Sonic ingredients in television food programmes

Abstract

The main focus of this article is the use, significance, and role of sound in food and food travel programmes, exemplified by cooking programmes broadcast on Danish television – public service and commercial channels. The aim is to demonstrate how sound and music in this kind of programme plays an important part mediating both the cooking and the kitchen as wellordered and well organized. The use of music represents flow, but refers also to locality, globality and identity, and is often linked to the notions of nostalgia, tradition and authenticity, and contributes to an aesthetization of food programmes as it forms part of the performance and presentation of meals. The early kitchen programmes emphasized on information, as a kind of living cooking books as the idea was to enlighten the housewives and their practices by challenging their common sense choices introducing a more French inspired kitchen. In relation to such kitchen programmes todays cooking programmes seem to appeal to a broader sensibility as they present us to the possibilities of modern life, and the chefs’ multisensuorious performances underlines this – often induced by the sound. It is through the sounds in food programmes that an authentic experience of taste and smell is mediated to the viewer: both through the lustful, approving sounds made by presenters and through the cooks’ handling of raw materials. What looks delicious, also smells and tastes delicious – mediated through sound.