaigns, moreover, played upon offensive stereotypes of Black men as happy-go-lucky, childlike, and suited for manual labor. Analyzing the reach, content, and significances of these campaigns, this article suggests that despite increased civil and human rights advocacy in the 1940s and 1950s, at least one major Canadian corporation persisted in distributing anti-Black racist advertising. Such persistence reveals that white supremacist sentiment was entrenched in western Canada during this time. It also suggests that the western Canadian sugar industry particularly, and the North American food industry more generally, have been prone to anti-Black racism within advertising.

Some scholars contend that the Global South is experiencing a consumer-driven nutrition transition characterized by a sharp increase in meat consumption. This article engages critically with this hypothesis by exploring the production, distribution, and consumption of chicken in Tamil Nadu (South India). Using the analytical lens of political ecology, it argues that food circuits are shaped in the interaction among political-economic processes, biophysical processes, and embodied encounters with food. In India, intensified farming and agrifood industrial capitalism affect the materialities of, and the meanings attributed to, chicken meat, making it more available, more accessible, and more desirable. The industry strives to control and conceal the animality and organicity of chicken as animal and as food. Yet new materialities and meanings are resisted by the biophysical processes that pervade the circuits of meat provision and by eaters’ visceral and cognitive engagement with chicken meat. The very people who produce, sell, buy, cook, and ingest food, even though they are partly dispossessed by capitalist and state control over knowledge and economic processes, also play a role in shaping, negotiating, and resisting the material, political, and emotional dimensions of taste, and of eating practices at large.

This article explores the role of cookbooks in supporting the creation of new eating habits and identities during the Japanese immigration to Brazil. When Japanese immigrants first arrived in Brazil in 1908, the local food represented a major barrier to their acclimation in the new country. Unknown ingredients and disgust for popular seasonings like pork fat and garlic prevented Japanese immigrants from preparing familiar meals and caused drastic changes to their diets. After nearly three decades improvising meals, Japanese immigrants started to better incorporate Brazilian ingredients into their eating habits when an alliance between the Brazilian and the American governments in 1937, and Japan’s defeat in World War II pressured them to adopt Brazil as their new home country. As Japanese immigrants internalized a new mindset focused on making Brazil their permanent home, cookbooks written by immigrants not only taught them how to use Brazilian ingredients, but also reflected immigrants’ improvements in building a higher-quality lifestyle. This article analyzes cookbooks written by Japanese immigrants in tandem with private diaries and recipes to examine the complex process of creating new eating habits as well as new Brazilian Nikkei identities.

Dominant analytical frameworks in critical food studies literature often ignore or underplay the role of the senses for chefs and eaters. This article considers one Peruvian American chef’s efforts to translate Peru’s gastronomic boom and “Peruvian flavor profiles” for New York eaters. Through an emphasis on flavor, this article shows the kinds of binds such dominant frameworks create around chefs, particularly for those who labor under culinary labels such as non-European cooking, Latino food, or ethnic cuisine. Flavor offers more than the binary of virtuous hero or colonialist villain, and instead helps conceptualize taste and power as acts of digestion, highlighting the sensory web created through cooking and eating in gastronationalism. A focus on flavor also points us to the way in which the category itself has become a resource, an embodied sensation that is part and parcel of our social lives, the result of digesting creatures and worlds around us, shaping our selves, our bodies and our national imaginaries in the process.