Culinary Capital

Peter Naccarato, Kathleen Lebesco

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857854155
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Scienze sociali
• Categoria: Sociologia

TV cookery shows hosted by celebrity chefs. Meal prep kitchens. Online grocers and restaurant review sites. Competitive eating contests, carnivals and fairs, and junk food websites and blogs. What do all of them have in common? According to authors Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, they each serve as productive sites for understanding the role of culinary capital in shaping individual and group identities in contemporary culture. Beyond providing sustenance, food and food practices play an important social role, offering status to individuals who conform to their culture's culinary norms and expectations while also providing a means of resisting them. Culinary Capital analyzes this phenomenon in action across the landscape of contemporary culture. The authors examine how each of the sites listed above promises viewers and consumers status through the acquisition of culinary capital and, as they do so, intersect with a range of cultural values and ideologies, particularly those of gender and economic class.

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Defining Culinary Capital

Consider the following hypothetical tableau.

In Brighton, United Kingdom, Jane Smith ends her nine-hour work day. On her way home to her family, she stops by her local meal prep franchise and “whips up” chicken cacciatore. She jumps in her car, finishes the drive home, barrels into the kitchen, and opens the fridge, which is stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables that she received the night before from her online grocer. She throws together a salad, plates it with the chicken, and calls her family in to a delicious homemade meal as she beams with pride.

Meanwhile, in Tampa, Florida, José and Jennifer Santos fight for control of the remote as they flop on the couch. The compromise: he gets to watch one episode of Iron Chef while she gets to watch one episode of Barefoot Contessa. Later that evening, as they peruse the dessert menu at the upscale restaurant they’ve selected for dinner, Jennifer can’t resist pointing out to José that she recognizes the mixed berry pavlova as one of Ina Garten’s favorite desserts. José fires back with half a dozen ways to prepare mixed berries, remembering that they were the secret ingredient on Iron Chef. Touché—a culinary draw.

Later that evening, Jeff Liu, aka “JeffEats,” hovers over his keyboard, furiously typing his review of his pilgrimage to the best dumpling shop in Vancouver’s Chinatown. He launches his latest salvo in his ongoing battle with “DumplingQueenBC” over where one can find the best dumplings in the city. Satisfied with his argument that the most obscure food is the most authentic, he sits back and hits send.

The next day, Randy Rogers returns home to Topeka, having just triumphed in a three-state s’mores eating contest. With trophy in hand, he welcomes the accolades of his family, who await him with colorful hand-drawn signs cheering his victory. His neighbor, Jefferson Pettengill, asks him for an interview, which he’ll post on his junk food blog. He also tells him about an upcoming eating contest—deep-fried Twinkies!—that will be held at next month’s Kansas State Fair.

There is something in each of these scenes to suggest that certain food practices give people a sense of distinction within their communities, and that distinction is not based simply on how expensive things are. To make sense of food as an economic and cultural commodity, to demonstrate how a society’s food practices function to circulate and challenge prevailing values and ideologies, and to understand how this is connected to the work of creating and sustaining a sense of Self, we turn to this book’s organizing concept: culinary capital.

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The concept of culinary capital owes a large debt to French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, who builds upon Karl Marx’s work on economic capital to understand how multiple forms of capital—economic, cultural, social, and symbolic—circulate across the social field. Bourdieu argues that by accessing these multiple forms of capital, individuals acquire status and power. To understand how this happens, Bourdieu focuses on practice, which he sees as “knit(ting) together structure and action, meaning and material conditions” (Calhoun and Sennett 2007, 7). Following Bourdieu’s example, we focus particularly on how individuals’ food practices are implicated in this process through the circulation of culinary capital.

Like Bourdieu, we recognize that food and food practices play a unique role as markers of social status. However, rather than presuming an inherent value stable within some culinary experiences or food products themselves and a lack of inherent value in others, we follow Bourdieu in attending to the processes through which such value is assigned and reassigned to a range of foods and food practices on a continuous and ever-changing basis. In other words, rather than assuming that culinary capital circulates in a fixed and predictable pattern (for instance, that certain foods or food practices always confer culinary capital while others do not), we focus on the multiple and potentially contradictory ways in which it may function. For example, Food Network celebrity chef Paula Deen’s revelation that she has been diagnosed with diabetes has touched off debates about the recipes and foods that she promotes on her very popular programs and in her very successful cookbooks. Is it irresponsible for her to celebrate butter and other fatty foods given the potential health risks associated with them? Would the answer to this question be different if Deen were a high-end pastry chef in one of New York City’s top restaurants rather than a popular media personality promoting Southern, down-home cuisine? Would the French-trained pastry chef earn culinary capital as she prepared butter-laden desserts for her restaurant’s high-class clientele who relax their typical restraint in order to enjoy them, while Deen is criticized for peddling such rich foods to her presumably helpless fans? And how do different consumers use each of these types of food to position themselves in fields of status? It is the potentially conflicting answers to these types of questions that suggest the complex factors that determine how culinary capital circulates across the social landscape. At the same time, this multiplicity is exacerbated further by the need to recognize culinary capital as only one means by which individuals may construct their social identities. Thus, our goal is not to isolate culinary capital from the multidimensional social space, but rather to understand how it circulates across this cultural landscape and how it interacts with any number of prevailing values and ideologies.

