Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution

By S. Margot Finn

Winner of the 2018 First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society

For the past four decades, increasing numbers of Americans have started paying greater attention to the food they eat, buying organic vegetables, drinking fine wines, and seeking out exotic cuisines. Yet they are often equally passionate about the items they refuse to eat: processed foods, generic brands, high-carb meals. While they may care deeply about issues like nutrition and sustainable agriculture, these discriminating diners also seek to differentiate themselves from the unrefined eater, the common person who lives on junk food.

Discriminating Taste argues that the rise of gourmet, ethnic, diet, and organic foods must be understood in tandem with the ever-widening income inequality gap. Offering an illuminating historical perspective on our current food trends, S. Margot Finn draws numerous parallels with the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, an era infamous for its class divisions, when gourmet dinners, international cuisines, slimming diets, and pure foods first became fads.

Examining a diverse set of cultural touchstones ranging from Ratatouille to The Biggest Loser, Finn identifies the key ways that “good food” has become conflated with high status. She also considers how these taste hierarchies serve as a distraction, leading middle-class professionals to focus on small acts of glamorous and virtuous consumption while ignoring their class’s larger economic stagnation. A provocative look at the ideology of contemporary food culture, Discriminating Taste teaches us to question the maxim that you are what you eat.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813576879

Book preview

Discriminating Taste

Discriminating Taste

How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution

S. MARGOT FINN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Finn, S. Margot, 1981– author.

Title: Discriminating taste : how class anxiety created the American food revolution / S. Margot Finn.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016025795 | ISBN 9780813576862 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813576855 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813576879 (e-book (epub)) | ISBN 9780813576886 (e-book (web pdf))

Subjects: LCSH: Food habits—United States—History. | Food habits—Economic aspects—United States. | Food consumption—United States—History. | Food consumption—Economic aspects—United States. | Food—Social aspects—United States. | Middle class—United States—Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC GT2853.U5 F565 2017 | DDC 394.1/20973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025795

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2017 by S. Margot Finn

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my parents, Linda Kay and James Patrick Finn

Contents

Introduction: Discriminating Taste

1. Incompatible Standards: The Four Ideals of the Food Revolution

2. Aspirational Eating: Food and Status Anxiety in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era

3. No Culinary Enlightenment: Why Everything You Know about Food Is Wrong

4. Anyone Can Cook: Saying Yes to Meritocracy

5. Just Mustard: Negotiating with Food Snobbery

6. Feeling Good about Where You Shop: Sacrifice, Pleasure, and Virtue

Conclusion: Confronting the Soft Bigotry of Taste

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Discriminating Taste

Introduction

Discriminating Taste

We are living in the Age of Food.

—Steven Poole

Sometime around 2005, my mother called me, distressed by a conversation she’d had with one of her co-workers about wine. She had started getting into wine after I left home for college in 1999, joining a trend that was sweeping the country. Wine consumption in America had been rising gradually ever since the end of Prohibition, but from 1991 to 2005, sales jumped by 50 percent.¹ The wine and cheese reception, virtually unheard of before the 1970s, became almost as common as the cocktail hour, and words such as Merlot and terroir became part of the common vernacular. My mother’s participation in this trend was relatively casual. She purchased most of her wine at the supermarkets where she did the rest of the grocery shopping, sticking mostly to a handful of national brands and varietals she knew she liked, and she rarely had more than a glass or two with dinner. However, after one particularly stressful day at work, she had consumed half a bottle by herself. When she confessed this minor indiscretion to a co-worker the next day, the woman asked what kind of wine she had been drinking. It was a white Zinfandel, one of my mother’s favorites. Oh no, her coworker sneered. That’s the hot dog of wines.

Well, my mother said to me later, I didn’t know that. Did you know that? I did, as she must have known I would. Although I had not yet started doing research on food in any formal capacity, I had also gotten into wine after leaving home for college. I drank keg beer at house parties and deceptively innocuous Long Island iced teas on happy hour discount, but I favored wine when it was available because it seemed to impart a kind of sophistication and worldliness I longed for. I also liked the taste and acquiring a special vocabulary to express my developing preferences. I liked learning about new grape varietals and tannins and minerality and oak. Partially due to a series of waitressing jobs at increasingly swanky restaurants and partially due to the ambient foodie-ism of my college town and then New York City, I learned to eschew not only white Zinfandel but also everything else sweet (infantile), Merlot and Chardonnay (too common), and anything with an animal on the label (pandering to the masses).² Still, it never would have occurred to me to say anything to my mom about her affinity for fruity pink wine. Let her drink what she likes, I figured, failing to anticipate that by doing so I might let her embarrass herself.

