Today as media technology has developed on a global scale as a result it has hastened the trend in hospitality and improved the quality of food and dining. More personalised services are provided to the guest with chef’s innovations in the lights of Silver service, Gueridon Trolley to give value of their money and provide atmost customer satisfaction.
The role of media has become so deeply embedded in our culture life. The media has an important role in modern democratic society as the main channel of communication. The population relies on the media as the main source of information and the basis on which they form their opinions and decisions. It has many sources like television, newspapers, magazines, books, sound in audio-tapes and pictures in video-tapes, internet, radio and promotional newsletters etc, where television is most comprehensive tool of media. Television produces texts about many aspects of hospitality; the one main component prevalent is that of Food and Dining (Lashley, and Morrison, 2000).
Media is conceived as an important institution in the consumer society because it produces "patterned systems of meaning" which play a key role in individual socialization and social reproduction (Finkelstein, 1989). Meaning of food and hospitality has been transformed by television personality food programmes into artistic practices of innovations, conspicuous display of taste and social status. Television food shows hosted by celebrity chefs featuring different cuisines from all over the world encourage local people to try the food/cuisine showed, in order to break the monotony. For example, Sanjeev Kapoor’s T.V shows: Indian Cuisine; Yan can cook: Polynesian, Chinese and Thai food shows; Gordon Ramsay: British celebrity chef experimenting on food with wide creativeness and innovations. Dominant message of these shows are promotion of innovations, experiments and sense of adventure as central satisfying elements of hospitality: new ingredients, new dishes, new styles, new cuisines (Lashley, and Morrison, 2000).
The Media is also an indispensable educational tool. It has educated public for continuing healthy eating habits. It is a powerful means of providing important information to consumers in order for them to make informed purchase decisions. The more that the consumer is exposed to the claims of competing providers of products and services, the better educated and sophisticated the consumer becomes regarding such issues as these products' features, benefits and relative value. Fischler, 1993 (in Wood, 2000) says, consumers turn to the media for guidance, to allay their anxieties about contemporary cultural life when faced with too many options to opt the better amongst those. The role of media has extended beyond solely that of goods promotion, to involve the production of information and knowledge that offers the consumers opportunities to acquire symbolic capital (Randall in Featherstone, 1991).
The Media influences consumers taste by creating tantalizing fictions of self-indulgence and pleasure derived from the Epicurean (Wood, 2000). This occurs in many ways, one ways is through the production of excitement. This excitement is constructed with iconic concepts and is anchored by the verbal texts. A sense of romance and magic are similarly reproduced with dramatic sunsets, seascapes, moonlit scenes, fun parties and sophisticated dinners (Randall, 1999). This sense of the epicurean has been expanded by the media through the aestheticization of food and beverage provision that presents them as cultural artefacts to be consumed as works of art (Randall, 1999). It has played a vital role for bringing awareness of pure, fresh and succulent variety of food to the public and gourmet, all of which offer the concepts of higher standards of quality in food.
Since the 1960s, that period which marked the last gasp of post-war austerity, the “hospitality” industry has grown considerably and modern tastes in dining out established and entrenched. In respect of such change it is normal to cite a number of factors in the emergence of what is regarded as a relatively unified marketplace open to external culinary influences. Without resorting to crudely deterministic explanations, it is certainly the case that the food and hospitality industries have sought to shape food tastes (Wood, 1994)
The geographical, historical and economic contexts of a culture all shape its food preferences and taste. Taste is “coloured” not just by the gustatory properties of the food itself, but its smell, sound and appearance as well as by expectations of consumers generated by marketing communications and even country of origin (Jacoby et al., 1971; Lecher et al., 1994). Fowler (1997) observed that natural tastes are in fact founded on social constructions which have been elaborated over generations. According to Bourdieu (1984), taste is not only socially constructed but it is constructed through membership of a particular habitus located in the hierarchy of class relationships. Whereas, Fowler (1997) says that food tastes are shaped by childhood experiences or family norms and socializations processes.
Taste discriminates between social groups and can be read by others as a marker of distinction, separateness and exclusion. Its function is to create social hierarchical which implicitly denote power. Taste in food reflects in part the consumer’s social and cultural origins, social ambitions and the cultural capital acquired, either as part of their upbringing or more deliberately. Bourdieu (1992) conceives taste as a means of distinguishing things to be considered as attractive and valued. He also suggests that the exercise of taste is also the process by which consumers distance themselves from that which is unattractive and not valued. Bourdieu (1984), attributed the working class taste for sweet, filling and fatty food to “a taste of necessity”, arising from the lack of choice and enjoyment of the sensation of feeling full.
Finkelstein (1989), argues that dining out is an instance of “uncivilized sociality”, that is, when most people engage in acts of dining out they do so not as a result of any conscious or explicit expression of free choice, but in response to how they think they should behave according to prevailing fashions and images. This is not to say that people are manipulated by corporate capitalism, but that we live in a society in which both consumers and suppliers engage together in constituting the environments in which uncivilized sociality can thrive.
Individuals dine out to show a willingness to cultivate and transpose the act of eating into a more socially complex and meaningful activity (Finkelstein, 1989). Dining out also transforms the act into a social event rich in the character of its setting. Dining out comes to be enjoyed as a form of entertainment and a part of the modern spectacle in which social relations are mediated through visuals images and imagined atmospheres (Finkelstein, 1989).
As Wood states in his magisterial social history of English and French eating, pays considerable attention to dining out but for the most part is preoccupied with elite forms of the phenomenon. He says that since the middle Ages, English and French eating habits have been subject to structured processes of change towards “diminishing contrasts” and “increasing varieties”. Contrasts have diminished between seasonal eating patterns and everyday eating, largely as a result of advances in technology and transportation; between elite professional cookery and everyday cookery, as peasant dishes have been absorbed into haute cuisine and importantly cookery books as an early form of food media have spread “appreciation of good cookery to wider audiences than before” and between culinary exclusion and culinary democracy as the hotel and restaurant industry has encouraged openness and access to more people.
In 1966 the author of The British Eating Out, one of the several reports published by the National Catering Inquiry sponsored by Smothers Foods, wrote that “In spite of the trend towards novel decor and a generally more ‘swinging’ atmosphere, people still go to restaurants primarily for a good meal”. But later in two decades, Finkelstein (1989) in her research says that the fact that dining out is not simply about food consumption alone.
In conclusion it is argued that eating practices in the contemporary society is influenced by the food media. Media have also played a vital role in educating the public and bringing awareness about the food in society. Today, food and beverage are promoted as exotic and exciting commodities that are a source of fascination, narcissistic desire and hedonic satisfaction (Featherstone, 1991). These commodities are perceived to consume to bring social and emotional benefits that are associated with the display of taste, class status, self-esteem and self-aggrandizement. Meaning of food and hospitality are constructed via mediated values. Food what you eat, your taste shows your social and economic capital. It is in these ways that food media can be said to create a well informed educated public that is demanding higher standards of food innovations.
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