Eating in a Food Oasis: Emotions, Food Choice and Inequality in One Oakland Neighborhood

• In Event: 324 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. RGC, Culture, and Space

Abstract

Over the last 10 years, there has been a growing body of literature addressing the health risks associated with reliance on the American conventional food system. While this scholarship provides evidence that structural factors – food quality, income and access – shape people’s food consumption patterns, it is not able to make sense of how people in different social structural locations make decisions about what they eat among alternatives. One reason for this gap is that these structural frameworks tend to ignore the micro level meanings that inform how individuals navigate the food system. This raises the question: how do individuals across race and class lines make decisions about what to eat when food access is varied and close by? In order to examine this, I will conduct in-depth interviews and extended case studies with individuals in the Lake Merritt Neighborhood of Oakland, California. This neighborhood is a mixed community of low-income residents, young professions, college students and middle-upper class families With 8 grocery stores within a 1-mile radios and one weekly farmers market, this field site provides an opportunity to understand how individuals make choices when choices are plentiful. Through these interviews, I argue that, beyond structure, individual emotions – defined by sociologists as socially constructed signifiers of our cultural common sense – drive patterns of eating and buying food and that these emotions are key mechanisms that link structural inequalities with disparate health and consumption outcomes.

Author

• Kara Alexis Young, University of California-Berkeley