Aspirational Eating: Class anxiety and the Rise of Food in Popular Culture

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on four pillars in the popular discourse about food 1) sophistication, 2) thinness, 3) purity, and 4) cosmopolitanism. The collective emergence of these four pillars in mainstream U.S. culture in the 1980s has been called the American “food revolution.” The prevailing explanation for the food revolution is a progressive narrative I refer to as the “culinary enlightenment thesis.” According to that thesis, the four pillars represent a unified gestalt that resulted from the inevitable forward march of progress in agricultural technologies, nutritional science, global trade, and liberal multiculturalism. I show that the four pillars are neither a unified gestalt nor a new phenomenon. Instead, they represent conflicting and competing ideals that were also mainstream preoccupations between 1880 and 1920. At the turn of the twentieth century, gourmet cooking, slimming diets, natural and “Pure Foods,” and international cuisines first became popular in the U.S. primarily among urban middle-class women, who served as national taste leaders. Furthermore, I analyze how recent mass media discourses and texts, including representations of President Obama, the Grey Poupon Rolls Royce advertising campaign, NBC's hit reality series “The Biggest Loser,” and critically-acclaimed films like Ratatouille (Pixar 2007) Sideways (Fox Searchlight 2004) construct, negotiate with, and reinforce the four pillars of “enlightened” eating. My central argument is that rather than representing a true enlightenment, the food revolution serves as a compensatory form of class mobility for the American middle class during periods of income stagnation and high inequality. Food has been used to define social classes since the emergence of capitalism, but aspirational eating, or the use of food as a means of performing and embodying the “good life” is a quintessentially middle-class practice that emerged in Anglo-American culture in the eighteenth century. Its changing manifestations reflect the shifting nature of middle-class status anxieties. Since the 1980s, as middle class has struggled to maintain their material advantages over the lower classes, the cultural capital represented by food has become a central technology of creating class distinctions and one of the primary ways that many Americans have of aspiring to the “good life.”