Aspirational eating: or why people are micro-obsessing over food

[HiPointDem]

11. i read it. but i don't get the point. it's someone making fun of 'golden age'

Last edited Sat Nov 24, 2012, 07:10 AM - Edit history (1)

cookery.


After the Civil War—especially during the period from 1880-1920
—the elites who served as national taste leaders began holding dinner parties with plated courses modeled on the cuisine developed by the Second Estate in France (also known as “dining à la Russe”), following slimming diets in pursuit of the new bodily ideal of thinness, dabbling in the “natural” diets developed by people like John Harvey Kellogg to promote spiritual and physical well-being, and hosting “exotic entertainments” showcasing their increasing knowledge about the fringes of the expanding American empire. These practices were emulated by the emerging professional-managerial class and portrayed as superior to the foods and practices associated with the working classes.

All four trends and discourses receded in popularity during the Great Depression as the plain foods associated with the Home Economics movement were established as the national cuisine. Thus, they (the four trends) seemed new when they re-emerged in the 1980s...

During periods of greater income inequality and relatively low mobility, interest in and anxiety about eating “better” becomes more important to the middle classes. Although they are a minority, their tastes are normative and reflected in mass media and market trends. “Enlightened” eating not only serves to distinguish the middle class from the working and lower classes in the Bourdieuian or Veblenian sense of cultural capital and conspicuous consumption, it also operates as a form of compensatory mobility. The four pillars elevate certain foods and practices over others without reliable evidence, but they nevertheless offer real pleasures and rewards that make them especially compelling for the middle classes when they are not advancing
materially.

deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86292/4/smargot_1.pdf


One of the similarities between the gilded age through the 20s and the 80s through the present is rising inequality and thus, status anxiety.

'plain foods' were a reflection of the depression and war-time/post-war relative equality/mass society.