Oliver's Twist_Reality television

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International Journal of Cultural

DOI: 10.1177/13678779030062005 2003; 6; 229 International Journal of Cultural Studies

Joanne Hollows Chef

Oliver's Twist: Leisure, Labour and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked

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Olivers twistLeisure , labour and domestic masculinity in TheNaked Chef

Joanne HollowsNottingham Trent University, England

A B S T R A C T Despite the explosion of interest in cooking , there has beenlit tle research into the meanings that men bring to their cooking practices. Thisarticle examines how a mode of domestic masculinity is negotiated in JamieOlivers television shows and cookbooks. Drawing on Marjorie DeVaults work , inwhich she argues that cooking is a way in which women construct themselves asrecognizably womanly, the article argues that in The Naked Chef cooking isconstructed as recognizably manly through associa tion with recognizablemasculinities. The construction of the masculine domestic cook involvesdisavowing the extent to which cooking is a form of labour and constructing it asa fun leisure and lifestyle activity. The article draws on Bourdieus work tosuggest that the ability to experience cooking as leisure is dependent on adistance from both economic and temporal constraints, a posit ion that is bothclassed and gendered .

K E Y W O R D S class cooking domestic labour food leisure life-style Masculinity television

Jamie Oliver is a phenomenon in the UK. Discovered in the kitchens ofLondon restaurant The River Caf during the filming of another cookeryseries, Jamie was launched in his own show, The Naked Chef, in 1999.Two further series of The Naked Chef followed along with four bestselling

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cookbooks.1 In the process, Jamie Oliver has become a powerful brandused to sell videos, DVDs, an album and live tour dates, alongside table-ware and cookware. He is also the face of Sainsburys supermarkets,featuring in high-profile advertising campaigns and on product lines in-store. Outside the UK, The Naked Chef has also had considerable successin a range of territories, capitalizing on the expansion of lifestyle program-ming on global television. For example, the Food Network, a US cablechannel, has now co-produced a 26-part series, Olivers Twist, sellingJamies cooking, lifestyle and London location to international audiences.

The power of Jamie as a brand stems from his shows negotiation of thetelevision cookery format to emphasize the importance of lifestyle.2 TheNaked Chef is distinguished by the way it incorporates cooking sequencesin Jamies apartment within a wider display of the Jamie lifestyle, in whichhe is shown riding his trademark Vespa around London, shopping, eatingwith friends and engaging in a range of leisure pursuits. The Naked Chefdoesnt simply educate the viewer about how to cook, but how to use foodas one element in an expressive display of lifestyle (Lury, 1996: 65). Thisis accentuated by the shows visual style which draws on pop videos andemploys a grainy realist aesthetic to create the sense of The Naked Chefas a docu-soap about Jamies life (Moseley, 2001: 38).3

This article focuses on how The Naked Chef constructs cooking as amasculine lifestyle activity,4 building on Moseleys argument that JamieOliver negotiates the tension between the new man and the new lad.(2001: 39) However, as the next section goes on to explore, work on newmasculinities within cultural studies has tended to focus on their produc-tion and negotiation in public, urban space rather than domestic contexts(Mort, 1996; Nixon, 1996). In this way, the article seeks to open up debatesabout new masculinities by examining how Olivers image attempts toreconcile public and private masculinities.

Furthermore, the article suggests that in negotiating a mode of domesticmasculinity, Jamie also negotiates the tension between the figures of thefeminine domestic cook and the masculine professional chef. Indeed, whatis striking about Oliver is the extent to which he refuses the legitimacy ofthe professional chef in culinary matters, despite his background, andcontinuing employment, in professional cookery in a restaurant kitchen.This is particularly striking in a UK-context in which professional cookeryhas been seen as the legitimate arena for a masculine culinary practice thatis usually seen as superior to feminine domestic cookery (Coxon, 1983;Mennell, 1996). Indeed, a number of celebrity chefs such as Marco Pierre-White and Gordon Ramsay have gained fame by accentuating their machocredentials. In what follows, I go on to explore how Jamie refuses theseconventions of culinary masculinity.

However, in order to embrace domestic cookery, Oliver also has to nego-tiate its associations with femininity. Academic work on gender andcookery, frequently motivated by a wider interest in the sexual division of

INTERN AT ION AL journal of CULTURAL studies 6(2)



labour, has been primarily concerned with the meanings women bring tocooking practices within nuclear family structures (Charles and Kerr, 1988;DeVault, 1991; Murcott, 1995). This has resulted in a relative lack ofinterest in mens relationship to domestic cookery, although research thatexists suggests that men cook when it can be understood as leisure ratherthan labour (Kemmer, 1999; Roos et al., 2001). For critics such as DeVault,womens cooking practices are a principal means through which womenperform caring for others and through which a woman conducts herselfas recognizably womanly (1991: 118). Such a position is reaffirmed byhistorical research suggesting that domestic cookery can only be understoodas manly when it is made consistent with traditionally masculine charac-teristics, spaces (such as outdoors) or foods (such as steak) (Inness, 2000).Cookbooks for men frequently present cooking as something easilymastered while maintaining that masculine incompetence in the femininesphere of the kitchen is a virtue.5

As a result, The Naked Chef incorporates cooking within a cool mascu-line lifestyle, by disavowing the extent to which both cooking and theconstruction of lifestyles can be experienced as labour rather than leisure.This emphasis on cooking as a leisure activity not only reaffirms masculinedomestic cookery as a leisure and leisured practice but also affirms thedispositions associated with the new petit-bourgeoisie, in which there is amorality of pleasure as duty (Bourdieu, 1984: 367). Although Moseleyargues that Jamie sells a discourse of accessibility and achievability (2001:39) the following discussion suggests that this is only achieved by obfus-cating the extent to which cooking as both domestic labour and lifestylepractice involves work.

