In Manga! Manga!The World of Japanese Comics, author Frederik L. Schodt categorizes cooking manga as type of "work manga", a loose category defined by stories about activities and professions that stress "perseverance in the face of impossible odds, craftsmanship, and the quest for excellence," and whose protagonists are frequently "young men from disadvantaged backgrounds who enter a profession and become the 'best in Japan.'" Individual chapters of cooking manga typically focus on a specific dish, and the steps involved in preparing it. While stories still incorporate standard narrative elements such as plot and character development, significant emphasis is frequently placed on the technical aspects of cooking and eating. Cooking manga stories often feature detailed descriptions or photorealistic illustrations of the dish itself; a recipe for the dish is often also included. Cooking manga is a multi-genre category, with cooking manga stories that center romance, crime, mystery, and numerous other genres having been produced. The age and gender of a cooking manga's protagonist typically indicates its intended audience, with both men and women forming the audience for the genre; while home food preparation is stereotyped as women's work in Japan as it is in the West, professional cooking and connoisseurship tend to be considered as male activities. Cooking manga is inclusive of stories concerning a variety of world cuisines, and is not limited to stories about Japanese cuisine exclusively.
History
While manga has long contained references to food and cooking, cooking manga would not emerge as a discrete genre until the 1970s. Jirō Gyū and Jō Big's , serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1973 to 1977, is noted as one of the first cooking manga titles. The genre achieved mainstream popularity in the early 1980s as a result of Japan's "gourmet boom", wherein economic growth associated with the Japanese bubble economy widened access to luxury goods and caused the appreciation of fine foods, fine dining, and the culinary arts to become popular interests and hobbies. During this period, Oishinbo was first published in the manga magazineBig Comic Spirits; the 103-volume series would become the most-circulated cooking manga of all time. To date, nearly 1,000 manga series in the cooking genre have been produced.
