In search of “Hestonthusiasts”: Heston Blumenthal’s liminal celebrity chef status and hybridized fan practices

Having focused on fandom’s “textual” productivity (Fiske 37), fan studies has begun to engage more centrally with material productivities such as “fan cooking, " (Magladry), theorizing how fans prepare dishes featured in or inspired by television shows. This chapter argues that Heston Blumenthal’s celebrity chef status needs to be analyzed within the context of “transmediatization” rather than thinking of him as a “real” chef who “does TV.” It also argues that “Hestonthusiasts” articulate activity-based and media-based attachments, mirroring how Heston Blumenthal’s celebrity status, restricted to an either/or of “real” culinary activity versus “virtual” mediation. The blog “Michelin Microwave” perfectly captures such hybridity by exploring celebrity chef-branded mass-market food products. Like “In Search of Heston, " this blog also ran across the first half of the 2010s, with archived posts beginning in November 2011 and concluding in October 2016.