This book serves up an accessible, critical introduction to food television, providing readers with a solid foundation for understanding how culinary culture became pop culture via the medium of television.

The book follows FoodTV's journey from purely instructional resource to a wide variety of formats, from celebrity chef and restaurant profiles to culinary travel and every manner of cooking competition from kids to cannabis. Tasha Oren traces the generic expansion of cooking on television as she argues for its development as a uniquely apt lens through which to observe and understand television's own dramatic extension from network to cable to streaming platforms. She demonstrates how FoodTV became popular commercial television through its growth beyond instruction, response to industrial and cultural change, and a decisive turn away from an association with domesticity or femininity. The story of FoodTV offers a new understanding of how certain material, stylistic, and textual practices that make up television emerge as conventions, and how such conventions both endure and evolve.

This book is an ideal guide for students and scholars of media studies, television studies, food studies, and cultural studies.

Tasha Oren is associate professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and teaches in the Media, Cinema and Digital Studies program and the Film Studies program. Oren is the author of Demon in the Box: Jews, Arabs, Politics and Culture (Rutgers) and co-editor of Global Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders (Routledge), East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (NYU), Global Currents: Media and Technology Now (Rutgers), and the forthcoming Global Asian America: Transnational Media and Migration (NYU) and The Handbook of Contemporary Feminism (Routledge).

Working at the intersection of media studies, food studies and cultural studies, FoodTV serves up an accessible, critical introduction to food television, providing readers with a solid foundation for understanding how culinary culture became pop culture via the medium of television. FoodTV also elucidates how food and its preparation have been central to the creative and formal evolution of television itself. As Oren elucidates, television has been, and remains, a formidable force that not only shapes food culture, but has acted as the arena where all matters edible link up with major preoccupations over domesticity and public space, globalization, immigration and nationalism, capitalism and labor, identity politics, difference and distinction.