In the process, the article brings together debates about cooking both interms of the sexual division of domestic labour and the leisure-work (Bell,2002) involved in constructing and maintaining the lifestyles through whichthe new middle classes distinguish themselves.6 Indeed, the article suggeststhat while the dispositions of the new middle classes are usually seen asgender-neutral characteristics, they presume a position of distance fromdomestic labour that is more readily available to men than women. In thisway, the article is also situated within wider feminist appropriations ofBourdieu about how access to different forms of capital (economic, cultural,social and symbolic) and the ability to capitalize upon them, is related toboth class and gender (Skeggs, 1997; forthcoming).

One of the (larder) lads: domesticity and new masculinitiesin the UK7

Jamie Oliver draws heavily on the new lad, a central figure in mensmagazine publishing and popular television in the UK in the mid-1990s whofuelled considerable debate in the press.8 However, as Moseley has noted,

Hollows Olivers twist 231



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Jamie Olivers image also draws on the 1980s new man, in both his incar-nations as nurturing, anti-sexist, caring, sharing man and as a narcissis-tic urban consumer (Beynon, 2002: 101). In order to construct domesticcookery as recognizably manly, Jamies image depends on these recog-nizable masculinities.

However, attempts to articulate these antagonistic masculine identitiesproduce contradictions in Jamies image. For example, the new lad has beenseen as a figure based on a refusal of the political correctness associatednot only with feminism but also the nurturing new man (Whelehan, 2000).Indeed, this refusal is neatly illustrated in the cookery column of the ladmag Later which offers laughably easy dishes that look like they wereprepared by a sensitive modern man who really went to a lot of trouble.(author unknown, 1999a: 144) In this way, Later mocks the new mans seriousness and wasted labour, reaffirming the lack of seriousness that ischaracteristic of the lad mags (Jackson et al., 2001).

Despite the presence of cookery columns in many mens magazines,academic work on both new man and new lad has shown little interest inhow these masculinities are formed in relation to domestic space and prac-tices. One of the axiomatic images in British debates about the new manwas that of Nick Kamen stripping down to his boxer shorts in a launderettein an advertisement for Levis 501 jeans. However, Nixon observes, bydoing his washing in a commercial public space, the new man was relievedof the unglamorous weight of domestic laundry (1996: 2). This commentcould also be seen as an apt metaphor for the position of domestic labourand leisure in academic debates about the new man. In cultural studies,critics have concentrated on how masculine identities are formed throughparticular metropolitan public spaces of consumption, which operate as amasculine playground (Mort, 1996: 82) and where the narcissistic newman was constructed at the level of the spectacle.9 This preoccupation withmens public consumption practices leads to a corresponding neglect of thesignificance of domestic consumption (and the relationship between publicand private). Indeed, these debates, which were preoccupied with figures ofmodernity such as the flneur, also drew on a long-standing vocabulary ofmodernity that was anti-home and celebrates mobility, movement, exile,boundary crossing. It speaks enthusiastically about movement out into theworld, but is silent about the return home (Felski, 2000: 86).

Domesticity also figures as a problem in debates about the new lad. Inthe lad mags studied by Jackson et al., the new lads single lifestyle is basedon the necessity of avoiding the constraints and traps of marriage, includ-ing domestic duties (2001: 81). It is perhaps for this reason that, while thebabe is the central figure of femininity in the lad mags, figures of maternalauthority play the crucial role in the construction of the new lad asnaughty boy (Hunt, 1998: 8). Furthermore, these magazines use lifestyleto address the tensions between domesticity (culturally coded as feminine)




and mens working lives, and consumption is presented as an alternativeto domestic responsibility and emotional commitment (Jackson et al.,2001: 1423). The new lad is precariously positioned, attempting to escapethe domestic yet contained by it. This tension is given a culinary manifes-tation in the lad mags, where the takeaway and the ready-meal, largelyproduced and bought within the public sphere but consumed within thedomestic, are given a privileged position.

A number of characteristics associated with the new lad are incorporatedinto The Naked Chef. First is the use of language: recipes and ingredientsare repeatedly described as pukka, funky and wicked, and even foodswhich suggest seriousness and a moral approach to healthy eating aresubject to an attempted transformation into lad food by being rebranded aspukkola (Oliver, 2000: 32). Oliver combines this youthful language withsome of the mockney linguistic turns that have also been favoured by thelad mags: Jamie gets into dodgy situations where he might have to leg it;he meets a bloomin great geezer, refers to his wife/girlfriend as the missusand likes a Ruby Murray (2000: 1112; 2001: 90). As a result, he fitsneatly with the image of the new lad as middle class but in love withworking-class masculinity, a masculinity that represents both authenticityand stability (Hunt, 1998: 7).

