Foodies

Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape

Josee Johnston, Shyon Baumann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317745006
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This important cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent 'hole in the wall' ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline insists that anybody can be a foodie, the second asks foodies to look in the mirror and think about their relative social and economic privilege. By simultaneously considering both of these stories, and studying how they operate in tension, a delicious sociology of food becomes available, perfect for teaching a broad range of cultural sociology courses.

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Foodies, Omnivores, and Discourse

We are, of course, interested in what foodies eat. As scholars who are personally interested in eating, we think a lot about the texture, flavor, aroma, freshness, and general deliciousness of foods. We admire the skills involved with finely dicing an onion into perfectly uniform pieces, creating a flavorful fish stock, or piping perfect macarons. However, as sociologists studying food, we need to go beyond the material details of the food itself, to investigate the social conditions of food’s production and consumption. Food scholar and historian Warren Belasco identifies a “food studies axiom”: “what we think about food may have little to do with the actual material properties of the food itself” (2002: 13). This means that we are interested in not just what foodies eat, but also how foodies talk about food, write about food, use food in public culture, make social connections through food, and how food operates as a source of status and distinction. In this chapter, our goal is threefold: (1) to briefly situate our study within a larger literature on the sociological study of food, culture, and taste; (2) to demonstrate food’s connection to discourse, or, put differently, the significance of how foodies think, write, and talk about food; and (3) to outline some of the debate surrounding the term “foodies,” including the thoughts of those whom we interviewed. By fulfilling these goals, we will provide an overview of key concepts that we use throughout the book.

An Introduction to the Study of Food and Taste

This section presents an overview of the realm of food studies as it relates to questions of meaning and identity, as well as concerns of social status and distinction. In general, it is worth noting that food is a subject that has traditionally not received a great deal of scholarly attention. In part, this stems from the Western intellectual dualism that prioritizes cognition over embodiment, and denigrates the material and practical nature of human life (Curtin and Heldke 1992: 6–7). This denigration has a gendered dimension: While food can be made significant when it resides in the domain of men, markets, and production, the realm of everyday eating and sustenance has been linked with the private, seemingly less important world of women. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz (2002: 26) presents this as a conundrum: Food is essential as sustenance and a form of group membership, yet it is frequently taken for granted. Sociologists Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Sharon Zukin echoed Mintz’s sentiment in a 1995 review article—despite the immense popular interest in food, “few sociologists have analyzed food in terms of systems of production or consumption, cultural products or cultural words, or social context” (1995: 194). While anthropologists have paid attention to how closed societies feed themselves (Mintz 2002: 24), sociologists have traditionally neglected the realm of food (Warde and Martens 2000: 1), with some important exceptions (e.g., Mennell 1996; Goody 1982; Elias 2000). The French sociologist Claude Fischler, for example, drew broadly from physiology, psychology, and sociology to illuminate contemporary food culture, or what he termed “gastro-anomie,” in his influential work, L’Homnivore (1990).

Despite historic neglect, sociologists have increasingly come to understand the importance of food in social life, shedding light on how food plays a vital role in the creation of meaning, the construction of bonds of solidarity and attachment, and the creation of everyday forms of politics (e.g., Carolan 2011; Ferguson 2004; Naccarato and LeBesco 2012; Warde 1997; Wood 1995). As Parkhurst Ferguson’s 2005 review of food scholarship suggests, an increasing number of scholars have come to appreciate “just how good food is to think with” (2005: 681). Sociologist Gary Alan Fine writes: “[t]he connection between identity and consumption gives food a central role in the creation of community, and we use our diet to convey images of public identity” (1996: 1). Who eats what speaks volumes about who belongs, and who is excluded from communities at a local and national level. Belasco argues that “to eat is to distinguish and discriminate, include and exclude. Food choices establish boundaries and borders” (2002: 2). Scholars have weighed in on how food is used to constitute boundaries of belonging to cities, nations, and diasporas, particularly in light of transnational flows of capital and people (Gabaccia 1998; Penfold 2008; Wilk 2002; Appadurai 1988; Hauck-Lawson and Deutsch 2009), while other scholars have made important connections between food, empire, and globalization processes (Mintz 1985; Wilk 2006; Barndt 2007; Ritzer 2000). The link between food and gender identities has also been explored, along with the connections between food, race, and ethnicity (e.g., Ray 2004; Williams-Forson 2006; Parasecoli 2005, 2007; Bentley 2005; Inness 2001a; Slocum 2010; Slocum and Saldanha 2013), as well as the role of food in popular culture (e.g., Ferry 2003; Naccarato and LeBesco 2012; Parasecoli 2008).