It is within this context that we use the concept of culinary capital to understand 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. In the mainstream United States today, for instance, a person who, in a restrained fashion, eats food produced locally and sustainably is a person with culinary capital. A person who is knowledgeable about wine and who can compare and contrast the menus at high-end restaurants has made a different, but also valuable investment in the Self, and is also rewarded with status and power. More broadly, as individuals assert the value of certain dietary preferences and food practices over others, they engage in the quest for culinary capital.

In advancing the concept of culinary capital, we extend a notion developed by Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann (2010) in their recent foundational study of the interplay of democracy and distinction in gourmet culture. Johnston and Baumann revealed that subtle forms of social differentiation are produced by omnivorous support for both high and low food cultures. Influenced by Bourdieu, the authors chart the gourmet-ification of the culture, exploring how notions of authenticity and exoticism shape foodie discourse. Where Johnston and Baumann leave off—in examining the role of food in generating social status—we begin, offering a nuanced look at culinary capital as both a raison d’être and something that accrues in the most unpredictable of ways. In extending their work, we adapt and apply Bourdieu’s ideas to consider how a variety of cultural institutions, including marketing and advertising, cable television, Internet communities, festival celebrations, and spectacular contests, function to socialize individuals. We are particularly interested in how specific cultural spaces shape individuals in dramatic ways, rewarding those who succeed with culinary capital and denying it to those who fail.

More broadly, such attempts to acquire culinary capital can be read as efforts to participate in projects of citizenship as individuals use their food practices to create and sustain identities that align with their society’s norms and expectations. Our analysis of the role of culinary capital in this process is informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose. Specifically, Foucault provides an important lens for understanding the role that culinary capital plays in circulating and accessing power. Using Foucault’s terminology, we distinguish between oppressive and productive power, noting that while repression and prohibition play a significant role in shaping American attitudes toward food, we must also attend to the productive role of culinary capital in shaping individual identities. At the same time, we must recognize that these processes of identity formation are often implicated in the exercise of social regulation over individual behaviors and practices.

For example, through his concept of bio-power, Foucault argues that the body is a crucial site for both exercising and resisting power. In his work, Foucault emphasizes the historical and cultural transition from the body that was disciplined by the external threat of violence to the body that was shaped by individuals who sought access to power by conforming to a set of internalized values and ideologies. While Foucault does not make explicit reference to food practices and rituals in defining this concept, it is clear how they relate to it. In fact, we would argue that culinary capital plays an integral role in the “investment of power in the body” (Foucault 1980, 56), as it both promotes normative standards of the “healthy” body and also authorizes the kind of culinary indulgences and excesses that oppose such cultural expectations. Because there is no way of understanding the body in relation to power that does not take into account the very food practices and rituals through which that body is created and sustained, we recognize culinary capital as a necessary precursor to the exercise of bio-power.

Extending Foucault’s work, Nikolas Rose focuses on the psychological processes through which individual identity is constructed and sustained, providing a useful context for understanding the role of culinary capital in such efforts. Specifically, he traces an important historical transformation in how citizens are governed, emphasizing a shift away from “the language of obligation, duty and social citizenship” that was the hallmark of nineteenth-century liberalism toward a discourse of free individuals who “seek to fulfill themselves as free individuals” (Rose 1999, 166). Such free individuals are no longer regulated by force or by a sense of obligation; rather, they act freely in a continuous effort to achieve personal fulfillment. This freedom of choice, however, does not mark the end of the governed subject; rather, it indicates a change in the technologies through which citizens are governed. Specifically, it raises the question of how individuals are to be regulated if they are going to exercise such freedom of choice. According to Rose, the answer is that rather than using the threat of punishment to force citizens to make specific choices, individuals begin to govern themselves by choosing to adopt specific practices and behaviors because of the status that comes with doing so.

Relating Rose’s ideas specifically to food, while consumers are presumably free to make their own choices regarding their preferred food-related practices, such freedom of choice is always influenced by a set of cultural norms and values that have been internalized by those consumers. Thus, society does not regulate individual behavior through external restrictions on consumers’ choices; rather, it relies upon a model of citizenship in which consumers curtail their own freedom of choice in order to conform to their society’s expectations and thereby be identified as good citizens. Essentially, maintaining good eating practices—as defined within the context of one’s culture—has become an indicator of being a good citizen. One might take, for instance, Michael Pollan’s rules about “how to eat” as a set of guidelines for producing good citizens. As individuals learn to avoid foods that won’t eventually rot and to always leave the table a little hungry, for example, they begin to accumulate culinary capital and in doing so self-identify as good citizens. People neither follow these rules out of a fear of overt punishment, nor do they engage with them out of a sense of duty or obligation. Rather, they usually aim, of their own volition, for personal fulfillment, making efforts to improve themselves as they take on the making of the self as a project (Rose 1999, 166).