Second, as Jackson et al. note, media debates have tended to condensethe new lad to a series of attributes such as football, music, booze and babes(2001: 37). Babes prove somewhat problematic for the Jamie image as hisgirlfriend (and later wife) Jules is a frequent presence in his TV shows andcookery books and, as Rachel Moseley notes, extra-textually much hasbeen made of his family values (2001: 38). Nonetheless, The Return of theNaked Chef draws on the visual style of the lad mags, featuring a shot ofJules (cropped so that she remains headless) wearing a tight t-shirt with thewords tuck in across her breasts. Sport, music and booze are far less prob-lematic: Jamie plays football, goes greyhound racing, plays in a band andgets lagered-up with his friends. The obsession with booze in the lad magsextends to the treatment of food and, in particular, to cooking that can beperformed when drunk: Later features Drunk Chef: Low-risk CookingWhen Youve Had a Few (author unknown, 1999b: 146) and FHM offersDrunken Delights (author unknown, 1999c: 44). Likewise, Jamie offers upa midnight pan-cooked breakfast to cook for your mates after the pub.The Naked Chef therefore suggests that cooking can be seamlessly incor-porated into a new lad lifestyle and appear as natural as ordering a take-away curry.

Third, the construction of the new lad in mens magazines involves anavoidance of seriousness combined with an ironic tone (Jackson et al.,2001). This is echoed in Jamies attempts to demonstrate he doesnt takehimself, or cooking, too seriously and his maxim that cooking has gotta bea laugh. Seriousness is also refused through an often child-like rejection of




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different forms of feminine authority. Talking about a friends mother, Jamieboasts, Ive changed Marys recipe to suit my taste Ill probably get a slapfor it but thats cooking and you can do what you like! (2000: 86). As Huntpoints out, forms of maternal authority allow the new lads rebellion tomake sense: the New Lad doesnt want to separate from the mother onthe contrary, he needs her to tell him that yes, he is a very naughty boy(1998: 8). Other womens authority is refused through a rejection of theircooking competence: his mother-in-law boils the hell out of spinach(Oliver, 2000: 210) and my missus makes me fantastic mashed vegetables,beautifully seasoned and drizzled with olive oil the only thing is, they aremeant to be separate servings of boiled carrots and new potatoes! (Oliver,2000: 215). Therefore, his masculine culinary competence is distinguishedfrom feminine domestic cookery in which overcooked vegetables representa British tradition. Finally, Jamie also uses feminism as a model of thefeminine seriousness and authority that must be refused in a manner remi-niscent of the lad mags (see Whelehan, 2000). He advocates that

If youre after some brownie points and youre a bloke I would highly suggestbreakfast in bed for the missus . . ., and if youre like my missus, sorry, thelovely Jules, you should attempt a little bit of brekkie for your fella beforeasking him for a bit of cash for that dress youve seen in Top Shop. But seriously, before Womens Lib get on the phone . . . (2000: 23)

In this way, Jamie reproduces the position to feminism articulated in the ladmags. As Suzanne Franks puts it, The message was Stop patronizing me;I understand the equal rights thing. Now lets have a laugh for Christssake. (cited in Read, forthcoming) In this way, the refusal of seriousnessalso works as a refusal of various modes of femininity.

If these features of The Naked Chef articulate domestic cookery withfamiliar aspects of contemporary masculinity, then so do the range ofhistorical and geographical identifications employed. As already noted,Jamies speech alludes to a (mock) cockney authenticity. Connections toLondon are established visually through speeded-up footage of the Thames,indicating both the passing of Jamies day and the pace of city life. Thecentrality of London as a setting for a metropolitan, cosmopolitan mascu-linity is cemented by the ways in which cooking sequences in domestic spaceare intercut with sequences tracking Jamies movements around locales(Soho, Islington, Notting Hill) and amid red buses and barrow boys, whichhave come to act as signifiers of London-ness in a manner established inBritish movies produced for an export market (Wilson, 2001: 146). Jamiesmobility around the city works to associate him with both the set of spatialidentifications and sense of flnerie that Mort (1996) associates with thenarcissistic new man.

This sense of London-ness is also articulated to a wider sense of British-ness. Some of the dishes prepared by Jamie involve (frequently minor)




adaptations of traditional British fare such as the bacon sarnie andEnglish breakfast. Comfort Grub is also linked to a nostalgia for Britishdishes associated with memories of childhood . . . coming home shiveringand wet after playing footie with the boys (Oliver, 2001: 20). This sense ofnation is also compounded by the soundtrack to The Naked Chef, which iscomposed of Britpop and acid jazz (Moseley, 2001), associations which arecemented in the cookbooks where a chapter on breakfast, Morning Glory,is linked to Brit-pop band Oasis. These musical references articulate British-ness to both the cool present and the past, through visual and aural refer-ences to the 1960s and 1970s, periods which the lad mags frequentlyassociated with a moment of authentic and natural masculinity (seeHunt, 1998: 57).

