The Intimacies of Industry

Celebrity chefs foster a relationship of intimacy with consumers, compounded by presenting styles, social media and the opening up of their personal lives. These intimacies are extended into domestic spaces through material objects such as kitchen equipment, specialist ingredients and cookbooks, which are brought into the home. This article interrogates the ways a group of UK consumers interact with this “stuff” of celebrity chefs and explores the ways these interactions (re)produce chefs and make them present in consumer homes. As such, it elucidates how focusing on the material objects that consumers personalize and associate with a celebrity chef can provide new insights into assessing the ways such chefs influence food and eating practices, as well as showing how these objects enable consumers to actively produce their food identities and social relations. As these relations are social and economic, attention is drawn to the manner in which the fostering of intimacies can obfuscate commercial relations.