The Feeding Tube: Watching What We Eat on TV

Food is a part of our everyday existence: we must eat in order to
survive. For most people it is hard to imagine a day without food,
whether we're grabbing a snack from the vending machine or sharing a
leisurely dinner with family and friends. Similarly, television has
reached such a saturation point in our culture that we have, in many
ways, become as dependent on it as we are on food. We gather in each
other's homes to watch season finales of our favorite shows, discuss
the previous night's HBO series broadcasts at the workplace water
cooler, or just consult the local news for a weather report. We often
eat while watching television, nourishing our bodies while allowing
the information from television into our consciousness.

To that end, this proposed panel is concerned with the ways in which
television mediates our cultural relationship with food. What can we
observe about our society and our roles within it from the ways in
which food is portrayed on television? How does it affect our
relationships with our bodies? With each other? How does the food we
see on television shape our regional, national, class, racial,
sexual, and gender identities?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Food and gender on TV
Food in reality TV
Sexuality and food
Sex and food (i.e., "feeding the beast" in Grey's Anatomy)
Race and food
Candid TV & food (i.e., Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, Anthony Bourdain's
No Reservations)
TV advertising of restaurants, weight-loss programs, and food items
Power and food
Cooking shows (and daytime shows with cooking segments)
The History Channel and food
Food and eating on Sex & the City
Food and eating on Desperate Housewives
Food and eating on the Sopranos

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words by November 17 to Melanie Haupt
at mkhaupt_at_mail.utexas.edu

Melanie Haupt
Department of English
University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station, B5000
Austin, TX 78712

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Received on Wed Nov 08 2006 - 12:15:06 EST