However, if Britishness plays an important role in the construction ofJamie Olivers image, Italianicity is also crucial to his construction of adomestic culinary masculinity. This Italianicity works to cement Oliversassociations with 1960s masculinities through references to Mod style, fromthe Vespa he rides to his Duffer of St George clothes. Italy is also the corner-stone of his culinary repertoire: much of his professional experience was inItalian restaurants and while the majority of his recipes may not be authen-tically Italian, they clearly signify Italianicity. This sense that Jamies ethnic-ity is imagined as a British-Italian hybrid is compounded by the way inwhich he refers to Gennaro, his Italian culinary mentor, as his Londonfather and this is accompanied by insistent references to babies asbambinos. This serves to inflect his family values (noted by Moseley),with an imagined Italian tradition of family, rather than a British family-values agenda, which usually signifies a non-youthful conservatism. Part ofthe significance of this hybridity lies in its relationship to an already estab-lished appropriation of signifiers of Italy in some British youth culture, fromMods through to the lifestyle magazines associated with the narcissisticnew man to the other predecessor of the new lad, the casual.10 Therefore,the Britishness which is a central feature of Jamies image, and of his poten-tial to be exported and become a global celebrity, incorporates elements ofItalianicity as an appropriate ethnicity which itself has become a fetishizedobject of consumption (Ahmed, 2000; Skeggs, forthcoming).

If, in these ways, Jamie Oliver can also be understood as a culinary exten-sion of mod (Hebdige, 1988: 75)11 then the association with Italian food,and corresponding rejection of French food, has a very specific functionto play in terms of Jamies construction of a domestic culinary heterosexualmasculinity. The reasons for this lie in the popular associations of thesenational cuisines in a UK context: Frenchness is strongly identified withposh restaurant cooking, while Italian food has been more readily in-corporated into everyday British domestic cookery and signifies a lessformal and more rustic tradition. The opposition between the associationsof these national cuisines, and the opposition between the posh and the




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rustic, lie at the heart of The Naked Chef. Olivers naked cooking styleisnt about cheffy food, its for normal people who want short-cuts and tips. . . its for anyone who is interested in cooking tasty, gutsy, simple, common-sense food and having a right good laugh at the same time (Oliver, 2000:11). This sense of simplicity and commonsense is reinforced by thelanguage used by Oliver: as Moseley notes, he uses words like bash,smash, and throw and repeatedly describes his cooking as notponcey (2001: 38). The use of such masculine and everyday language notonly distinguishes Jamies culinary style from the more cautious and precisetone of female cookery writers such as Delia Smith, but also from theprofessional and technical vocabulary found in the cookery books writtenby superstar male chefs.

Indeed, Jamies rejection of poncey cookery is less a rejection of femininedomestic cookery than of the hegemony of the male restaurant chef.12 Inthe UK, there is a long-standing association between restaurant cuisine andFrench-influenced cookery (Mennell, 1996), an image reaffirmed by thenouvelle cuisine of the 1980s. As a result of these changes, ornamentalcookery is no longer associated with the feminine domestic cook as it wasin the 1950s, and is now associated with the highly stylized visual aestheticsof post-nouvelle cuisine. These associations are cemented on television inprogrammes centred on chefs such as Gary Rhodes and Gordon Ramsay.While these chefs may aim to translate their restaurant styles into a domesticcontext, there is nonetheless a heavy emphasis on the visual aesthetics offood and the domestic cook is encouraged to serve meals plated-up andfinely tweaked. In opposition to this, Oliver claims to still believe in thetwo things that resulted in my name of the Naked Chef: using the bareessentials of your larder and stripping down restaurant methods to thereality of home (2000: 1213). For example, when Jamie prepares amozarella, peach and parma ham salad, he suggests we chuck it in themiddle of the table, none of this plated-up business, advising us to rip apartthe peaches as cut ones look commercial and horrible.13 In this way, Jamieseeks to strip away the formality of the cooking and eating practices associ-ated with restaurants to reassert the validity of domestic cookery (a positionalso taken up by Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater). Furthermore, throughhis emphasis on words such as bare and stripping, Jamie accentuates theimportance of an authenticity homologous with popular conceptions ofItalian cooking in the UK.

Some of Jamies legitimacy as a television chef comes from his positionas a restaurant chef (and this was emphasized in title sequences in the tele-vision show). This has no doubt been consolidated by his association withThe River Caf, which itself has spawned some highly successful cook-books, a television series and a reputation as the canteen of New Labour.Indeed a sign that Jamies time had come can be seen in Peter Lilleyscomplaint at the Conservative Party Conference that the nation was now




all about Britpop and The River Caf (Adams, 2000). However, byrefusing the legitimacy of both the macho restaurant chef and feminizeddomesticity, Jamie reclaims the domestic kitchen as a sphere of masculinecompetence and a site for the practice of the attributes of the new lad. Inthe process, he appears to ameliorate the tensions that Jackson et al. identifybetween domesticity . . . and mens working lives (2001: 142). However,as the next section goes on to explore, gendered divisions between workand leisure continue to produce contradictions within Jamie Oliversimage.14

You cant be serious? Leisure, labour and gender

However, Jamies adoption of a laddish wardrobe and a corresponding lackof seriousness sits uneasily with an increasing emphasis on caring, responsi-bility and the serious nature of cooking. This emphasis on caring forserves to associate Jamie with both feminine domestic labour and thenurturing new man, the masculine figure associated with the politicalcorrectness that the new lad refuses. This has been reinforced by Jamiesmore recent portrayal of the new father. If this emphasis on care works tocreate contradictions in Jamie Olivers image, these are partially containedby his emphasis on domestic cooking as a fun, leisure activity distinct fromlabour performed in the public sphere. The following discussion assesses theextent to which The Naked Chef reproduces the masculine dispositionstowards domestic cookery as a creative leisure activity distinguished fromfeminized domestic labour, examining how care and responsibility aredisplaced from the domestic sphere and onto the public world of work.

