Book Reviews

“In critical discourse studies there remains a lack of attention to how power, ideology and class relations are communicated and reproduced at the level of popular culture. Through a beautifully contextualised study in Slovenia, this book takes an important step to address this, showing just how much can be revealed through the case of cookbooks and cookery programs. If you need to be persuaded that critical discourse studies should pay more attention to popular media and culture, then you should read this new book.” David Machin, Örebro University

“This book is an engaging and absorbing insight into social class and cookery books. Tominc offers us a fascinating discussion of the ways in which lifestyle and social class are intertwined with recipes across national contexts, employing CDA in a creative and articulate way.” Angela Smith, University of Sunderland

“One of the main strengths of Tominc’s account is her attention to detail, especially when discussing the translation of Jamie Oliver’s books to Slovene. She is able to convincingly show that Oliver builds “the brand of a young lad” who is at the same time close to both the younger and the older generations of the British food programme audience through diverse language styles and when these shows are introduced to Slovenia, and the cookbooks translated, a slightly different brand emerges. /…/ The book represents a valuable contribution to the field of Food Studies, especially with its suggestion and demonstration that CDA is one of the most suitable approaches for Food Studies.” Dejan Jontes, University of Ljubljana, in Journal of Language and Politics 18:4 (2019)

Tominc’s analysis of nutrition in Slavic cookbook discourse is also distinctive, as this
topic is rarely addressed in linguistics. She observes that in standard cookbooks vegetables are described with a nutritionist vocabulary, a scientific reduction of the food in terms of cooking techniques and its nutrition. In contrast, the Novaks’ cookbooks emphasize taste. Like Oliver, they call for healthy, local, authentic and ordinary food, but are unique in invoking Slavic tradition and the past. /…/
The book is one of the first to demonstrate the global reach of celebrity chefs, but perhaps Tominc’s biggest contribution is her observation that this global lifestyle discourse does not entail a mere copy of ideology across borders; rather, the discourse is adapted for each context, including language and culture. Keri Matwick, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Kelsi Matwick, University of Florida, USA in Discourse and Society 30(3), 2019.