| Abstract: | This paper examines visual and narrative techniques used in representations of food production and processing in contemporary reality television programming. These include normalizing industrial labor, controlling who is given license to speak, the use of humor, baby talk and innuendo, celebrating artifice, presenting numbers without context, and venerating mechanical precision and scale. The paper argues that together these strategies help to convert productive (wage) labor into televisual free labor. Additionally, viewer feedback on these episodes (available through on-line discussion sites and constituting yet another form of free labor) provides some evidence of the ways in which readers interpret these texts, acknowledge the conditions of industrialized labor, and begin to reflect on their own food consumption practices. |
