Driving Taste, Shifting Identities: Valuation and Cultural Repertoires in Boston's Food Truck Economy

• In Event: 365 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Culture and Markets

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate how cultural producers, by engaging across differing standards of valuation, are capable of drawing from distinct, contextually defined repertoires at different times and places to create complex situational identities. To that end, I engaged in a year-long ethnographic study as a consumer within the Boston Food Truck Program studying the emergent practice of gourmet mobile food vending. Having negotiated a parking schedule and developed a menu, I sought to uncover what identities enable food truck operators to ensure a match between the assemblage of tastes they have decided to deploy and the tastes of the neighborhood residents, transient visitors, and workers their businesses serve. In other words, are their multiple ways of being a gourmet food truck—even for a single truck? I show that the same menu can take on a host of meanings within the Boston Food Truck Program, thereby giving an array of meanings to what it means to eat out of a truck. By engaging across differing standards of valuation, cultural producers are capable of drawing from distinct, contextually defined repertoires at different times and places. Rather than being limited by neighborhood characteristics or menu decisions, operators variously construct the cultural meanings of their products through selective, interactional engagement with distinct cultural repertoires. This dynamic crafting of product identities suggests the need for a more dynamic understanding of cultural fields as interactional spaces where statuses, hierarchies, and meanings are not merely constrained but (re)produced.

Author

• Connor John Fitzmaurice, Boston University