Chef’s Table Documentary as a Memory Narrative

Food, Past, Identity

Abstract

Memory studies is a relatively young discipline. Although the dominant debates of the discipline have become canonical over time, its discussion through components of everyday life and many concepts in the social sciences is still somewhat limited. Within the discipline of memory studies, the discussion of the relationship between food and memory is limited primarily to literature that has emerged in the last two decades. This study aims to analyze the Netflix documentary Chef’s Table through a framework centered on memory, identity, and food cultures. Chef’s Table has several features that are different from conventional cooking programs and differ in many ways from the content that focuses on food within the boundaries of popular culture. What is distinctive for the discussion here is that it focuses not only on the practice of cooking but also on the life stories of the chefs it represents as protagonists and constructs a memory narrative through a series of relationalities, such as past and present, remembering, and the (re)construction of identity. In this respect, it is an appropriate medium for exploring the relationship between these three concepts on a conceptual and empirical level. Since the relationship between remembering and eating is at the center of the memory narrative constructed by the documentary, the specific dynamics of this relationship are included in the discussion. Six episodes representative of the discussion were selected through purposive sampling and analyzed through thematic narrative analysis, which allows for the discernment of thematic orientations within a narrative, focusing on the content rather than the form and discussing its content within certain conceptual boundaries. The episodes that most clearly reflect the conceptual framework were analyzed around three themes. These chapters were constructed in a way that centers on the relationality of memory, identity, and food, which constitute the study’s conceptual framework. The selected chapters were analyzed through the themes of “the moment of remembering,” “remembering, identity and a new life,” and “remembering, communal identity and empowerment.” In line with the conceptual framework, the thematic analysis presented the qualities of eating and food-making practices as memory carriers. It revealed that the social/individual relationship with food is at the center of remembering the past and transforming identity in the past and present. The study posits that food is a vibrant medium for engaging with multiple sets of concepts and empirical material around a range of conceptual debates inherent to memory studies –social identities, biography, self, and everyday life, different ways of relating to the past, such as forgetting, trauma and nostalgia– and proposes to address these relationalities through different examples within the discipline of cultural studies.