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’s depicted and discussed). This intersection of language and materiality (cf. Shankar & Cavanaugh 2017) makes food an ideal site for examining the place of language in contemporary class formations (cf. Thurlow 2016). As a case in point, my paper examines a dataset of multimodal food texts (e.g. restaurant websites and signage, food reviews, and food tourism) drawn from an international selection of food producers-cum-consumers who explicitly self-style as the height of modern, cosmopolitan food practices and trends. Combining critical discourse analysis and social semiotics, I document the linguistic, verbal and material tactics by which stakeholders produce a discourse of elite authenticity indexed by, for example, claims to locality, sustainability, ethnicity, and especially rurality. This discourse hinges on the iconization, romanticization, and exploitation of agrarian life in ways that strategically (dis)avow elitist distinction. In fact, I argue that the production – and circulation – of this discourse erases the complex ethnic and economic realities of the rural Other (cf. hooks 1992), while elevating the privileged consumption practices of urban life and cosmopolitan elites. As such, particular ways of eating (and particular eaters) are hailed as simultaneously fashionable and socially/politically virtuous (cf. Kenway and Lazarus 2017), while covertly reinscribing privileged standards of good taste (cf. Bourdieu 1984) and class inequality.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, trans. by R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cavanaugh, Jillian and Shalini Shankar (eds). 2017. Language and materiality: Ethnographic and theoretical explorations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
hooks, bell. 1992. Eating the other. In Black looks: Race and representation, 21–39. London: Turnaround.
Kenway, Jane and Michael Lazarus. 2017. Elite schools, class disavowal and the mystification of virtues. Social Semiotics 27(3): 265–275.
Thurlow, Crispin. 2016. Queering critical discourse studies or/and performing post-class ideologies. Critical Discourse Studies 13(5): 485–514.
