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Featured at the NYC Food Film Festival this past week, Eating Right is a short documentary that focuses on the use of food stereotypes by politicians in their campaigns. Here is an exclusive interview with Alison Perelman, the director of the film, and be sure to check out the film here: http://media.asc.upenn.edu/media/a_perelman/a_perelman.html

Can you tell me about your film Eating Right?

The film looks at the way food is used as a kind of rhetorical strategy by both political campaigns and the media that cover them. Specifically, the film outlines the ways food is used to frame candidates as both Average Joe's who understand the concerns of everyday Americans, and out of touch elitists who like fancy, foreign sounding food and couldn't possibly govern with the interests of average Americans in mind. I look at three main ways this happens. First, the film looks at examples of food and beverage entering political discourse, specifically, through the adoption of the terms "latte liberal" and "Joe Six Pack" as a way to describe class without actually talking about class. The film also looks at how diner politics -- the ubiquitous campaign stops at diners and local joints -- is a way to demonstrate that a candidate understands everyday American people because he or she has a (supposed) affinity for greasy spoons. Finally, the film traces instances of "food faux pas," or moments on the campaign trail when a candidate reveals a food taste that is used by his opponent to frame the offending pol as an out of touch elitist. There's a history of this -- Dukakis recommending Iowa farmers grown Belgian endive, Obama mentioning the word arugula -- and it is usually the case that the faux pas becomes a faux pas when it's committed by a Democratic candidate and is used as a point of attack by his opponent.

What got you started in filmmaking?

I took a class. This is my first film.

How did you learn about the NYC Food Film Festival?

I’d made a film about food and politics and was interested in finding a place where it might be relevant.

I noticed that your thesis at UPenn is focused on consumer culture, questions of food and taste, and the role of consumption in American political campaigns. Can you talk a little about this and how this inspired you to produce Eating Right?

The process of making Eating Right helped me articulate my academic interests in a really useful way. Making a film requires that you flex completely different creative muscles than does writing papers, and as a result forces you to think differently about what questions you want to answer and how you’re going to answer them.

Do you have any experience in the food industry? How did this affect your decision to create Eating Right?

Other than a summer working in a bagel shop, I have no experience working in the food industry. Though my academic interest in food spurred the creation of Eating Right.

Eating Right focuses strongly on the use of food by politicians to talk about class and critique their opponents. How did you make this correlation between food and politics?

During campaigns candidates try to frame themselves in really particular ways through what they say and what they do. For example, Mitt Romney is a billionaire, however during his campaign he frequently made stops in places like KFC. There’s little reason to believe that this is a practice he engages in his life outside of the campaign, so the decision to eat there is clearly performative. But what are the implications of his doing so? And what benefit does it serve McCain to attack Obama for mentioning arugula and Whole Foods? These are the questions I wanted to investigate in my film.

Can you talk about your work in the television industry prior to attending UPenn for your doctorate? How did this affect your film?

I lived in LA for three years after college, one of which was spent working as an assistant at a talent agency in the TV Literature department (where writers and directors are represented) and another as the assistant to the head writers/directors of a TV series.

What message are you trying to convey to viewers in Eating Right?

The underlying idea I want to get across is that candidates use food to present themselves as the stereotypical average American, and that the effort to do so is one of the most consistent yet subtle threads during a presidential campaign. I would hope that viewers would come away from the film more aware of the fact that campaign stops at diners is a campaign convention, but it also is designed with a really specific end in mind- to convince viewers that candidates are “just like us” because they eat the same food we eat. By the same token, campaigns attack a candidate as being intractably different because they don’t eat like us. The definition of eating like us, as we all know, is preposterous. There’s arugula on the menu at Chili’s; Obama is not different because he may occasionally eat it.

Is there anything else you want to say about your film?

I hope you like it, and it’s available to be viewed here: http://media.asc.upenn.edu/media/a_perelman/a_perelman.html (Or, if that doesn’t work, here: http://www.asc.upenn.edu/students/GradBio.aspx?id=79)