Happy Days with the Naked Chef acknowledges that providing personalattention in the preparation of meals is a means of demonstrating care forothers. Womens magazines frequently suggest that home-produced food isemotionally-superior, signifying womanly labour but acknowledge thepractical constraints that impose a need for convenience, despite its associ-ation with the impersonal world of capitalist rationalization (Warde,1997: 133). While convenience is absent as a prime consideration in TheNaked Chef (and the relative lack of labour-saving devices in Jamieskitchen reaffirms this) a chapter on Quick Fixes demonstrates an acknow-ledgement of the importance of time constraints, and the need to managetime, in preparing everyday meals (Warde, 1999). I didnt want Jules tofeed herself on ready meals so I found myself custom-making the fantasticJamie Oliver dinners in a bag , he claims, pointing out that they also saveon washing-up (2001: 44). In this way, he not only marks the differencebetween his professional and domestic practice, but also incorporates whathave traditionally been seen as elements of feminine domestic practice intoa domestic culinary masculinity.




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If this attention to the needs of others threatens to undermine Jamiesrefusal of seriousness, so his attachment to culinary values puts him at oddswith his laddish image. Although stripping down restaurant techniques iscentral to The Naked Chef, this can only go so far without threatening hisprofessional credibility: for example, he advocates making stocks fromscratch. Likewise, there are awkward passages in the cookbooks whereJamie attempts to negotiate his own preferences. In response to thequestion of why is a twenty-six year-old full-blooded Essex boy devotingtwo pages of his precious book to herbs?, he can only anxiously assertthat quite frankly, theyre cool: not just cool, but very cool (Oliver, 2001:16). This anxiety also relates to the ways in which some of his tastes mightbe seen as feminine (see Lupton, 1996): most blokes when asked what theylike [to eat] say MEAT, MEAT AND TWO VEG that means chipsand mash. Well, thats great me too. But you cant beat a good salad(Oliver, 2000: 54). In this way, Jamies culinary cultural capital (Bell,2000) demands a level of seriousness about cooking that stands in anawkward relationship to the frivolity demanded by the consumption activi-ties of the new lad, suggesting an uneasy relationship between cooking asmasculine professional practice and as a masculine lifestyle practice. Thissense of professional responsibility is accentuated in his latest series,Jamies Kitchen, a docu-soap in which he aims to train 15 unemployedyoung people to work as chefs in his new non-profit-making restaurantventure, Fifteen.

If Jamie can become serious in a professional capacity, to what extentis this sense of responsibility maintained in his approaches to domesticcookery? Happy Days demonstrates an increased sense of concern with thesocial and cultural functions of eating as he is increasingly positioned withinthe family and the domestic. In the process, Jules is transformed from ababe into a wife as they become a good team in the kitchen (2001: 9).However, most striking about Happy Days, dedicated to the cooks oftomorrow, is the centrality of children. As Jamie explains in the chapterdevoted to children and cooking, getting your kids involved is definitely theway forward for cooking in this country (2001: 65). While trying tomaintain a distance from the position of the expert, he nonetheless getsserious in his discussion of childrens food habits: Without sounding like agoody-goody or a preacher, in general kids diets in Britain are a nightmare(2001: 67). The reader is encouraged to include their children in all aspectsof the familys food practices, from shopping to cooking, enabling them tomake informed choices while having good fun. This extends to the role offood in sustaining family life: Turn the TV off (unless the World Cup is on,of course) and simply enjoy eating together (2001: 75). However, havingfun is a serious business: cooking with your kids is not about making smileyfaces on pizzas . . . and disguising food. Its about smelling, touching,creating, tasting, laughing and eating (2001: 66).




By taking on a position of parental responsibility, Jamie becomes associ-ated with what are usually seen as feminine domestic competences. Forexample, it is women who usually co-ordinate the feeding work thatallows family mealtimes to be experienced as quality time (DeVault, 1991).Furthermore, by producing meals, mothers not only provide children withnutrition but also with love and care (Lupton, 1996). While Jamie adoptssome of these characteristics, what remains absent is the sense of anxietythat mothers frequently experience in relation to the practice of feedingchildren (Coveney, 1999; Lupton, 1996; Murphy et al., 1999). Therefore,while Jamie is positioned within the domestic, he is not defined by itsdemands and obligations. While womens anxieties in the kitchen arise fromthe fact that the successful performance of domestic femininity is frequentlylinked to feeding work, domestic masculinity does not incur the same therisks or produce the same anxieties.

