Cooking with Love : Food, Gender, and Power

This work explores the complex relationships between women, food, and power. Engaging the literature of feminist food studies allowed me to record the narratives and examine the experiences of women living in the United States. I take a close look at how women solidify and strengthen their social relationships to family and community through the use of food, or compromise and weaken these relationships through the denial or refusal of food, in the form of cooking or eating. I also consider both local and global contexts for understanding food, in terms of consumption and chores. Finally, I demonstrate how imagery of food allows women to participate in processes of commodification and fetishism

Senses of Taste: Duncan Hines and American Gastronomy, 1931-1962

Duncan Hines was the first national restaurant critic in American history and a significant tastemaker in popular culture. This dissertation is an accounting of how senses of taste were formed in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States and how Duncan Hines aided this process. Conceiving of taste as a conjoining of physical sensations and cultural sense by mediators, I argue that Hines guided consumers and producers through the practice of making sense of momentous changes in society that influenced Americans' eating habits as well as their awareness of American foodways. Hines gained and maintained cultural authority because his criticism networked developing mid-century trends including automobility, consumerism, middlebrow criticism, regionalism, suburbanization, the popularity of "eating out," the professionalization of restaurants, the nationalization of media, the discourse of authenticity, and the continued evolution of technologies for the growing, processing, shipping, selling, and cooking of food. From the farm to the fork, American gastronomy is thus predicated on technology, commerce, and media intersecting to offer mediators, like Hines, resources with which to make sense of the tastes occurring within a context. Since these relationships change, I contend that taste is neither an object to be acquired nor a state of being to be achieved, but instead an on-going and contingent activity, a temporary association of things formed in reaction to the context in which it is configured

From chef to superstar : food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web

Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-338).This thesis examines representations of food in twenty-first century media, and argues that the media obsession with food in evidence today follows directly from U.K. and U.S. post-war industrial and economic booms, and by the associated processes of globalisation that secure the spread of emergent trends from these countries to the rest of the so-called Western world. The theoretical frame for the work is guided in large part by Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967), which follows a Marxist tradition of examining the intersection between consumerism and social relationships. Debord's spectacle is not merely something to be looked at, but functions, like Marx's fetishised commodity, as a mechanism of alienation. The spectacle does this by substituting real, lived experience with representations of life. Based on analyses of media representations of food from the post-war period to the present day, the work argues against the discursive celebration of globalisation as a signifier of abundance and access, and maintains, instead, that consequent to the now commonplace availability of choice and information is a deeply ambiguous relationship to food because it is a relationship overwhelmingly determined by media rather than experience. It further argues that the success of food media results from a spectacular conflation of an economy of consumerism with the basic human need to consume to survive. Contemporary celebrity chefs emerge as the locus of this conflation by representing figures of authority on that basic need, and also, through branded products (including themselves), the superfluity of consumerism. The subject of the work, therefore, is food, but the main object of its critique is media. Food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web is about the commodification of history and politics, through food, and the natural (super)star of this narrative is the modern celebrity chef

The Path to the Table: Cooking in Postwar American Suburbs

This work examines the foods eaten by postwar (1946 to 1965) American suburbanites to see how those foods were affected by larger trends in society. The work is divided into chapters which look the effects of, respectively, suburbanization and affluence; gender; changes in the postwar food industry, including food manufacturers and grocers; women's responses to those changes; and race and ethnicity. The conclusion is that suburban cooking was shaped by many of the larger trends in American society, and these trends tended to push Americans toward using more convenience foods such as packaged mixes and frozen foods

Customer satisfaction of dining experience in Malaysian malay restaurants.