Even though my mother has never aspired to be a connoisseur and mostly drinks at home with no one around who might be impressed, her enjoyment of wine was still partially based on its broader cultural significance. She probably wouldn’t have started drinking wine in the first place if not for the idea that it is refined or high class. I’m sure she also likes the taste, and the fact that she turned to it to unwind after a stressful day suggests that she appreciates the relaxing effects of alcohol. However, her co-worker’s suggestion that white Zinfandel was déclassé ruined it for her. In that phone conversation, I think I offered some kind of lame defense about how rosés were all the rage in New York that spring and her co-worker didn’t know what she was talking about, but whatever I said apparently wasn’t very convincing. I don’t think I’ve seen her drink a blush wine of any variety since.

Taste is complex—it’s both deeply personal and profoundly social, rooted in our physiology but also shaped by culture and experience. Some tastes we develop as children seem to stay with us, but others change over time. Many wine drinkers find that their preferences evolve, usually moving from sweeter and lighter varietals such as Riesling and Moscato to drier whites such as Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc and more tannic or alcoholic reds such as the hedonistic fruit bombs favored by wine critic Robert Parker.³ In fact, the taste for all kinds of alcohol usually develops gradually, starting with lighter beers and wines and sweet mixed drinks. With enough exposure, many find that they enjoy hoppy India pale ales, drier cocktails, and even hard liquor neat. Even if you don’t drink, you’ve probably experienced some kind of similar taste transformation. Most children have an aversion to all things spicy, bitter, astringent, and pungent, including hot peppers, tea, tobacco, olives, kale and Brussels sprouts, and sharp or stinky cheeses. But all of those things also offer rewards, both chemical and cultural. As people come to associate the rewards with the initially offensive stimuli, both consciously and subconsciously, their taste experience changes. The flavors become tolerable or even pleasurable.⁴

Take coffee, for example. Many people add sweetener and milk to mask coffee’s natural bitterness, especially when they first start drinking it. However, as they associate the aroma and taste with the sensations induced by the caffeine and by any sugar and fat they’ve added and perhaps also the context where they tend to drink it—an invigorating morning ritual, a break from work, or meeting a friend at a café—most come to like coffee itself. I’d probably still find coffee repellent if I hadn’t gotten a crush on a Starbucks barista in high school and been too embarrassed to order hot chocolate from him like a little girl, opting for a mocha instead. At first, the chocolate syrup and milk and whipped cream just barely made the espresso tolerable, but within a year, I was fueling late night study sessions at Denny’s with endless cups of coffee, which by then I had decided I preferred black.

Not everyone follows this pattern. Even when they do, the extent of eventual acclimation varies widely. Some people actually have more taste buds than others and they tend to have a much stronger aversion to bitter tastes in general. Many people have gastronomical blind spots or sensitivities to specific flavor compounds, which is probably what makes cilantro taste like soap to roughly 15 percent of the population.⁵ People also vary in how they respond to the rewards of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, sugar, and fat. Nonetheless, there is enough commonality across individuals and cultures that the most initially offensive, hardest-to-acquire tastes—the hottest chili, the smokiest scotch, the hoppiest beer, the most pungent tobaccos, the blackest coffee—are typically associated with maturity, masculinity, and high social status. I still genuinely like the taste of black coffee, but it’s hard to know how much of that is due to a reward response conditioned by the rich, sugary mochas I started with, how much to the addictive nature of caffeine, and how much to my desire for the maturity and edginess I thought it communicated.

The physiology of taste offers a partial explanation for why white Zinfandel might be considered the hot dog of wines. Sweet and soft, with less acid and a lower alcohol content than many wines, it’s like a wine with training wheels from which many people eventually graduate, especially those who become aficionados. However, I wonder if my mother would have ever stopped enjoying white Zinfandel without her co-worker’s shaming nudge or if I’d have ever acquired a taste for coffee if not for my desire to seem older than I was. Physiology alone does not explain why some tendencies become the basis for pejorative judgments about taste, and it definitely doesn’t explain how the tastes of groups of people change over time. For most Americans today, the idea that wine is categorically sophisticated is a kind of common sense, almost too obvious to merit further examination. It was not always so.

