Pop Culture In Food Documentary

Food. Everyone needs it to survive. Yet, most people don’t care about the history of food, nor do most people like documentaries. Yet, when the two are together it becomes a genre that draws people in. Food documentaries is a sub-genre of the documentary genre. What does that sub-genre mean? Does Cooked a Netflix Original fit the guidelines for a food documentary? What of the characteristics of Cooked that fit those guidelines?

Cooked is a four-episode docuseries based off of the book written by Michael Pollan. Pollan is also the main character or host of this docuseries. This series takes the audience through four different elements. The series also explores how those affect and change the food people eat. He also goes into the history of

Food documentaries such as Cooked, center themselves around food. While it might impact the viewing of the documentary. Pop culture doesn’t affect Cooked in the same way other “culinary-obsession movies” do (Gleiberman, 2002, p. 62). The way pop culture affects food also changes from region to region. Where the audience is affects what food is chosen to ‘‘define inclusion and encourage discipline, solidarity, and the maintenance of social boundaries’’ (Goode, 1992, p. 234). This makes it difficult to find something to connect all the cultures and areas around the world. Each area of the world has different resources available and a different way to go about using those resources. The one thing all those areas and cultures have in common is the impact brought by

Pollan shows a pig in multiple stages but only because he ties in an anecdote about his own pet pig that he had when he was younger. He includes pictures in this story to show the growth, and the audience sees the pig’s body after being butchered, but that is to show how the process of cooking the pig relates to the person raising the pigs. Pollan even connects the editing so that the audience finds out after that, the pig the audience has been watching be smoked on a grill is one of the pigs this farmer had butchered. What really connects it is the fact that the audience then sees the pig farmer at the barbecue picnic eating the pig that has been slow cooking over a fire for hours, showing that food truly does bring people together.

Those scenes help “emphasize the importance of visual evidence in informing the citizen consumer’s perceptions of the source and composition of meat” (Smaill, 88). While many food documentaries out there focus on only the horrid aspects of the food industry, Pollan has chosen to show the people the amazing areas of food. This gives the docuseries a different atmosphere when watching than other