Space, Taste and Affect

Atmospheres That Shape the Way We Eat

Emily Falconer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781315307459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

This book is an exploration of how time, space and social atmospheres contribute to the experience of taste. It demonstrates complex combinations of material, sensual and symbolic atmospheres and social encounters that shape this experience.

Space, Taste and Affect brings together case studies from the fields of sociology, geography, history, psycho-social studies and anthropology to examine debates around how urban designers, architects and market producers manipulate the experience of taste through creating certain atmospheres. The book also explores how the experience of taste varies throughout life, or even during fleeting social encounters, challenging the sense of taste as static. This book moves beyond common narratives that taste is 'acquired' or developed, to emphasize the role of psycho-social histories of nostalgia, memories of childhood, migration, trauma and displacement in the experience of we eat and drink. It focuses on entrenched social dimensions of class, value and distinction instead of psychological and neuroscientific conceptualizations of taste and sensuous practices of consumption to be intrinsically linked to the experience of taste in complex ways.

This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, human geography, tourism and leisure studies, anthropology, psychology, arts and literature, architecture and urban design.

Part I

Distinctive tastes

Space, consumption and (dis)taste

1Beer consumption, embodied distaste and anti-corporate consumer identities

Thomas Thurnell-Read

Processes through which consumers align their identities with specific products and tastes have been well explored by academics (Belk, 1988; Warde, 1994). However, it is only recently that the role of emotional and bodily experiences which play a part in consumption have begun to receive greater attention (Rafferty, 2011; Rhys-Taylor, 2013). While ‘good’ or ‘bad’ consumption can be understood in terms of competing expressions of meaning and morality, it can also be acknowledged that consuming ‘in the right way’ can ‘feel good’ (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010). Yet, as Wilk (1997) has observed, academic work on consumer choice and taste largely overlooks the significance of distaste to consumption practices. The act of consumption involves both selection and rejection. This is particularly pronounced when considering eating and drinking practices which involve both ‘introjection’ (taking in) and ‘separation’ (keeping out) (Falk, 1994). Consumers can and do express revulsion and hatred for particular tastes and, further, these distastes are often articulated in ways which indicate the affective and embodied qualities of consumption.

While these qualities might manifest at the intimate level, residing within or emanating from the individual consumer body, they can also be read as strikingly social and political. The political content of consumer choice has been explored, meaning that there is now a greater understanding of the ways in which consumers can embrace some elements of consumer culture while actively rejecting others. As Simon (2011: 147) observes, ‘many have turned to the realm of buying to express their political concerns and desires’ meaning that the ways in which consumers interact with brands can be seen as ‘one of the most dynamic forms of political expression today’ (Simon, 2011: 148). In this sense, consumers can use consumption not only as an expression of individual taste but as a means of resisting ‘the signs of corporate life, the symbols, services and commodities associated with large multinational corporations’ (Smart, 1999: 1).

This chapter explores the case of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), a consumer group established in the United Kingdom in 1971 in response to changes taking place in the British beer and pubs industry. CAMRA, therefore, might be understood as part of a wider trend towards resisting mass consumer products which are seen as bland, generic and lifeless (Kingsnorth, 2011). Within this, expressions of distaste for particular beer brands allow a means to voice dissatisfaction with corporate ideology and mass consumption practices. Whilst this is an expression of individual taste (liking this beer but hating that one), it is also an example of the socio-political nature of consumption meaning individual expressions of (dis)taste are part of wider changes in social and cultural life. The chapter suggests that many of the varied functions of contemporary consumption such as performing autonomy through choice, expressing identity and rebelling against changes (Gabriel and Lang, 1995) can be observed in the examples of consumer resistance enacted via distaste and disgust drawn from analysing CAMRA.

Embodying consumer resistance

The figure of the modern consumer, as Slater (1997: 33–34) observes, has long been viewed through a series of dichotomies; between ‘rational or irrational, sovereign or manipulated, autonomous or other-determined, active or passive, creative or conformist, individual or mass, subject or object’. On the one hand, over recent decades we have seen the widespread use of the term ‘consumer society’ to condemn ‘what appeared to be a growing and uncontrolled passion for material things’ (Sassatelli, 2007: 2) and an associated concern with the apparent ease with which consumers could be manipulated by powerful companies (Schwarzkopf, 2011). On the other hand, we have also seen a more recent emergence of the powerful, yet problematic belief that consumption can be made ‘ethical’ (Lewis and Potter, 2011) and that ‘consumer activism’ can foster ‘a larger cultural and political conversation about who and what consumers are and should be’ (Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, 2012: 3).

Many consumption practices may be viewed as symbolic behaviour, used to align oneself with a particular social cause (Moore, 2008). However, a recent trend has been to identify and acknowledge the ways in which consumption ought to be understood as practice as well as performance; paying regard to not just meanings and symbols but materials, competencies, emotions and embodiment as constituents of ‘good’ or ‘ethical’ consumer practice (Wheeler, 2012). As Sassatelli and Davolio (2010: 219) observe in relation to the Slow Food movement, which bears many similarities to CAMRA in attempting to empower consumers to resist the pernicious influence of ‘mass’ or ‘fast’ food production and distribution, individuals need to combine both ‘cognitive knowledge’ and ‘incarnate taste’ in enacting the role of ethical or responsible consumer.

As such, recent studies have attuned scholars of consumption to be aware of the role of the body, and of emotions and senses, in consumer practice. Importantly, as the chapter will illustrate, this involves negative as well as positive experiences and is felt as much in disgust as in pleasure. For example, in Nixon and Gabriel’s (2016: 53) recent study of individuals who actively reject mass consumption, participants expressed how the spaces and objects of mass consumption were felt as invasive, polluting and contagious; as ‘a standardized, artificial world of consumerism that is damaging to one’s health’ (Nixon and Gabriel, 2016: 53).

