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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 moulder 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 centre 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.
List of contents
The Mundane Made Meaningful: Introducing Food Studies Approaches to Television 1: Television's Literary Appetite: Tracing American TV's 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: Everyone's 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 Bear's Culinary Musicality and Confused Temporality 10: Ballaboosta to Ballbuster: Jewish Female Archetypes in the American Sitcom PART 3: Family Drama 11: "I Can't Live on Rabbit Food, I'm a Warrior!": Small Screen Food and Supernatural's "Sad Story of that Afternoon" 12: To Protect and to Serve...the 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 Hulu's Only Murders in the Building 16: Breaking and Making the Body: Subverting Sad-Girl Food Narratives in Televisual Breakups
About the author
Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis is Associate Professor at the English Studies at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. She is author of
Race and Repast: Foodscapes in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (2022) and co-author of
Pathologizing Black Bodies: The Legacy of Plantation (Routledge, 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 author of
Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (2018) and
Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (2025).