From the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 through the 1960s, wine was associated primarily with poor alcoholics and immigrants. Fortified wines produced by blending brandy or grain alcohol with cheap wine or fruit juice, sugar, and artificial coloring made up the vast majority of U.S. wine sales.⁶ National brands such as Thunderbird, Wild Irish Rose, and Night Train became popular during the Great Depression because of their relatively low price, high alcohol content, and sweet taste.⁷ In 1940, the first year when U.S. sales reports differentiate between fortified wine and table wines, the latter constituted less than a third of the total market.⁸ The sales data don’t include the wine that people made at home, but that practice was never common outside of immigrant communities from Southern and Eastern European. During Prohibition, California vineyards shipped their grapes to the east, where Italian Americans bought them by the crate straight from the railroad yard. Italian Americans were also the primary consumers of the inexpensive jug wines that many of those vineyards began to produce after Prohibition, some of which are still around, such as Gallo and Carlo Rossi. Until the 1960s, jug wines were just about the only domestic table wine you could buy in America. The prevalence of cheap, low-status wines consumed primarily by low-status people was reflected in derogatory terms such as wino and Dago red.⁹

In 1947, the Gallup polling agency asked Americans about their idea of the perfect meal. Those who said they would start with an alcoholic beverage mostly said they’d prefer a gin cocktail or plain Manhattan. The same year, approximately 60 percent of Americans told Gallup they drank alcohol at least occasionally, and most said they preferred beer or liquor.¹⁰ By 1960, the fortified and dessert wines associated with poor alcoholics were still outselling table wines two to one. It’s hard to exactly pinpoint wine’s transition from lowbrow to highbrow, but based on the prevalence of table wine as a portion of overall sales, it was probably sometime in the late 1970s. Although Julia Child arrived on PBS with her enthusiasm about French wine in 1963, sales of table wine increased only modestly in the 1960s, not much more than can be accounted for by population growth. By 1970, table wine sales made up only half of the market (see Fig. 1). By 1980, they constituted three-quarters of the market, which as a whole had grown to 480 million gallons.¹¹ The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed in 1984, combined with the baby bust that followed the baby boom to briefly reduce the total population of Americans who could legally purchase alcohol, which explains the dip in overall sales in the 1980s. However, per capita wine sales continued to increase throughout the downturn.

The growing popularity of table wine in the 1970s and 1980s that Fig. 1 demonstrates was accompanied by changes in the cultural significance of wine. Being interested in wine became a sign of refinement instead of addiction, impoverishment, or the dangerous—if sometimes alluring—sensuality and lack of self-control associated with wine-drinking immigrants.¹² In the 1990s, wine also acquired a tentative association with health, largely thanks to a 60 Minutes episode on the so-called French paradox. It suggested that one of reasons the French have lower rates of heart disease than Americans, despite consuming more saturated fat, is that they drink more wine. In 1992, Gallup added a question to their annual survey of drinking habits about whether respondents who drank alcohol drank beer, wine, or spirits most often. That year, 47 percent said they preferred beer compared to 27 percent who preferred wine, but wine steadily ate away at its lead until 2005, when it surpassed beer as the nation’s alcoholic beverage of choice. Beer recovered a slight advantage the following year, but broader trends in the beer market echo the changes in wine. Per capita consumption of the beer produced by the three breweries that dominate the U.S. market—Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors—has been flat or falling since 1981.¹³ The only kind of beer people are drinking more of is what is typically seen as the fancier stuff. Imported beer began to claim an increasing share of the market in the late 1990s, and since 2000, the fastest-growing segment of the beer market has been microbrews.¹⁴

Figure 1. Wine consumption in the United States, 1940–2009. Source: Constructed from data from Wine Consumption in the U.S., updated April 5, 2010, Wine Institute, http://www.wineinstitute.org/resources/statistics/article86.