Jamies relationship with maternal responsibilities is also undercut by hisability to move between the positions of parent and child. As noted earlier,he sometimes adopts the role of naughty boy in relation to figures ofmaternal authority. However, Jamies refusal of seriousness does not alwaysresult in the ironic distance associated with the new lad, frequently mani-festing itself in terms of a child-like enthusiasm in his descriptions of foodsas pukka, cool and wicked. Indeed, Jamies image as a child is moststrongly reinforced by repeated shots of him sliding down the banisters inthe earlier series of The Naked Chef. This works to confirm a conceptionof the domestic as a site of play rather than work, reinforced by the waymuch of Jamies food is prepared for parties and celebrations.

The Naked Chef reproduces masculine dispositions towards cookingdiscussed in sociological research, turning domestic cookery into a specialevent and a performance done in free time. Indeed, the show usuallyfocuses on a (non-working) day in Jamies life. Although he may cookhimself something simple for breakfast or lunch, the narrative of the showusually deals with the preparation of dishes over the course of a day for aspecial event with family and friends. The relationship between cooking andperformance is not only emphasized by Jamies open-plan apartment inwhich his culinary activities can be viewed by dinner guests, but also theways in which the presentation of food contributes to this performance: forexample, sea bass served straight from a tin-foil bag is described as realtheatre (Oliver, 2000: 153). Jamies gift to his guests is not only the fooditself, but also his own performance in the kitchen (Hollows, 2002). In thisway, domestic masculinity in The Naked Chef draws on some of the dispo-sitions associated with feminine domestic cookery while keeping itsmundane and repetitive aspects at a distance, so that demonstrating carebecomes a luxurious indulgence (Lupton, 1996: 146).




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Theres something quite brave about doing somethingbasic: cooking, gender and the new petit-bourgeoisie

For Moseley, The Naked Chef emphasizes a discourse of accessibility andachievability in which viewers is offered the opportunity to make-over notonly their cooking but also their self in order to achieve the Jamie life-style (2001: 39). From such a perspective, Oliver can be seen as a culturalintermediary who both practices, and popularizes, a particular form of life-style centred within the culinary field. For Bourdieu, the cultural inter-mediaries who are a product of the new middle classes make available toalmost everyone the distinctive poses, the distinctive games and other signsof inner riches which were previously associated with the habitus of anintellectual elite (1984: 371). However, Bell (2002) argues that televisionchefs, like gourmands in general (Mennell, 1996) inhabit the paradoxicalposition of marking distinction while also democratizing tastes. Thissection suggests that The Naked Chef not only obfuscates the extent towhich cooking is work, but also denies the labour involved in acquiringculinary cultural capital. In the process, Jamie Olivers output serves toaffirm his own distinction, along with both petit-bourgeois and masculineculinary dispositions, by making his cooking look effortless and accessibleto all.

Writing about television cookery, Niki Strange distinguishes between thefigure of the feminine domestic cook, who presents cooking as a practicaland social skill, and male celebrity chefs who present cooking as a sensualand pleasurable practice (1998: 310; see also Bell, 2000). The formerapproach is exemplified by Delia Smiths How To Cook, in which shepresents the acquisition of cookery skills in terms of money, time, commit-ment and labour, drawing an analogy between learning to cook and learningto drive. The Naked Chef exemplifies the second approach, emphasizinghow cooking can be a source of pleasure and entertainment for the cook,and an aestheticized leisure practice (Lupton, 1996: 146) centred aroundthe care of self.

Such an approach to cooking has been associated with a professional andmasculine middle class for whom the preparation and consumption of themeal . . . becomes a source of entertainment, of enhanced sensory and socialenjoyment, pleasure rather than work (Lupton, 1996). These dispositionsare based on a classed and gendered distance from the demands of theeveryday, and the ability to move between the positions of the disciplined,productive self and the hedonistic, leisured self. These positions also havespatial and temporal dimensions (Lupton, 1996: 151): for domesticcooking to be experienced as an indulgent leisure activity rests on the abilityto experience the home as a site of leisure rather than labour and this, inturn, rests on a relatively clear demarcation of the temporal relationsbetween public and private spheres. Because Jamie is positioned as a




professional chef in a domestic context, he can exemplify the distinctionbetween cooking as professional work and domestic leisure.

This representation of cooking as leisure in The Naked Chef also extendsto other aspects of feeding work. While Jamie observes the need to avoidthose aspects of domestic labour which cannot be recoded as leisure (inparticular, washing-up) shopping is more easily understood as a masculineleisure pursuit that can be incorporated into his lifestyle. Indeed, it is in hisshopping practices, with their emphasis on connoisseurship, rather than hiscooking practices, that Jamie most closely resembles the narcissistic newman. Jamie is constructed as a metropolitan omnivore as he cruises thestreets of London on his vespa, moving betweeen the mass supermarketand the popular street market, ethnic grocers, upmarket niche outletsand the friends in the restaurant trade who procure for him qualityproducts. He is also connected with the narcissistic new mans flnerie ashe moves among the urban spectacles that promote the idea of consump-tion as pleasure, a connection reinforced visually in The Naked Chefs life-style sequences that juxtapose images of urban life and consumer goods(Nixon, 1996: 6272). This not only reinforces the connection betweencooking and masculine consumption practices, but also works to maintaina distance between Jamies shopping practices and the more mundaneaspects of feeding work.