These contributions to our collective understanding of food have been multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, but another more specific contribution that we draw upon in this book has been made through the sociology of culture and its study of taste. While the sociology of culture has not been centrally concerned with food, it can help us understand how taste and culture evolve across time, and how a sense of “good taste” is linked to social status. Bourdieu’s seminal work in this area, Distinction (1984), drew on surveys with French citizens to investigate how tastes related to social class, and how aesthetic preferences operated to bolster and reproduce class inequality. For Bourdieu, the consecration of certain cultural preferences as part of “good taste” is not a random phenomenon, but reflects the ability of dominant class factions to legitimate their tastes as superior. Further, Bourdieu argued that it is difficult for those born outside of a privileged socio-economic milieu to develop this “good taste”—or, to put it differently, to acquire the cultural capital required to appreciate cultural artifacts associated with good taste.

Bourdieu’s work has inspired a plethora of cultural analyses examining how access to cultural capital facilitates the construction of class identities and maintenance of social hierarchy. Most studies of cultural consumption that have examined the constitution of cultural capital have been concerned with the arts—music, the performing arts, museum-going, etc.—and, as a result, research on cultural capital has tended to neglect the banal concerns of everyday life, like eating and drinking.¹⁴ This is somewhat puzzling since Distinction opens with a call to conceptualize culture broadly, moving beyond an understanding of culture as synonymous with ballet and theater, and instead connecting culture with the “elementary taste for the flavours of food” (Bourdieu 1984: 1). For us, looking at Bourdieu’s work suggests the need to examine the ways cultural capital operates in the intimate realm of social reproduction to bolster the legitimacy of the cultural preferences of dominant groups. Working in a similar mode of inquiry, Naccarato and LeBesco use the term “culinary capital” to investigate “how and why certain foods and food-related practices connote, and by extension, confer status and power on those who know about and enjoy them” (2012: 4).

In the decades following the publication of Bourdieu’s Distinction, sociologists have debated the extent to which aesthetic preferences are correlated with socio-economic hierarchies. As Alan Warde puts it, “Does taste still serve power?” (2008). Scholars have also questioned to what extent Bourdieu’s work is relevant outside of France (Vander Stichele and Laermans 2006), and raised questions about the connection between class rule and aesthetic preferences, particularly in an era when overt snobbery is frowned upon. With haute cuisine in decline, and a greater interest in rustic, authentic foods, and filling, hearty fare associated with working people (Bourdieu 1984: 194–195), it might appear that the age of food snobbery and status-seeking is in retreat. While contemporary taste hierarchies are not simple or straightforward affairs, we believe that there is still an important relationship between social class, power, and aesthetic preferences as they relate to food. In this book, it is our contention that the everyday-life concerns of eating can say a great deal about the relationship between taste, class, and power. When read carefully, gourmet culture can serve to affirm and elaborate Bourdieu’s key assertion on the importance of everyday cultural forms—like food—for understanding the creation and maintenance of social status and distinction (see Johnston and Baumann 2007). These hierarchies persist, even in a cultural context where foodies can enjoy high-priced dinners alongside food-truck lunches. As Naccarato and LeBesco convincingly argue, even in the “topsy-turvy world of competitive eating and the junk food blogosphere, culinary capital is there for the taking” (2002: 18).