Extending this example, the exalted status of the good home cook, the locavore shopper, the armchair restaurant critic, and the knowledgeable food television viewer alike emerges because they each engage in food-related practices that reflect a certain set of values that are privileged over others. Surely, the attitudes about food that permeate contemporary American society have their repressive and prohibitive elements; the United States is, after all, a diet-crazed society that at times seems to revel in the severe regulation of individual desires. At the same time, such food-related attitudes and assumptions can also be quite productive: they produce knowledge, induce pleasure, and generate power (Foucault 1990, 73). In contexts like these, individuals are active participants in their own empowerment through their search for self-realization. It is within this framework that we read food and food practices in relation to projects of the Self and, in doing so, witness culinary capital in action.

At the same time, active participation in one’s own empowerment cannot go unchecked. In short, we are interested in how the concept of culinary capital provides a framework for understanding how an individual’s food choices function simultaneously as an exercise in freedom and as a means of containing it. However, rather than assuming that food practices must always be read as signaling conformity to culinary and cultural norms and values, we are equally interested in moments when resistance is afoot.

Our approach to culinary resistance is also informed by Bourdieu, who recognizes that foodways are one arena in which the working class challenge the power of the upper and middle classes. As peasants and workers indulge together in disregard of cultural edicts surrounding sobriety and slimness, they assert a different set of values and priorities. We argue that this peasant revolt against a narrowly conceived culinary capital finds itself played out in a number of cultural sites, including those that we explore in chapter 5. In fact, we argue that while one means of acquiring culinary capital is to approach one’s food practices in ways that conform to prevailing attitudes and assumptions about food and foodways—thus contributing to one’s identification as a “good citizen”—an alternative is to endorse or engage in eating practices that appear to contradict or challenge such norms.

As contemporary American society becomes increasingly focused on a set of normative values surrounding culinary choices and practices, we are interested in people who use food and foodways to fight back, to question and undermine these social censorships and unhinge economic resources from pleasure and taste. Are they peripheral to mainstream American culture and as such should be excluded from cultural analysis? Or, in neglecting them, do we risk ignoring crucial sites for the production and circulation of an alternative model of culinary capital?

If Bourdieu compels us to recognize culture as produced through practice—as “embodied, engaged, interactive, creative, and contested” (Calhoun and Sennett 2007, 5)—then it is imperative to ask which kinds of practice warrant our attention. While chapters 2 through 4 explore how culinary capital functions hegemonically as it circulates across cultural sites that encourage consumers to approach their food choices and practices in ways that conform to prevailing attitudes and assumptions about food and foodways, we transition in chapter 5 to consider sites that promote eating practices that appear to contradict or challenge such norms while offering their own form of culinary capital to those who embrace them. Rather than assuming that such sites, and the practices that they promote, must be read negatively or that those who visit them and engage in such practices lack the knowledge or will-power that would direct them to “proper” or “healthier” choices, we argue that such sites, and the practices that they promote, assume a complex relationship with the mainstream discourses they seem to challenge.

Our approach is informed, in part, by Warren Belasco’s analysis of the “countercuisine,” which he frames within the broader context of “subcultural dissent and deviancy” (Belasco 2005, 219). First and foremost, Belasco underscores the relationship between food choices and social categories as he articulates the link between dietary choices and both individual and group identity formation: “By categorizing foods into what’s good to eat and what is not, a cuisine helps a society’s members define themselves: To eat appropriate foods is to participate in a particular group; eat inappropriate foods and you’re an outsider. Like language, a cuisine is a medium by which a society establishes its special identity” (Belasco 1989, 44). In focusing on the “countercuisine” that emerged in the United States in the 1960s, Belasco considers the potential impact of those individuals and groups who challenge their society’s prevailing culinary attitudes and trends. Rather than assuming that they have little impact given the economic, political, and ideological power of the mainstream, Belasco traces a much more nuanced process by which the countercuisine’s attitudes about food and its preferred culinary practices, which had been deemed “deviant” by mainstream American culture, gradually influenced evolving American foodways, as evidenced by “organic farms, coops, farmers markets, natural foods supermarket chains, New American Cuisine restaurants, and designer bread boutiques that feed some of us today” (Belasco 2005, 223). By offering a compelling critique of the economic, political, a...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Defining Culinary Capital
• 2 Fixing Dinner/Fixing the Self: The Contradictions of New Trends in Food Procurement
• 3 Television Cooking Shows: Gender, Class, and the Illusory Promise of Transformation
• 4 Democratizing Taste?: Culinary Capital in the Digital Age
• 5 Culinary Resistance: State Fairs, Competitive Eating, and “Junk” Foodies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index