However, while Jamie frequently takes on the role of connoisseur in theshopping sequences in public space, there also remains an uneasy relationshipto this model of the masculine gourmet. Whereas the connoisseur is frequentlyconstructed as someone who mimics the masculine professional tradition ofhaute cuisine in a domestic context, Jamies cookery is based on a refusal ofthe authority of haute cuisine in a domestic context. Instead, Jamies projectfrequently appears to be one of democratization in which he aims to demys-tify cooking, adopting a friendly, chatty style and introducing the cool prop-erties of herbs to all. As he puts it, cooking has gotta be a laugh, its gotta besimple, its gotta be tasty, its gotta be fun.15 While such an approach mightsuggest that Jamies aim is the flattening out of taste cultures, the dispositionstowards cooking he promotes are those associated with the new petit-bourgeoisie whose lifestyle is based on an ethic that makes it a failure, athreat to self-esteem, not to have fun (Bourdieu, 1984: 3667).

Jamies promotion of an aesthetic of cooking as fun also denies the labourinvolved in acquiring culinary cultural capital. Furthermore, it denies theleisure-work involved in producing and maintaining new middle-class life-styles. It is here that the paradox between democratization and distinction,identified by Bell, appears particularly pertinent. This is made clear whenJamie comments:

The problem I get is cos everyone thinks Im a chef, they think theyre goingto come round mine for like posh dinners and, you know what, theres




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something quite brave about doing something basic like a fish pie or a chilicon carne or jacket potatoes done really well. Thats the twist isnt it? Justdo something that they have everyday but do it really well and make it special thats the vibe I go on anyway.16

Here, Jamie reiterates his refusal of posh food associated with a restaurantand dinner-party tradition (and, in the process, the formality of the oldmiddle classes). In the process, he simultaneously embraces the simplepleasures of domestic cookery, while refusing their simplicity by doingthem really well and making it special. Jamie performs his own distinc-tion by demonstrating that he can both occupy the realm of everydayfeminine domestic cookery while rising above it. The tools to cook a goodchili are offered to his audience through his demonstration of the recipe andthe cooking process; how one acquires the ability to perform the twist andthe vibe remains far less defined.

Furthermore, Jamie demonstrates his own distinction by being braveenough to cook mundane dishes such as chili or fish pie, which signifymass taste and feminine cookery. Lupton argues that the professionalmiddle-classes sometimes engaged in a machismo of eating, an almostinverse food snobbery, in which the more repulsive the food, the morepoints are won for appearing gastronomically brave and adventurous(1996: 128). While this bravery can be demonstrated by eating exoticingredients such as bollocks and semen (Oliver, 2001: 9) it can alsoextend to other acts of cultural omnivorousness that transgress boundarieswithin, as well as between, national cultures. Making something basic likea fish pie, but making it really well, not only emphasizes Jamies braveryand distinction, but also generates the pleasure that comes from trans-gressing boundaries (while reaffirming them in the process) (Lupton, 1996:129).

This ability to transgress everyday feminine domestic cookery serves todistinguish Jamie from the home-cooking he appears to embrace; heoccupies the domestic but is not contained, or defined, by it. Masculinity isfrequently associated with a mobility that is anti-home because home (likehome-cooking) signifies femininity and familiarity, dullness, stasis (Felski,2000: 86). The continual movement between domestic space and metro-politan public spaces in The Naked Chef further reinforces Jamies mobility.Moreover, Jamies domestic cookery is largely cosmopolitan, culled from arange of different national domestic cuisines. If, as Beverley Skeggs (forth-coming) argues, femininity is fixed so others can travel, Jamies domesticmasculinity is based on an ability to enjoy the feminine pleasures of thedomestic sphere as a realm of leisure because it is predicated on the abilityto escape. Furthermore, Jamies appropriation of femininity, obfuscates theways in which a mobile and reflexive relation to gender is a privilegedposition in late modernity (Adkins, 2002: 80). (Similar points might also




be made about his relationship to Italianicity and working-classness.) Likethe new lad, Jamie likes a bit of the other but he doesnt want to be her.

For Bourdieu, the key factor shaping differences in lifestyle and, evenmore, the stylization of life lies in objective and subjective distance fromthe world, with its material constraints and temporal urgencies (1984:376). Bourdieus argument seeks to explain the relationship between classand lifestyle and, indeed, the figure of the masculine cook in Jamie Oliverswork, as my discussion has implied, is based on a new petit-bourgeoisaesthetic in which distance from both economic and temporal constraintsenables the potentially mundane acts of cooking and eating to be producedas a right laugh and a source of fun. However, Bourdieus argument maybe equally salient in understanding gendered dispositions towards cooking.Jamies culinary masculinity, in which domestic cooking is experienced as aform of creative leisure, is also a product of a distance from domestic obli-gation and labour (and the accompanying experience of time poverty andthe need for constant temporal-management) associated with womensposition in the sexual division of labour (Hollows, 2003). Jamies disposi-tions may be open to specific women in specific social and economicconditions,17 but his position in the sexual division of labour is associatedwith masculinity. This also suggests that the competences and dispositionswhich the new petit-bourgeoise have been seen to bring to the art ofeveryday life may themselves be more open to men than women and, inparticular, when they concern aspects of domestic life.

