Abstract
Food is a revealing index of social and cultural boundaries. It is the symbolic fulcrum of many religious rites, such as the Eucharist in Christianity or the Islamic Eid al-Fatr post-Ramadan feast. Food preferences and aversions also circumscribe the distances between cultures and classes. What is considered a delicacy or an acceptable meal in one place—say, horse flesh to the French or dog meat in parts of China—may elicit disgust elsewhere, as in England or the United States. However, social differentiation through food is not limited to exceptional cases; our everyday product choices and manners are important cultural statements about who we are. Food, David E. Sutton perceptively states, “hides powerful meanings and structures under the cloak of the mundane and the quotidian.”1 It is surprising then that scholars have only begun to explore the cultural exchanges, social and econom ic inf luences, and patterns of consumer choice guiding food consumption. We have volumes of nutritional and empirical (especially market-driven) data on culinary practices, but still limited material on post-Second World War gastronomic trends. The last decade has begun to reverse this trend, led by the groundbreaking works of Michael Pollan, Donna Gabaccia, Hasia R. Diner, Eric Schlosser, and Tom Standage. These and other authors are considering why individuals and cultures eat and view food experiences as they do.
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Notes
David E. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (New York: Berg, 2001), 3.
Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 25.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Ibid., “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 14–25.
Panikos Panayi, Spicing Up Britain: The Multicultural History of British Food (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 172.
Elizabeth Buettner, “Going Out for an Indian: South Asian Restaurants and the Limits of Multiculturalism in Britain,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 4 (2008): 865–901.
Dhani R. Prem, The Parliamentary Leper: A History of Colour Prejudice in Britain (Aligarh, India: Metric Publications, 1965), 4; Ibid., The Parliamentary Leper, 875–76.
Andrew Rosen, The Transformation of British Life, 1950–2000: A Social History (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 94.
Pat Chapman, ed. The Cobra Indian Lager Good Indian Restaurant Guide (London: Piatkus, 1991), 18.
Sarah Mills, Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 2003), 54.
Joanne Finkelstein, Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners (New York: New York University Press, 1989);
Lisa M. Heldke, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), 178.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Want, 1972), 151–52.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (1985): 730.
Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 329.
For a list of works before 1996, see Bonnie H. Erickson, “Culture, Class and Connections,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 1 (1996): 221–22.
Ahmed Jamal, “Acculturation: The Symbolism of Ethnic Eating among Contemporary British Consumers,” British Food Journal 98, no. 10 (1996): 12–26.
Anne Murcott, “On the Social Significance of the ‘Cooked Dinner’ in South Wales,” Social Science Information 21 (1982): 677–95;
Janet Mitchell, “The British Main Meal in the 1990s: Has it Changed Its Identity?” British Food Journal 101, no. 11 (1999): 876–77.
Jon R. Bareham, Consumer Behaviour in the Food Industry: A European Perspective (Toronto: Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd., 1995), 78–79.
These tensions were chronicled much earlier in Dervla Murphy’s Tales from Two Cities: Travel of Another Sort (London: John Murray, 1987).
Ahmed Jamal, “Food Consumption among Ethnic Minorities: The Case of British-Pakistanis in Bradford, UK,” British Food Journal 100, no. 5 (1998): 221–27.
Nigella Lawson, “The Comforts of Home, and Fit for a Queen,” New York Times October 2, 2002. http://www.lexisnexis.com (accessed April 10, 2006); see also Allison James, “How British Is British Food?” in Food, Health and Identity, ed. Pat Caplan (New York: Routledge, 1997), 79–80.
Alan Warde and Lydia Martens, Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption, and Pleasure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145.
Survey cited in John Burnett, England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England from 1830 to the Present (Toronto: Pearson Longman, 2004), 300.
Alan Warde and Kevin Hetherington, “English Households and Routine Food Practices: A Research Note,” Sociological Review 42, no. 4 (1994): 769.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 14–25.
Alan Warde, “Eating Out and the Commercialization of Mental Life,” British Food Journal 100, no. 3 (1998): 151.
See Shirley Tate, “Talking Identities: Food, Black ‘Authenticity’ and Hybridity,” in Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, eds. Tobias Goring, Marcus Heide, and Susanne Muehleisen (Heidelberg, GER: University of Winter Heidelberg Press, 2003), 89–105;
Lynn Harbottle, “Fast Food/Spoiled Identity: Iranian Migrants in the British Catering Trade,” in Food, Health and Identity, ed. Pat Caplan (New York: Routledge, 1997), 87–110.
Davide Girardelli, “Commodified Identities: The Myth of Italian Food in the U.S.,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 28, no. 4 (2004): 307.
Ching Lin Pang, “Business Opportunity or Food Pornography? Chinese Restaurant Ventures in Antwerp,” International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research 8, no. 1/2 (2002): 152.
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© 2014 Russell Cobb
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Fielding, S.A. (2014). Currying Flavor: Authenticity, Cultural Capital, and the Rise of Indian Food in the United Kingdom. In: Cobb, R. (eds) The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353832_4
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