Wine has never had just one meaning. Even in the heyday of Thunderbird and jug wines, some Americans drank imported table wine and fretted over how to use it to impress their dinner party guests. For example, a cookbook called Dining for Moderns published by the New York Women’s Exchange in 1940 includes dinner menus with suggested wine pairings for each course, identified by the regions in France where they were produced—Champagne, Burgundy, Bordeaux—rather than the grape varietals more commonly used today. Dining for Moderns also criticizes hosts who served wine simply to show off instead of selecting the kind that would best complement the food.¹⁵ At least for the American elite, wine may have always been associated with sophistication and thus also carried the risk of snobbery. However, there is little indication that most middle-class Americans in the 1950s and 1960s were any more interested in using wine to show off than they were in drinking Dago red. Instead, table wine was generally seen as unappealing, along with other fancy, foreign foods such as caviar and escargots. The plain Manhattan in the Gallup poll was preferred at least in part because of its plainness: a reliable, unfussy cocktail that would be followed by an equally plain meat-and-potatoes meal. In 1947, calling something the hot dog of wines probably would have been interpreted as an endorsement.

Clearly something has changed. My mother is a middle-class Midwesterner—the daughter of Japanese American sugar-beet farmers from Nebraska who now lives in suburban Chicago and works as a computer tech at an elementary school. The fact that one of her middle-class, Midwestern coworkers would even think to criticize her taste in wine (and by comparing it to a populist icon like the hot dog, no less) is the result of a comprehensive transformation in how many Americans buy, cook, eat, and above all talk about and imagine food. This sea change has been widely hailed as an American food revolution. The signs of it are everywhere. Chefs and food writers have become celebrities with hit television shows and best-selling books. Americans collectively spend something in the range of $40–60 million every year on weight-loss programs and products, including an ever-expanding array of diet, low-fat, and low-carb foods.¹⁶ Organic, locally grown, free-range, or otherwise environmentally friendly and ethical foods are available not only at the growing number of farmers’ markets and Whole Foods Markets but also at Walmart. Options for ethnic food have expanded far beyond Italian, Mexican, and Chinese; it’s no longer uncommon to find Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Ethiopian restaurants in Midwestern strip malls. Rice noodles, chutney, curry paste, and tahini appear on the shelves at Kroger and Safeway. Food is also the subject of a growing number of popular and acclaimed documentaries, blogs, books, college courses and even entire majors; many of the most read and most e-mailed New York Times articles; and a burgeoning movement for social change.

The question this book seeks to answer is: How did we get here? Perhaps the most intuitive answer is simply progress. Innovations in agriculture and food processing and cheaper, faster shipping have made a wider variety of foods available to more people than ever before. Immigrants, trade, and tourism have introduced Americans to ingredients and flavors from around the world. They are more likely to try to appreciate foods that seem foreign or ethnic thanks in part to the rise of multiculturalism and the idea that diversity is good. Additionally, a lot more information is available about how food affects our health, the environment, and the welfare of animals. If Americans didn’t care as much about drinking wine, dieting, buying organic and local food, and sampling diverse ethnic cuisines thirty years ago, that may be because they just didn’t know any better, care enough, or have sufficient resources before. I call this theory, which is the prevailing, commonsense explanation for the food revolution, the culinary enlightenment thesis. It attributes the changes in American food culture in the last few decades to advances in agriculture, nutritional science, ecology, and the global movement of people, goods, and ideas. According to the logic of culinary enlightenment, the food revolution is another example of new technologies, research, and wealth that enables people to improve on the deficiencies of the bad old days.

Many kinds of food have gotten cheaper, and changing immigration patterns are certainly part of the reason there are more Thai and Indian restaurants in the United States now than there were thirty years ago. But there are reasons to be suspicious of the overall narrative. After all, it’s equally obvious to many people that we’re living in an era of unprecedented culinary backwardness and on an overall downward trajectory. We are constantly told by public health authorities and the mass media that Americans hardly have anything worthy of the name cuisine and instead prefer nutritionally empty junk food with little regard for the supposedly dire long-term health effects and consequences for the environment of consuming such food. There’s a popular alternative to the prevailing story of progress that I call the culinary decline thesis. Instead of seeing new technologies, information, and trade as the source of better-tasting, healthier, safer, fresher, more varied, or more environmentally friendly foods, the decline thesis argues that industrialization and capitalism have distanced people from the agricultural origins of their food, polluted the environment and the food supply with toxic chemicals, and eroded traditional social institutions such as the family farm and the family meal. As a result, most Americans today don’t know what real food tastes like or how to prepare it.¹⁷ They are thus reduced to subsisting on highly processed convenience foods that make them fat and sick. Instead of putting faith in the inexorable forward march of progress, proponents of the decline thesis often promote a return to the good old days. This romantic yearning for the past is captured in the idea that people need to get back to the land, to get back in the kitchen, or—as Michael Pollan advises—to avoid anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.¹⁸

