Abstract

The Cooking-Showdown Cartoon is the site where the life of food and the cultural life of cartoons meet in a dramatic confrontation. A Cooking-Showdown Cartoon's plot gains plausibility only if its method for representing taste is persuasive. We can therefore expect Cooking-Showdown Cartoons to have the most advanced techniques for representing taste. This paper analyzes how Cooking-Showdown Cartoons represent the ‘pursuit of taste’ and investigates how this technique corresponds with the overall theme of Cooking-Showdown Cartoons. In brief, the first technique for representing taste is emphasizing the quality of the ingredients. Showing the difficulty involved in obtaining these ingredients serves to emphasize the taste of the dishes made with them. The second technique is emphasis on skill. Using his culinary skills, the hero is able to defeat the villain who uses superior ingredients. The third technique is the function of the food critics, who with their refined palates and moral bearing act in these texts as mirrors of taste. Since these techniques are objective descriptions of taste, we can call it an ‘objective representation of taste.’ The final and most powerful technique employed in Cooking-Showdown Cartoons is food from the heart. It is the hero's good and true heart that enables him to defeat the villain who otherwise has the same skill level. These foods can persuade the readers by appealing to subjective values like the heart or memory. This technique can therefore be called a ‘subjective representation of taste.’Cooking-Showdown Cartoons have a serial system and thus have serial text. The objective description of taste plays a central role in these serial texts, lending them probability of plot and making them entertaining. The whole text of Cooking-Showdown Cartoons comprises a dramatic plot that has a stable-instable-stable structure. This process shows the final showdown between hero and villain. The most important and powerful technique for representing taste is the subjective representation at this showdown. Although the plot follows a melodramatic trajectory, the finale of Cooking-Showdown Cartoons is unfulfilled, since the villain is invited to the final festival. We can find no development in the whole text. The world of Cooking- Showdown Cartoons regresses to the first situation in the plot. The finale of Cooking-Showdown Cartoons can have two results and qualities, depending on one's point of view. First, it can be read as an ultimate forgiveness narrative. In this case, Cooking-Showdown Cartoons are very positive texts. Secondly, according to a different viewpoint, it can be read as a tool to distribute capitalism. This is because the world of the finale is exactly the same as the world in which the text begins, where capitalism dominates the world with violence.