The subject of this Ph.D. thesis is Customer Satisfaction in Malaysian Malay Restaurants Dining Experience. The research was conducted in three Malay family restaurants in Malaysia by using an inductive Case Study research approach. The aim of the research was to propose a conceptual framework for customer satisfaction dining experience. It focused on dining experience satisfaction consumption related to factors in, and the management of, customer satisfaction. The implications of the findings provide a theoretical and methodological contribution to the knowledge in both, Malaysia and the rest of the world. Adopting the Case Study research approach gave an opportunity to collect data that stems from three Malay family restaurants in Malaysia using a wide variety of data collection methods. The findings presented in this thesis were based on an in-depth interview with 108 restaurant customers who dined at the restaurants and 18 restaurant staff, particularly front of house and kitchen staff, besides the owner and manager of each restaurant. Daily participant observation for each restaurant took 5 to 9 hours a day for between 27 and 30 days. The findings were also based on a number of supplementary data from documentary evidence such as staff working timetables, menu cards/ books, staff attendance punch cards, stock check lists, reservation records and restaurant organisational charts. The contributions of this study comprise of six major themes: Firstly, dining experience is a continuous process which starts with the customers’ first engagement with the restaurant at the reservation stage and continues until they leave the restaurant at the departure stage. Therefore, to ensure customers’ loyalty, restaurateurs needed to ensure all tangible and intangible factors that influenced satisfaction at each stage of the dining process (pre-meal experience; antecedent experience; reservation experience and arrival experience; the actual meal experience: seating experience and food experience; and post-meal experience: payment experience and departure experience) were integrated together (they did not work as separate entities and should not be treated individually) to provide valuable, meaningful, memorable and holistic satisfaction to every customer who dined at the restaurant. Secondly, factors influencing customer satisfaction at the pre-meal experience were the availability of a reservation service, both formal and informal, and customers’ phone calls for reservations being answered quickly by restaurants’ polite and professional staff. Meanwhile, at the dining arrival stage, factors influencing customers’ satisfaction were being assisted by a free parking attendant, having a parking area close to the premises, punctuality of restaurant business hours and offering a 24-hour restaurant operation to the public. The meal experience stage was found to be a major stage among seven stages of the dining experience process, with menu variety, and food presentation and display as the core of restaurant service. iv Factors influencing dining satisfaction during the actual meal experience were related to a unique cultural preference concept for Malay restaurants such as private dining space, food quality attribute of authenticity, eating style, restaurant decoration, waiting activities, prayer room, and traditional live band. Satisfaction influence factors for post-meal experience were self service payment, being bid farewell and being escorted to the exit door. Thirdly, this study because it adopted a qualitative research approach, managed to venture the role of Maslow’s Theory in customer satisfaction through the hierarchy of satisfaction of dining experience. The lowest level satisfaction was achieved when the basic needs of the customers’ dining at the restaurant was fulfilled or what restaurants provided to the customers was adequate or equal with customers’ expectation. A moderate level of satisfaction was achieved when customers could control their own dining activities. A high level of satisfaction resulted when the restaurants offered something above ordinary or which exceeded customers’ expectation. The highest level of satisfaction was achieved when the restaurants provided something that was outstanding and which surpassed the ordinary needs of the customers. Fourthly, the major way of managing factors influencing customer satisfaction dining experience was based on a systematic restaurant operation system. However, the key element that was responsible for the management of a systematic restaurant operation system depended on human resource management (the restaurant manager, front of house staff and kitchen staff), staff training and development, and restaurant rules. Fifthly, the analyses of customer satisfaction in a new socio-cultural context: Malaysian Malay restaurants provided an opportunity for a cross-comparison of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ research findings and the identification of what was the same and what was different depending on the cultural context. Sixthly, the development of a conceptual framework had three major concepts: the input for the dining experience satisfaction (which consisted of factors influencing dining satisfaction and ways of managing it); the consumption of dining experience satisfaction at three phases: pre-meal, the actual meal and post-meal experience and the cognitive evaluation process of dining experience that led to satisfaction. And, lastly, the outcomes of dining experience satisfaction (in a form of pleasurable feelings and behavioural changes) which aided the understanding of customer satisfaction with the dining experience and ways managing it. This research suggested future research should consider additional factors to explain the overall satisfaction with the dining experience at Malaysian Malay restaurants (and /including) cross- type of restaurants and demographic profiles of customers; expand this research throughout the country to improve the transferability of the findings to other types of restaurant to assist restaurant managers in better matching the needs of each customer segment; extend the research to different ethnic restaurants that have different characteristics and attributes; undertake a comparative study of factors influencing customer satisfaction in Malay restaurants between two different groups of customers, such as Eastern versus Western; conduct a longitudinal study to compare changes in factors that influence customers’ satisfaction with dining experience at different times; and investigate whether the meal experience stage still plays the most important role in different types of restaurants

A New Way of Eating: Creating Meat Reducers, Vegetarians and Vegans

The proportion of the British population reducing their consumption of animal food products has increased dramatically over the last decade, while vegetarian and vegan options are now widely available in supermarkets and restaurants across the UK. This phenomenon presents vital benefits for climate change, environmental degradation, human health and animal welfare. Yet, little research has investigated the rapidly growing trend. A broader understanding of the decision to reduce one's consumption and the cognitive, social and physical processes involved in maintaining dietary changes is essential for policy makers, campaigners and researchers working toward a sustainable future. Meat reduction and vegan campaigns by non-governmental organisations serve as a primary promoter of reduction and present a unique opportunity to research reducers when they may first be seeking a dietary transition. The theoretical framework employed within this dissertation combines the first comprehensive model of behaviour change, the Behaviour Change Wheel (Michie, Atkins and West 2014), with the fields of social consumption and sustainable and ethical consumption to analyse the reducer and the reduction process through a more comprehensive framework. A mixed-methods approach has been used to investigate the barriers, motivators and goals of participants in seven UK-based meat reduction and vegan campaigns through focus groups (n=33) and a longitudinal web-based survey (n=1,587). To the best of the researcher's knowledge, this represents the most comprehensive study of reducers and reduction campaigns to date. Interviews with campaign staff (n=13) and an examination of campaign messaging and strategies have been used to further analyse campaign participation and the reduction process. Findings reveal key trends within highly diverse approaches to reduction, including a reduction hierarchy that prioritises red meat and neglects fish and egg reduction through a tendency for small, gradual dietary changes. While meat reducers were likely to be successful on a short-term basis, they were unlikely to maintain reductions over a prolonged period. Those with the greatest levels of abstention were, instead, the most likely to meet their reduction goals. Animal protection also emerged as key for many reducers, potentially creating a new perspective - a mindshift - that re-positions the animal source within the consumption process. Findings suggest that policy makers, campaigners and advocates need to consider the psycho-social element within the reduction process, with the potential for a wide variety of consumer types and, importantly, the need to not simply address what is consumed but to address normative omnivorous consumption that is formed around a meat component and de-values meatless meals