Part of the complexity of the contemporary gourmet foodscape lies in its “omnivorous” nature. Because our analysis will rely heavily on recent sociological work on omnivorousness—since we argue that foodies are cultural omnivores—here we provide an introduction to the central ideas of this vein of research. While the term “omnivore” has an intuitive meaning as somebody who eats many things, our use of the term “omnivorous” is not biological—we are not referring to a species’ openness to eating various plants and animals. Sociologists of culture (e.g., Richard Peterson) use the term “omnivorousness” to posit a general trend away from snobbish exclusion towards cultural eclecticism by high-status cultural groups (Peterson 1997a, 2005; Peterson and Kern 1996; Peterson and Simkus 1992; Levine 1988: 243).¹⁵ In the omnivorous era, cultural consumption marking high status through a reliance on a few highbrow genres of culture, like opera, is a less effective signal of social status. In place of the traditional high/low divide as a status marker, high status is signaled by selectively drawing on multiple cultural forms from across the cultural hierarchy. With musical tastes, for instance, high status in past decades was signaled through one’s appreciation of classical music. More recently, however, high status can be effectively signaled through knowledge of a wide variety of musical genres ranging, for example, from Appalachian bluegrass to Cuban music from the 1930s, in addition to knowledge about chamber music and Wagnerian opera.

While past sociological work on cultural omnivorousness has mainly focused on musical tastes (van Eijck 2001; Peterson and Kern 1996; Peterson and Simkus 1992), reading (Zavisca 2005), or a variety of types of arts consumption (DiMaggio and Mukhtar 2004; Fisher and Preece 2003; López Sintas and García Álvarez 2004; Vander Stichele and Laermans 2006), in this book we examine omnivorousness in American gourmet food culture. In taking the term of omnivorousness back to a concern with comestibles, we argue that, like arts consumption in general, cuisine is a cultural realm where individuals can effectively engage in status displays. Some might object that, because food is fundamental to human existence, it belongs in a different category of analysis than cultural products like film or music. While food consumption does indeed contain an element of necessity not possessed by other cultural realms (e.g., not everybody listens to music, but everybody must eat), food choices cannot be adequately understood as purely functional. Food scholars have persuasively demonstrated cuisine’s significance as a socio-cultural realm ripe with meaning, symbols, myths, and latent messages about gender, class, race, and social standing (for examples, see Kors-meyer 2005; Ferguson 2005).

The omnivorousness era appears to support a more inclusive and democratic notion of what counts as good or prestigious culture, and to do away with the arbitrary and discriminatory standards of the traditional cultural hierarchy. However, as Peterson and Kern (1996) and others (Bryson 1996; Emmison 2003; Johnston and Baumann 2007) have noted, omnivorousness does not indicate the end of social status distinctions, but seems to function as an alternative strategy for generating status. Omnivores are not necessarily less status-seeking, but status is sought out in newly selective ways. A large number of studies within various national contexts have effectively demonstrated that high-status cultural consumption is “becoming increasingly diversified, inclusive, or omnivorous” (Peterson 2005: 261). At the same time, the research emphasizes that omnivorous consumption “does not imply that people are equally apt to like everything” (van Eijck 2001: 1180). A key question then arises: Which cultural choices are selected by omnivores and how are these selections legitimated?

Sociological research has brought some useful speculation to bear about why snobbish exclusion is in decline, and omnivorous cultural hierarchies are on the rise (van Eijck and Bargeman 2004: 442).¹⁶ Peterson and Kern, for example, suggest that “omnivorous inclusion seems better adapted to an increasingly global world managed by those who make their way, in part, by showing respect for the cultural expressions of others” (1996: 906). Other authors (Bryson 1996; van Eijck 2001) have examined patterns of cultural consumption in survey data to produce excellent studies of the nature of omnivorous tastes. However, the data they employ force them to infer, rather than observe, underlying logics for omnivorousness, and these accounts cannot explain why certain cultural products are preferred by omnivores. In this book, we hope to illuminate the principles at work in omnivorous culinary consumption to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate cultural options. (Our focus here is on dominant gourmet food discourse, and not foodie sub-cultures; for a discussion of culinary capital and resistance at a range of diverse sites, like competitive eating contests, see Naccarato and LeBesco’s Culinary Capital (2012).)

