Cocinando las alegrías: Imagen y discurso en Bizarre Foods America

Abstract:This article presents the search results for the discursive and visual (re)presentations of San Basilio de Palenque, its food, and people in the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods America TV show with Andrew Zimmern. This was a qualitative work that used multimodality and visual anthropology to analyze the relationships between text (verbal), image, and cinematographic elements. It is the conjunction of the three elements that generates a series of (re)presentations and (re)constructions of Palenque and its inhabitants that far exceed the intention of the program: to talk about rich and unique cuisine. Food appears as a rhetorical device through which privilege manages to legitimize the practice of desiring and consuming the Other. Bizarre Foods and what is shown in the episode become an excuse to address issues such as authenticity, the consumption of ethnicity, and the romanticization of poverty.