There are probably some kernels of truth in the decline thesis. There are fewer Americans employed directly in agriculture today than there were fifty or a hundred years ago. The consolidation of food processing has made it theoretically possible for a single source of contamination to sicken hundreds or even thousands of people across the country. And the American population as a whole has gotten slightly fatter—about ten to twenty pounds, on average, between 1980 and 2000, though there has been no statistically significant increase in the last fifteen years.¹⁹ However, the significance of these changes may not be as dire nor the past as rosy as the decline thesis suggests.

Small, diverse family farms such as those idealized in films such as Food, Inc. were never the dominant form of agricultural production in the United States, particularly in the South. Even Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most famous advocate of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer, owned a large plantation that depended on slave labor.²⁰ The overall rate of food-borne illness has dropped by nearly 25 percent since the Centers for Disease Control began tracking laboratory-confirmed infections caused by the six most common pathogens in the late 1990s.²¹ Despite continued industrial consolidation in that period, the only food-borne illness that is more common now than two decades ago is caused by the Vibrio bacteria, which is contracted primarily by eating raw oysters and may be increasing due to rising ocean temperatures.²² Despite decades of public health warnings that fatness is going to cut our lives short, average life expectancy has continued to increase throughout the so-called obesity epidemic and many measures of health supposedly related to weight have improved.²³ Furthermore, there’s little evidence that eating real food and engaging in vigorous daily exercise would make everyone thin. The Old Order Amish spend an average of ten to twelve hours a day performing tough physical labor and eat largely the way their great-great-grandmothers did, but they’re just as fat, on average, as the rest of the American population. Amish women over the age of forty are actually slightly fatter.²⁴

Although the culinary enlightenment and decline stories may seem to be diametrically opposed, they actually have much in common. Both portray the industrial food system as the source of fundamentally bad food—homogeneous, highly processed, artificial, fattening, nutritionally and environmentally toxic crap. Even the fact that many people seem to like how this junk food tastes is generally portrayed as a bad thing, although the reasons why can be contradictory. Some critics of industrial food argue that it is ingeniously engineered to be so intensely flavorful that it ruins people’s ability to appreciate simpler, subtler, more authentic flavors. Others claim that the inferior quality of industrially grown and processed ingredients renders the food flavorless compared to heirloom crops and homemade products. Whether it is deemed excessively flavorful or flavorless, industrially processed food is consistently portrayed as inferior to real food.

The enlightenment and decline stories also share the same basic criteria for what made the foods we supposedly used to eat or the ascendant trends of the food revolution better. In addition to being more authentic, they’re supposed to be fresh, whole, natural, local, organic, sustainable, traditional, diverse, artisanal, and healthy. It’s not always clear where exactly the line between bad, processed junk and real food ought to be drawn. For example, homemade bread made with packaged yeast and white flour or Lay’s Classic potato chips made with only potatoes, vegetable oil, and salt might reasonably belong to either category. But those are minor definitional quibbles. In terms of their overall aesthetics and ethics—what kinds of food are good, what kinds of food are bad—the culinary enlightenment thesis and the culinary decline thesis are aligned. The real difference between the stories is what kind of food they think is winning. Are industrialization, capitalism, and mass media working to improve or degrade America’s food culture as a whole? Are we a fast food nation or nation of foodies? My goal is not to settle that debate. Instead, this book seeks to account for the rise of the particular set of beliefs about what kinds of food are good and bad that both the enlightenment and decline narratives share.

Those beliefs are part of the ideology of the food revolution, a comprehensive way of thinking about food that’s become the prevailing common sense in America. How did so many people come to see things such as wine, kale, and Thai food as desirable? Progress isn’t necessarily the most convincing answer.

