‘You are What you eat!'? Crafting the (food) consuming subject through cooking shows

This chapter explores cooking shows as a form of food pedagogy and examines how they attempt to shape postmodern subjectivities characterised by a preoccupation with lifestyle practices and the selfreferential concern with style and image. Using a Foucauldian framework, we sought to understand how different genres of cooking shows enacted, embodied and/or produced particular food pedagogies. The chapter pays attention to how these food pedagogies problematise particular issues, to what kinds of authorities they invoke, to what technologies they employ and to what kinds of subjectivities they seek to create in learners. It uses the framework of problematisation, subjectivities, authorities and technologies to explore the ways in which these various chefs, through their food pedagogies, offer potential subject positions from which audience members can draw as they craft their identities. The chapter also discusses the pathways of two alternative cooking shows that offer different aesthetics of consumption while also propagating subjectivities linked more to particular form of conviviality than consumerism.