Eating, Class, and Control: The Emotions of Food Choice in One Oakland Neighborhood

• In Event: 479 - Section on Sociology of Emotions Paper Session. Emotions and Social Worlds

Abstract

This article speaks to an emerging body of research on food choice by asking what are the emotional associations that individuals have with the food that they eat and how do those associations affect our food choices? How are emotional experiences distributed among different social structural positions? 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 – especially 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 in research is that these structural frameworks tend to ignore the micro level meanings that inform how individuals navigate the food system. Drawing on 29 in-depth interviews from one mixed-income, racially diverse, and food diverse neighborhood in Oakland, California, I argue that class inequalities are acted out through different emotive relationships to food therefore fortifying the results of structural inequality. Individuals understand the places that they eat and buy food as classed spaces and embody systems of classed meanings that can be explored through their emotional relationships to food. Specifically, I look at the way that feelings of control, fear, pleasure and pride around food are distributed across socioeconomic status groups.

Author

• Kara Alexis Young, University of California-Berkeley