Instead, the ideology of the food revolution may have been embraced because it appealed to many Americans whose income and wealth had begun to stagnate or decline in comparison to the soaring fortunes of the super-rich. From 1880 to 1920, the conspicuous consumption of gourmet and ethnic foods, dieting, and social reform efforts such as the pure food and drug movement offered the emerging professional middle class a way to distinguish itself from the lower classes and claim moral authority over the industrialists and corporations that were eclipsing them in wealth and power. It seems at the very least possible that the correspondence between income inequality and the popularity of four central tenets of enlightened eating—both in the Gilded Age and since the late 1970s—is not coincidental.

From 1930 to 1980, the middle classes made significant gains in wealth and cultural power and their status anxieties changed. The rewards of culinary distinction faded and concerns about the softening and corrupting influence of affluence increased. Instead of dinner parties with multiple courses paired with wine, the plain meat-and-potatoes meal became the culinary emblem of the good life.²⁵ Instead of seeking the gourmet or exotic, most Americans began to regard culinary frills and foreignness with suspicion or disgust. Natural foods became a fringe, niche market associated with long-haired, unpatriotic nuts and flakes,²⁶ and even weight-loss dieting declined in popularity as a more voluptuous body ideal returned. It’s not that the middle class stopped using food to perform a desirable class identity. Instead, there were shifts in what kind of class identity was seen as desirable and how people used food to communicate that. The symbolic vocabulary of class and the nature of class aspiration changes in response to changes in class structure.

The contemporary food revolution started around the same time as what the economist Paul Krugman calls the great divergence in wealth and income distribution, a reversal of the great compression in incomes that began with the Great Depression. Beginning in the late 1970s, the middle class began to stagnate as the richest 1 percent started getting much richer. Shortly thereafter, gourmet and natural foods began to gain traction, first among young urban professionals on the coasts and more gradually in the mainstream, middle-class American heartland. Diet food products began to appear on regular supermarket shelves and a fitness craze swept the nation as a slimmer beauty ideal reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century Gibson girl and flapper became popular again.²⁷ Other trends that had also been marginal since the Great Depression, from drinking fine wine to eating whole grains, entered the mainstream. A preference for foods constructed as elegant, virtuous, and exotic began displacing the mid-century preference for the familiar, plain, and ample.

I can’t prove that people started eating better again primarily because of class anxieties, but it’s the explanation that seems to best fit the evidence, not just in terms of the history of the central ideals of the food revolution but also in terms of the way people portray and talk about those ideals today. The resurgence of interest in enlightened eating has spurred a great proliferation of mass media about food. Restaurant reviews and recipes in the New York Times have grown from a minor feature to an entire food section, rivaling the paper’s coverage of sports and the arts. Food television, which used to consist of a handful of didactic cooking shows on PBS such as The French Chef and The Frugal Gourmet, has diversified to include restaurant makeover shows, cooking competitions, and globe-trotting documentaries, all broadcast around the clock on multiple cable networks devoted entirely to the subject and on major network and cable channels. The most popular food blogs and recipe sites attract millions of visitors, and some food writers who started online such as Deb Perlman of Smitten Kitchen and Kenji Alt-Lopez of Serious Eats have now published best-selling cookbooks, one of the lone sectors that is still growing as book sales in general decline.²⁸

These diverse kinds of food media reveal patterns in the way some foods have been constructed as good and others bad. Three kinds of stories in particular stand out for their ability to make food a viable arena of class aspiration: 1) making taste and thinness into meritocracies; 2) denying that trying to eat well is about status; and 3) portraying value-added consumption as virtuous rather than profligate. Middle-class Americans facing stagnating wealth and frustrated upward mobility have embraced these stories because they offer another way to reach for the good life. Eating better offers compensations for the lack of material gains in the last few decades. I call this phenomenon aspirational eating, a process in which people use their literal tastes—the kinds of foods they eat and the way they use and talk about food—to perform and embody a desirable class identity and distinguish themselves from the masses.

The word ideology is sometimes used to refer to explicit, conscious belief systems, usually in the realm of politics. It is often used to distinguish between rational or moderate beliefs and those seen as irrational or extreme, which are often attributed to an ism such as fascism or neoliberalism. That’s not what I mean when I talk about the ideology of the food revolution. Instead, I’m using the word to refer to particular understandings of the world that are taken for granted as totally obvious at a particular moment in time.²⁹ Unlike most isms, which people often embrace or reject deliberately, ideologies in this sense of the word are generally implicit. They shape how people perceive reality and what kinds of stories they tell themselves about who they are and why things happen, but people usually aren’t conscious of them. They surround us invisibly like the air we breathe. Consider the beliefs that wine is sophisticated and that sophistication in food and drink is a good thing. Those ideas are so commonly taken for granted right now that most people aren’t even aware many people could (and until recently did) see wine as categorically low class and fancy foods as undesirable.