One area where these concerns have become pronounced is the global spread of ‘fast food’ business models which prioritise convenience, standardisation and efficiency in the pursuit of profit and market dominance (Reiter, 1991; Lang and Heasman, 2004; Ritzer, 2013) and, in marked contrast, of various attempts to resist such pressures through ‘everyday practices of food production, distribution and consumption’ (Donald and Blay-Palmer, 2006: 1917). The Slow Food movement, therefore, foregrounds the political nature of food choices and food practices (Sassatelli and Davolio, 2010) by ‘transforming quite simple activities, such as eating a bowl of pasta or holding a farmers’ market, into politically meaningful acts’ (van Bommel and Spicer, 2011: 1728). While we see that food ‘sustains identity’ (Warde, 1997: 199) and can be deployed as an instrument of identification and division (Ashley et al, 2004), we also need to acknowledge the ways in which, as Wilk (2006, 21) has argued, ‘food is a potent symbol of what ails society’. Thus, the juxtaposition of gluttonous, unthinking, fast food consumers and reflexive, critical, ethical consumers who resist mass production and standardisation has now long dominated popular and academic debates of contemporary food and illustrates the intersection of individual, embodied, social and political facets of consumption (Guthman, 2003).

Adding to these debates, this chapter considers the role of CAMRA in resisting the rationalisation of the British beer industry. Following a brief summary of the research methods and context, the chapter will therefore consider the ways in which the embodied rejection of mass-produced beer, most vividly seen in expressions of revulsion and disgust, serves to illustrate the socio-political nature of consumption and of consumer bodies.

Research methods and context

This chapter draws on a wider qualitative research undertaking focusing on CAMRA and, more generally, recent trends in British beer consumption. Founded in 1971, CAMRA now has over 180,000 members and a sizable staff of over 40 at its headquarters in the English city of St Albans. Throughout its existence, the campaign has focused on protecting and promoting ‘Real Ale’, a traditional form of beer involving secondary fermentation in a cask or bottle and defined as having no extraneous gases added, in opposition to the widespread use of pasteurised, mass-produced beer. Alongside the campaigning activities of the head office team, over 200 local ‘branches’ spread across the UK and Northern Ireland hold regular meetings, organise beer festivals and ‘survey’ local pubs to evaluate them for the extent and quality of their offerings of Real Ale. The majority of those who ‘work’ for CAMRA do so as volunteers, including a National Executive of 12 directors, local branch presidents, secretaries and finance officers, and the numerous members and non-members who serve beer and act as stewards at local and national beer festivals.

A total of 53 semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of CAMRA including directors, salaried operational staff and local branch members and volunteers as well as others such as ale brewers, beer writers and members of a student ale drinking society, many of whom were also current or previous CAMRA members. Further, participant-observation was conducted in a range of contexts including attending two CAMRA AGMs, local branch meetings and a number of beer festivals and brewery tours. Finally, archival research was conducting focusing specifically on CAMRA publications such as the monthly member’s newspaper What’s Brewing and the annual Good Beer Guide.

‘All that gas and fizz?! No thanks!’

Throughout the research, it was clear that members of CAMRA exhibited a strong attachment to the beer they consumed. This tended to manifest in two ways. First, as I explore in more detail elsewhere (Thurnell-Read, 2016; 2018), participants could demonstrate a passionate and knowledgeable preference for Real Ale and frequently exhibited an exuberant pleasure in its consumption. It was, for example, common for participants to speak of their attraction to the taste of Real Ale, with various references by interviewees to their ‘conversion’ when they first realised ‘just how good real beer could taste’. As Lupton (1998: 139) observes, such experiences can be felt as a ‘pull’ of desire and attraction towards a particular object ‘which we ourselves may find difficult to explain or understand’. However, in the second manifestation of the strong attachments exhibited by Real Ale consumers, both implicit and explicit rejections of mass-produced beer and, at times by association, those who drink it represent the importance of distaste in consumer practices (Wilk, 1997). As such, CAMRA publications and interviews were filled with references to ‘nasty fizzy lager’ invariably described as ‘bland’, ‘gassy’ or ‘tasteless’.

To further explore the second of these two manifestations of consumer preference, those representing distaste and disgust, it is worth returning to what might be regarded as the foundational narrative of CAMRA. This involved a trip made to Ireland in 1971 by a group of four friends, three of whom would go on to found CAMRA and guide it through its formative years. As one of the founders recalled during an interview:

The burping was the main thing, when we were on this holiday in Ireland we had so much keg beer, one night in Dublin I went out of the pub we were in and couldn’t stop with these hiccups and went outside and the only way I could get rid of them was to hold my nose tight and put my head between my knees and I was in the middle of doing this in Dublin on a Saturday night … the gas in it, stopped me drinking that beer, and I can’t drink lager now for the same reason.

This unusual account, striking in its image of a bodily rejection of the overly carbonated ‘keg’ beers that had gained majority market share by the early 1970s, resurfaced elsewhere in CAMRA publications and in the narrative accounts of branch member interviewees. Ian, a long-time member of the local branch, recalled returning to the UK following several years of living in Latin America...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Space, taste and affect: An introduction
• PART I Distinctive tastes: space, consumption and (dis)taste: The sommelier ceremony
• PART II Moving tastes, mobility, displacement and belonging: Sensing and tasting Spain in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century British travelogues
• PART III Taste, affect and the lifecourse: Negotiating tastes in family mealtime interaction
• PART IV Atmospheric tastes: affect, design and creative space: Taskscape and taste at Neal’s Yard Dairy
• Index