ABSTRACT
The Food Network’s slogan, “Taste Life,” illustrates contemporary media’s approach to promoting all things food. American audiences have become gourmands with the mainstreaming of sun-dried tomatoes, arugula, and truffle oil.1 As American palates have grown more sophisticated, food marketers have responded with stimulating advertising campaigns. Food has become less of a necessity and more of a commodity as slick food marketing techniques produce global images of highly processed, packaged food products. Advertising is a “profound pedagogical site [that] has helped to elevate consumption to the primary role in defining our social selves” (Hoechsmann, 2007, p. 653). Marketing campaigns associate social values with consumption of food products. Food is above all “a cultural domain that is often elaborated into complex systems of meaning” (Goode, 1992, p. 233). In a global media market, images and narratives of food construct the way consumers consume food.
