My dissertation explores media networks within the Chicago culinary industry. At three fieldwork sites I conducted participant observation and employee ethnography with media producers, chefs, and software app developers at the intersections of food and media. My main theoretical focus is on how different actors experience and adapt to digital media’s impact on culinary culture. Using the concepts of hypermediacy, authenticity, and immediacy, I demonstrate the struggle emerging between these networks and highlight the very real barriers to successful collaboration prosumerism is breeding across production cultures.

Page 99, just shy of the conclusions drawn from my first ethnographic research site, is set during a food-focused audio competition. It opens with an intern commenting on the user-submitted short documentaries she remixed into a teaser for the competition’s main event, an “Audio Feast” announcing the winners:

I really respect and admire each person that submitted a piece, I feel like they put so much thought and effort into each second…that you may not know listening, but when you’re producing or editing them you discover all these things, like taking out a little silence to make the story tighter…

The Audio Feast brought in five famous chefs to represent the winning documentaries in a food event focused on dialogue rather than degustation. The awkward premise shined a light on the highly divergent perspectives, processes, and products of the participant groups. Audio producers use scripted material and careful production to simulate the authentic through hypermediation. Chefs, on the other hand, deliver authenticity through the immediacy of production, distribution, and consumption.

As the event organizers, the media experts dictated logistics, creating a counterfeit culinary environment in which the media novices, the chefs, were required to perform. The chefs found it challenging to adapt their production culture and largely defaulted to the immediacy-focused taste, temperature, and timing of their milieu, even though the audience would not eat their food. When chefs were able to sublimate their own ethos and embrace the hallmarks of new media, crafting (inedible) Instagrammable food and sharing emotionally compelling narratives, they achieved some level of audience connection. But the collaboration, on the whole, was fraught with conflict and consternation and showcased the lengths to which media novices will go to avoid media production—even at the cost of their own authenticity. Ultimately, the Audio Feast exchanged participation for exposure, allowing the chefs to sidestep media creation and prosumption while shining a light on the spoils prosumerism promises to deliver.

My dissertation draws from this example as I move through the interconnected web of the culinary community, further exposing the trajectory of a culture growing increasingly more reliant on hypermediation to discover, feel, and claim tangible human experiences. How will this change the way we eat? We can only anticipate the #flavorofthefuture.

Leigh Bush. Slow Food and Fast Fast Flows: Chefs, Cuisine, and Convergence. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, Bloomington, 2017.

Leigh Bush earned her PhD from Indiana University’s Food Studies program where she researched the effects of new media on the culinary industry. She studied and worked in wine, dairy and meat production in Europe and the United States before doing her ethnographic research on food, media, and tech startups in Chicago. She has been a fellow at the IU Food Institute and at the travel and exploration digital media company, Atlas Obscura/Gastro Obscura. She has been host of the wine documentary Hoosier Hospitality: Wine, and guest-host of WFIU’s syndicated food radio program Earth Eats. Currently, she works in the tech industry in Colorado, writes freelance for the publication, Westword, and teaches adjunct at Johnson and Wales University, Denver. You can reach her at leigh.bush@gmail.com.