Telling Food Stories

With only five senses, each experience heavily utilizes just one or two, making different actions deeply associated with the dominant sense. From savoring the last bite of a homemade chocolate chip cookie requires the activation of your taste buds to watching a murder documentary that relies on your eyes and ears to stay open and alert. With distinct mediums utilizing such specific sensations, producing content that centers around taste but caters only to visual sensory experiences seems counterproductive and wildly uninteresting. Yet, documentaries about food and their success challenge that sentiment. Food documentaries provide people with the opportunity to learn about nutrition, new cuisines, and places. Although the consumption of film and television seems like a passive and casual endeavor, food documentaries—both travel and food-science documentaries—offer the unique opportunity to actively learn more about something that perpetually permeates our world.

Films and short videos explaining an educational topic are frequently used to teach a particular topic or provide an example of an event. Documentaries infiltrate daily life consistently and have begun to do so at a higher rate, given the rise of accessible digital cameras. “Camcorders and cell phones have also been used by activists, journalists, and citizens, as well as issue-driven documentary filmmakers. Popular and revolutionary movements around the world are being documented with digital video”, Nancy Kalow stated in a documentary studies course at Duke University.

The increased production of documentaries has been met with increased consumption because of their ability to go beyond the expectation of educating and elicit an emotional response in the viewer. Because of the story-telling nature involved in documentaries, their impact on society is determined through unique and subjective perspectives. “I argue that an adequate model … must consider the role of films in the efforts of social movements to create and sustain alternative spheres of public discourse”, Amma Marfo states in a paper on the impact of documentaries. The applicable real-world nature of documentaries has the potential to elicit change on an individual level through the viewer’s experience.

Documentaries’ ability to elicit emotional responses in viewers has been a stable aspect of the film industry, but audience’s access to media has

dramatically shifted in the last twenty years since the introduction of the internet. Websites and streaming services have opened the door for more people to access niche information. Around two thirds of people said they consumed new information on food science, according to a recent study done by the Pew Research Center. This finding corresponds with the increased production of media; people are making more media than ever, so people who are not researchers have more access to new information on what they eat.

Professor of media studies at Boston College, Anthony Tran, sees a direct correlation between the introduction of streaming media and food media production. “We have to create so much content, and I think people just found food,” Tran stated. The introduction of cable television in the early 2000s and then the introduction of streaming platforms in the late 2010s created the space for so much more content.

Alongside the aforementioned rise in documentaries, food as the main subject of the media has risen as well. Yet this influx of food addressing food science and consumption may have little impact and poorly reflect food habits of Americans. Rebecca Franckle is a professor of public health at Boston College with research interests in nutrition, behavioral science, and social determinants of health. Although these documentaries may discuss important aspects of nutrition and food, many ignore factors like cultural, economic and environmental influences when discussing different diets, x said.

“It is really really challenging to change what people eat,” Franckle also said. Communicating and educating people is not enough to elicit changes in their food habits because of many other social factors. If the films are only aimed at a less diverse audience who have higher socioeconomic statuses, Franckle does not think that documentaries cause any change in peoples’ diets at the population level but rather that they merely act as a vehicle for communicating food science information.

Words By: Lauren Rabbottini Photos By: Eileen Shelton & Ngan Tran

However, these documentaries may have a large impact on the other side of food consumer culture: the food industry. Franckle said that just a small portion of the population consuming these specific food documentaries can shape the food industry and its landscape. As people change their behavior in a specific way, “the food industry is going to match that,” Franckle says, because of the supply and demand nature of the consumer and food industry relationship. “If you see that shift, there will be a trickle-down effect on the consumer, even if they were not interested in that documentary. You could actually see tangential effects on the population.” Impacts on an individual documentary viewer, therefore, could result in large changes at the business level, due to supply and demand.

Super Size Me is a fantastic, albeit extreme, example of this individual behavior change on society. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock documented his experience from eating only McDonalds food for thirty days. While his radical diet change was not done to shape individuals’ habits, the aftermath of the documentary was monumental. McDonalds in the United States stopped selling its “supersize portions,” and sales in England decreased throughout the year following the film’s release.

Aside from food science, people utilize food documentaries to “travel” to far off locations and explore local cuisines that may not be at the fingertips of viewers. Anthony Bourdain’s television show No Reservations functioned as a docuseries that featured a new location and new local cuisine each episode. As a chef and journalist dedicated to educating people on all aspects of the culinary experience, Bourdain created the blueprint for how travel food documentaries need to be produced to be successful in highlighting the food and the culture. “[Bourdain] was very well aware that he needed to be talking to people, that it was their story. It was theirs. He was asking the questions, but he was not the authority. They knew more than he did,” executive producer, Sandra Zweig, stated in an interview reflecting on Bourdain’s career. Bourdain facilitated an unfiltered look at the interactions between the food and the local culture.

Each episode of his multiple series encapsulated key parts of the specific region’s culture and food, combining the art of documentary-making with food. This unlikely fusion of a television show was ultimately incredibly successful and won Bourdain twelve Emmys Awards.

The various achievements of Bourdain’s TV shows opened the floodgates for famous chefs, TV personalities, and other hosts to try achieving that level of success in following similar models of travel food documentaries. One of the driving factors causing this style of media to grow in popularity is the principle of vicarious consumption: one person benefits from watching another person’s productivity. In this case, the viewer can watch the host galavant around the world, experience novel foods, and interact with local chefs all from the comfort of their couch. The productivity emerges from the viewer’s ability to quickly educate his, her, or their self on a topic that increases their cultural and worldly knowledge.

Tran said that the success of these shows are having both negative and positive impacts on American food culture. In order to sell a show or product, creators advertise the meal as an extreme, being the best or the most authentic. Tran stated that this reduces foods from different cultures to having to meet those high, extreme standards. However, these documentaries centered on different cuisines have begun to feature more diverse hosts and have allowed a diverse group of people to tell their story through food.

Documentaries and docuseries centered around traveling for most viewers introduce new cuisines, techniques, or dishes to the viewer. In doing so, the viewer’s options or variety of what food they would be interested in eating increases. “Variety is related to newness, which appears to be an inducement to consumers to at least try a product”, a book on determinants of food states. So in indulging oneself in the passive consumption of watching a documentary on a different culture’s cuisine, the audience is gaining beneficial, applicable information that they can apply to their own diet.

By no means are food documentaries, whether science or travel, revolutionary or groundbreaking. However, they do capture the changing sentiments around food within American food culture. People want to be entertained and be educated, and food is the happy medium between those two desires. Big media companies are catering to this desire by creating documentaries that are more diverse and include a range of stories and foods. These efforts of inclusion are very new and have only recently become apparent in food documentaries. As documentaries continue to be released and more food stories are told, individual viewers will learn more about the world around and beyond them.