In Chapters 2 and 3, we argue that food is legitimized for omnivorous foodies when it can be framed as authentic or exotic. We argue that, through these two frames, cultural consumption allows foodies to negotiate a fundamental ideological tension between democracy and distinction—a tension that resurfaces in the book’s various chapters. On the one hand, the decline in the legitimacy of snobbism and the rise of meritocracy (whether imagined or real) encourages an inclusive cultural ethos. Not only is open snob-bism frowned upon, but also down-home charm and lack of pretentiousness are qualities that are highly valued in our cultural leaders and culinary icons. Both authenticity and exoticism are reasonable and potentially egalitarian criteria—not snobbish—for cultural consumption, and suggest that cultural forms outside the dominant Western cultural canon can be appreciated on an equal footing. On the other hand, authenticity and exoticism can work to validate a relatively narrow range of foods—despite coming from disparate culinary traditions—that require considerable cultural and/or economic capital on the part of individuals. As a result, frames of authenticity and exoticism contain elements of democratic inclusivity, while they simultaneously work to legitimize and reproduce status distinctions.

It is important to acknowledge that the culinary tension between democratic inclusiveness and class distinction is by no means new. In his study of 19th-century gastronomy, Stephen Mennell (1996: 266) noted precisely this tension between the democratizing and status-affirming function of gastronomy, and suggested that, over the last two centuries, the codification of gastronomic principles democratized taste by making standards more broadly accessible to the public.¹⁷ We do not dispute Mennell’s argument, and recognize the importance of democracy as an organizing ideology that has emerged over decades, and, indeed, centuries. However, recent omnivorousness trends warrant critical interrogation, since democratic ideology appears to obscure the simultaneous persistence of status distinction and displays of cultural capital in gourmet culture.

Certainly the mass media may have made it easier for non-elites to learn about new food fashions and high-status cuisines, and to even enter the field as a culinary “expert” on food forums like Chowhound and Yelp (see Naccarato and LeBesco 2012: 67–83). However, this process of democratization is a relative one, and exists alongside an ever-changing fashion cycle of high-status foods as well as elite-controlled practices of culinary distinction. To be clear, we do not think that an omnivorous food culture is straightforwardly democratic or straightforwardly hierarchical. Instead, our argument is that, within the gourmet foodscape, democratic ideology operates in tension with ideologies of status and distinction, suggesting that foodie culture cannot be dismissed as simple snobbery re-packaged, or unequivocally praised as indicating a new era of cultural democracy.

Culinary expertise itself reflects this tension between democratic expansion, and the persistence of distinction. On the one hand, there has traditionally been, and continues to be, a heavy weight in the culinary field given to sources with institutional legitimacy, such as authors writing in prestigious print magazines like Saveur and newspapers like the New York Times. On the other hand, the gourmet foodscape has been undeniably influenced by the input of popular food personalities appearing on millions of television screens; these figures widely disseminate knowledge about food trends and celebrated chefs beyond New York Times subscribers. In addition, the rapid expansion of food blogs and food-centered websites and review forums have broadened the playing field, and opened up opportunities to participate in the creation of foodie discourse (e.g., by posting a restaurant review online). While all of these diverse voices are focused on matters of “good food,” it is important to emphasize that power and privilege still shape participation in the gourmet foodscape. A middle-class American can save up for a celebra-tory dinner at an acclaimed restaurant and then post a review online; however, this act cannot be equated with the influence and power of key players in the culinary field who are heavily endowed with cultural and economic capital, and much better positioned to shape what foods, cuisines, and restaurants are fashionable.

Discourse, Democracy, and Distinction

As noted above, our focus in this book is not simply on particular culinary practices (e.g., who cooks what and what cooking techniques are employed), but engages fundamentally with the constitution of culinary discourse—how food is talked about, discussed, and understood in the public realm and what this means. Discourse can be understood as an institutionalized system of knowledge and thought that organizes populations, and shapes the parameters of what thoughts are popular and even possible. Critically oriented discourse analysis is not simply interested in how social reality is discursively constituted, but has a par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to Second Edition
• Series Foreword to Second Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Entering the Delicious World of Foodies
• 1 Foodies, Omnivores, and Discourse
• 2 Eating Authenticity
• 3 The Culinary Other: Seeking Exoticism
• 4 Foodie Politics: This is One Delicious Revolution!
• 5 Class and Its Absence
• 6 Caring about Food: Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen
• Conclusion: Foodie Continuity, Change, and Moral Ambiguity
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Endnotes
• References
• Index