Notes

1 This article concentrates on the three television series produced byOptomen for BBC2: The Naked Chef, The Return of the Naked Chef andHappy Days with the Naked Chef. The umbrella term The Naked Chef isoften used in what follows to refer to all three television series. These seriesspawned three cookbooks: The Naked Chef (1999) The Return of theNaked Chef (2000) and Happy Days with the Naked Chef (2001) (datesof first publication). Jamies Kitchen (2002) published as I was finishing thispiece, is loosely based on a new television series of the same name, whichfinished being broadcast during the revision process. This new series, aChannel 4 docu-soap following Jamies attempts to set up a new restaurantstaffed by unemployed trainees that he sought to transform into chefs,marks a significant departure from his previous work.

2 Nigella Bites uses a similar strategy.3 For a more detailed analysis of the formal features of The Naked Chef,

alongside an excellent discussion of its mode of address, see Moseley(2001).

4 This is not to suggest that Jamies audience is primarily male: indeed,




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research by Sainsburys supermarket suggests that his primary appeal is towomen and up-market families (Cozens, 2002).

5 For examples of books which emphasize either male culinary incompetenceor a masculine unease with the domestic kitchen, see Anderson and Walls(1996) Bastyra (1996) and Zen (2000).

6 This relationship between domestic labour and leisure-work is furthercomplicated by the ways in which womens domestic labour (including theactivities involved in feeding work such as shopping and cooking) havefrequently been seen within more traditional views of consumption as thefrivolous other of labour (for more on this see, for example, Lury, 1996).

7 Larder Lads (playing on the frequent characterization of new lad as lagerlad) a cookery book addressed to the new lad (Holland and Moore, 2000)includes recipes from new lad icons and attempts to incorporate recipesthat reflect contemporary food trends within a laddish lifestyle of footballand take-aways.

8 In the press, the new lad was seen as an emergent figure of 20-somethingBritish masculinity. Conceived as a younger brother of the new man, thenew lad was seen to eschew political correctness in favour of an ironicembrace of more traditionally laddish pursuits and attitudes.

9 Subcultural theory marginalized the domestic in a similar way (McRobbie,1981).

10 Nixon (1996) identifies the importance of Italian styling to 1980s lifestylemagazines and Spencer (1992) notes the importance of Italian style to thecasual. Thanks to Steve Jones for discussing these issues with me and, fora further discussion of the significance of Italianness to British masculinity,see Jones (1995).

11 This draws on Dick Hebdiges comments about Len Deightons HarryPalmer as a fictional extension of mod. This reference to Harry Palmercan be seen as rather more than incidental. Palmer, and his cinematic real-ization by Michael Caine in the film The Ipcress File, are crucially linkedto the 1960s London working-class masculinity celebrated in mens maga-zines, and implicitly in Jamies image. Furthermore Palmer/Caine alongsidePalmers creator, Len Deighton (himself a cookery writer as well as anovelist) were key figures in producing domestic cookery as an acceptable,and even heroic, signifier of heterosexual masculinity in the UK in the early-to mid-1960s. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the launch issue of theshort-lived Loaded spin-off Eat Soup (October/November 1996) a foodand drink magazine targeted at a male audience, should feature Caine asHarry Palmer on the front cover accompanied by the tag-line, MichaelCaine: Why its Cool to Cook. The magazine proceeds to devote ten pagesto Caine/Palmer/Deighton (Deighton, 1996; Pride, 1996).

12 Possibly due to the influence of Jamie, poncey seems to have acquired acurrency within culinary discourse in the UK as a means of refusing thepretentions of restaurant chefs and their cooking techniques. For example,




the term was used to evaluate the styles of different chefs on the BBC showThe Best by contributors to the on-line message board to accompany theshow.

13 The Naked Chef, series 2, Reunion.14 There has also been considerable resistance to Jamies omnipresence, life-

style and relationship with Sainsburys. For example, numerous web-pagesdenounce him as a Mockney git, recast his claims to authenticity asfake, and present his lifestyle and masculinity as manufactured and,sometimes, feminized. (See, for example, the fat tongue gallery,http://www.hairytongue.com/gallery/fattongue/, accessed 23 July 2002.)

15 The Naked Chef, title sequence.16 Happy Days with the Naked Chef, Moving House.17 Gregson and Lowe (1995) note how some middle-class women use paid

domestic labour to relieve themselves of the less creative aspects ofdomestic labour, making time to invest in leisure-work.

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JOANNE HOLLOWS is a Senior Lecturer in M edia and CulturalStudies a t Not tingham Trent Universi ty. She is the author o f Feminism ,Femininity and Popular Culture (M anchester Universi ty Press, 1995), co-editor o f A pproaches to Popular Film (M anchester Universi ty Press,1995) and The Film Studies Reader (Arnold , 2000) and co-author o f Foodand Cultural Studies (Routledge , forthcoming). She is currently w orkingon a book on historical transformations in the rela tionship bet w eengender, class and cooking in the UK . A ddress: M edia and CulturalStudies, Department o f English and M edia , Not tingham TrentUniversi ty, Clif ton Lane , Not tingham NG11 8NS, UK . [email:joanne .hollo ws@ntu .ac.uk]




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