Old tastes, old stories
Gourmetmagazine's representations of Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5284067 |
|---|---|
| Authors | René Alexander D Orquiza (Providence College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 165-189 |
| Publication date | 2019-07-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Food and Foodways (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0740-9710 • E-ISSN: 1542-3484 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/07409710.2019.1646483 |
| OpenAlex | W2969298864 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 25 |
This article examines how Gourmet, the nation’s most influential food magazine, covered Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. Between its first article in 1969 and its last issue in 2009, Gourmet published 56 pieces on the region’s nine countries over 40 years. The tone and scope of this coverage changed very little, demonstrating how Gourmet failed to evolve in its stated purpose of using food as a lens for the thoughtful inquiry and exploration of people and culture. This article examines three important characteristics of Gourmet’s Southeast Asian coverage. First, it focused on a romanticized history of French, Dutch, British, and American empires that ignored the region’s modern development, particularly its booming economies and detestable dictatorships. Second, it embraced tourism as a means for these dictatorships to rebrand themselves by removing the stench of questionable human rights and environmental records. Third, it homogenized the entire region into a collection of a few hotels and resorts that left little voice or agency for Southeast Asian people. Gourmet thus made Southeast Asia into a safe, anodyne, and ultimately bland space that relied on representations of historical and contemporary selectivity, the destructive amnesia of colonial hagiography, complicity with dictators to rebrand through state-funded tourism, and the danger of transforming diverse regions and peoples into interchangeable parts of a repetitive trope. Rather than use food as a lens for a better engagement with society and culture, Gourmet perpetuated the racial hierarchies and exploitative relationships of the past through the seemingly innocuous genre of contemporary food writing
Agency (philosophy) · Colonialism · Complicity · Democracy · Dictatorship · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Tourism · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture
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| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |