Between rough and refined: Omnivorous consumption and palatable elitism in mediatized food discourse

Mapes, Gwynne Erin (2018). Between rough and refined: Omnivorous consumption and palatable elitism in mediatized food discourse (Unpublished). In: Talking about Food: Local and Global Contexts conference. University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany. 27-28 April 2018.

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Food, like language, plays a central role in the production of culture; it is likewise a
powerful resource for the representation and organization of social order. Status is
asserted or contested through both the materiality of food (e.g. its substance and raw
economics) and through its discursivity (e.g. the way it is depicted and discussed). This
intersection of language and materiality (cf. Cavanaugh and Shankar 2017) makes food
an ideal site for examining the place of language in contemporary class formations (cf.
Thurlow 2016). Orienting more specifically to elite discourse studies (e.g. Thurlow and
Jaworski 2014), I argue that mediatized representations are instrumental in teaching
people how to attain and manage privilege. Central to this instructional function is
conveying the need to disavow entitlement or snobbery and, instead, to assert one’s
status on the grounds of effort and inclusivity. As empirical evidence, I turn to a dataset
of New York Times food section Instagram (@nytfood) posts, documenting the
multimodal tactics by which food media writers and users perform a kind of acceptable
or “palatable” eliteness. One such tactic is the framing of “rough” and “refined,” and
the juxtaposition of various forms of supposedly low and highbrow cultural artifacts or
practices. For example, @nytfood features one photo of a restaurant’s (expensive)
lobster and Swiss chard dish, accompanied by the following caption about the
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restaurant itself: “[this is] a swell place to spend a night in a postindustrial zone where
gentrification has moved as slowly as the fluid in the canal”. Elite readers are thus
invited to imagine an experience, for one night, that is both fine dining and slumming
(cf. Koven 2006). Additionally, they are invited to work through their status publically
by commenting on or tagging other users in posts, nicely exposing how putatively
inclusive, democratic digital platforms are often spaces of social hierarchy (cf.
Naccarato and LeBesco 2012). In sum, my paper speaks to the ways mediatized food
discourse demonstrates and demands a nuanced preference for egalitarian, “omnivorous
consumption” (cf. Khan 2014), which is essential to performing the “good taste”
(Bourdieu 1984) of contemporary privilege.

References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. by R. Nice.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cavanaugh, Jillian R. and Shalini Shankar, eds. 2017. Language and Materiality:
Ethnographical and Theoretical Explorations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Khan, Shamus R. 2014. “The Ease of Mobility.” In: Birtchnell, Thomas and Javier Caletrío, eds.
Elite Mobilities. London: Routledge. 136-148.
Koven, Seth. 2006. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Naccarato, Peter and Kathleen LeBesco. 2012. Culinary Capital. London/New York: Berg.
Thurlow, Crispin. 2016. “Queering Critical Discourse Studies or/and Performing Post-class
Ideologies.” Critical Discourse Studies 13(5): 485-514.
Thurlow, Crispin and Adam Jaworski. 2014. “Visible-Invisible: The Social Semiotics of Labour
in Luxury Tourism.” In: Birtchnell, Thomas and Javier Caletrío, eds. Elite Mobilities.
London: Routledge. 176-193.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures > Modern English Linguistics
UniBE Contributor:	Mapes, Gwynne Erin
Subjects:	400 Language 400 Language > 410 Linguistics 400 Language > 420 English & Old English languages
Language:	English
Submitter:	Federico Erba
Date Deposited:	23 Jan 2019 17:43
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 12:31
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/122620