Food and the media : production, representation and consumption

The media bring the social and cultural significance of food to public attention in all their forms. Food – its production, its preparation and its consumption – is a topic that features increasingly frequently in print, on radio, in the cinema, on television and online. Over the past sixty years there has been a gradual, but in recent years, quickening rise in food’s prominence in the media. This is partly because there has been a steady global expansion in the media industries themselves and there have been large increases in the range and forms of output. It is also partly because of the simultaneous rise of the global food industry and its dominance of commercial advertising...the sociology of how people learn to cook and what use they make of printed materials in the process are neglected research topics. [Taken from introduction]