Contribution to the panel entitled, “Doing ‘being ordinary’ in reality television discourse” 

 

“Pico de gallo, my aunt showed me how to make”: 

Constructing ordinary participants and authentic food on Real Food Real Kitchens 

 

Cynthia Gordon 

Georgetown University 

 

 

This paper investigates the construction of “realness” on the documentary-style reality series, Real Food Real Kitchens. In each of the 12 episodes of season 3 (aired in 2017) that comprise my dataset, members of a different New York City family, in their own home, are filmed as they talk about and prepare a traditional family dish. I suggest that this series’ “realness” is achieved by constructing, via both linguistic and multimodal means, the participants as “ordinary,” and the foods they prepare as “authentic.” 

 

To theorize “realness,” I integrate Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) notion of authentication, or the process of identity verification (especially by claiming historical ties); Sacks’ (1972, 1989) theorizing on membership categorization, which highlights a culture’s various identity categories, their interconnections, and category-related expectations; and Sacks’ (1970/1984) understanding of “being ordinary” as an achievement. Following existing reality show research (e.g., Gordon, 2013), I examine my phenomenon of interest at multiple structural levels: While I focus on clips showing family members cooking and interacting with each other and the camera (which constitute the bulk of each episode), I also analyze contextualizing material (e.g., voice-overs), and discuss relevant production features (e.g., blurry zoom-ins). 

 

Findings indicate that discursive features that construe participants as “ordinary” and their food as “authentic” include simultaneous talk, collaborative utterance-building, repetition, code-mixing, (habitual) narratives, and membership category references. For example, in the quotation in this abstract’s title, a woman who self-identifies as being of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent explains that she learned to make pico de gallo (fresh salsa) from her aunt; in so doing, she uses a Spanish food term, and attaches the recipe to recognizable family- and culture-related membership categories. Ordinariness and authenticity are also created as participants interact with their surroundings, including with objects (as when an Italian-American uses an inherited iron skillet that has been in his home “for as long as [he] can remember”). Materials intermittently provided to viewers in post-production, such as voice-over comments, family photos, and maps of city neighborhoods, also help create realness, as does the show’s relatively simple and non-glossy production. 

 

This paper contributes to our understanding of “realness” as linguistically and multimodally created on a documentary-style reality series focused on family and food, while also highlighting how realness entails both ordinariness and authenticity in this context. 

 

References 

Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5): 585–614. 

Gordon, Cynthia (2013). “You are killing your kids”: Framing and impoliteness in a health makeover reality TV show. In Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action (245-265). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Sacks, Harvey (1970[1984]). In J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (413-429). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Sacks, Harvey (1972). On the analyzability of stories by children. In: John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (325-345). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  

Sacks, Harvey (1989). Lecture six: The MIR membership categorization device. Human Studies 12(3): 271–281.