Ideologies can’t be directly observed or measured,³⁰ but they can be interpreted from the things people say, do, and create. Mass media are particularly rich sources of clues about what kinds of beliefs are winning the struggle over meaning in a particular time and place because they tend to reflect the popular understanding of the world in order to appeal to a broad audience. Mass media also shape how people see the world. In other words, mass media and dominant ideologies are mutually constitutive; the influence runs in both directions. But the relationship isn’t always simple or direct. The world view represented in a particular news story or television show is inevitably partial, and any given film or blog entry may contain contradictory or unstable ideological elements. Even when the ideology represented in a mass media text is straightforward, audiences don’t necessarily embrace the world view they encounter in mass media whole cloth or believe everything they see. People sometimes appreciate things in an arch or ironic fashion or interpret something as humorous that was meant to be serious.

Whenever possible, I have paired examples from mass media texts with evidence of their actual audience reception, often from the comment threads on articles, blogs, fan message boards, and review sites. The advent of forums such as these provides a large and ever-growing source of information about how people are interpreting mass media, but as a source of reception data it is not without problems. For one, the participants in online forums are probably not representative of the entire audience. The people who comment on articles or review movies on sites such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) are generally those who have stronger feelings than most; they are the ones who really like or really hate whatever they’re writing about. They are also likely to be somewhat younger, wealthier, and better educated than the average viewer. Nonetheless, especially considered in aggregate, they can provide a sense of how people are making sense of media. When multiple contributors to several different forums express a similar interpretation of a given text, it’s probable that other viewers have a similar take. One advantage online forums have over the kind of experiments and surveys that prompt people for reactions to media is that there are no measurement or observer effects. Additionally, comments in online forums capture audience reactions to media however they’re encountering it in their own lives with any effects of the influence of their friends and family and the broader cultural context intact. To complement the reception data from online forums, I also use Nielsen ratings, opinion surveys, and sales data in order to better understand how people are using and reacting to mass media and the ideologies represented in it.³¹

Although I focus on cultural products mostly created by and aimed at Americans, the food revolution and aspirational eating are not exclusively American phenomena. The epigraph declaring this to be the age of food comes from You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture by British writer and Guardian columnist Steven Poole.³² Many of the targets of Poole’s ire, such as Jamie Oliver, are celebrities throughout the Anglophone world. MasterChef Australia, the antipodean version of a competitive cooking reality show that originated in Britain, has been one of the country’s most watched programs since its 2009 debut.³³ The vibrant restaurant scene, farmers’ markets, and food activism in Toronto are similar to what you see in American cities such as Portland, San Francisco, and New York.³⁴ Some aspects of the food revolution may even be global. The Slow Food movement, founded in Italy in 1986, now has chapters in 150 countries around the world. Japan is home to more restaurants with three Michelin stars than any other country, and trend-setting bars in the Ghanaian capital of Accra feature local ingredients with a cosmopolitan twist, such as caipirihnas made with local palm spirit and locally caught salmon garnished with avocado velouté.³⁵

If my theory about the relationship between class structure and food culture is correct, this makes sense, as the economic trends that have shaped American class anxieties since the late 1970s are not restricted to the United States. Technological changes, globalization, and neoliberal economic policies have affected many countries in similar ways. The Reagan revolution was paralleled by Thatcherism in Britain and economic rationalism in Australia, all of which idealized free markets, ushered in a relaxed regulatory environment, privatized state industries, increased restraints on unions, cut taxes and social support programs, and reduced barriers to trade. Since the mid-1980s, income inequality has increased in seventeen of the twenty-two member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.³⁶ Even in historically egalitarian countries such as Denmark, Germany, and Sweden, the divide between the rich and poor has widened. Some of the global manifestations of the food revolution may be the result of American influence, but some are a response to other changes in politics, economics, and culture.

The United States itself is vast and heterogeneous, so the flip side of the fact that many American cultural trends are