Espetáculo à mesa: ética da alimentação no Masterchef Profissionais

Abstract

It is considered that the television productions have been dedicated to giving a media visibility to the act of eating and cooking. Reality shows are examples of the increase in the visibility space of gastronomy, since they are an inviting strategy to unite two strong elements: eating and playing. Therefore, the gastronomic spectacle praises the kitchen as a space of competition and, in this context, the importance of reflecting on the formation of an ethics around the food question in the media is observed. The purpose of this study was to understand the ethics of food in the context of the media from the reality show program Masterchef Profissionais. We used the technique of moving image analysis to elaborate the analytical categories of the investigated corpus that were systematized as follows: (1) the contemporary shows where gastronomy becomes a television show presents the space of the kitchen in a makeup, displaced and distant from reality that can not be achieved except by vicarious experience; (2) the media kitchen is the concretization of the spectacle, it refers to the construction of an ideal of kitchen made for a purely visual consumption, interpreted as a media arena of disinhibition that has the figure of the chef of kitchen strategically exalted; (3) power relations in the kitchen, even if they meet a hierarchical logic in the professional scope, become authoritarian and abusive when there is no establishment of a socio-ethics, depriving ethics of acting in favor of democracy; (4) eating can be understood as a regenerative way of establishing a food anthropology, by extending the ethical dilemmas of food to a political sphere. The exercise of thinking about the relation of food and ethics driven by media visibility, envisions the modeling of a new kitchen format that is produced by an image-mediated language system, where its construction has re-signified symbolic relations with food, with the act of cooking and with the media itself.