Reading Labels, Learning Status: Symbolic Boundaries and Gourmet Food Writing

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 04. Symbolic Boundaries Network

Abstract

In their influential American Journal of Sociology article, Johnston and Baumann (2007) argue that that American gourmet food writing trains consumers to distinguish the fancy from the unexceptional. In this article, I apply Johnston and Baumann’s analytical framework to the magazine coverage of a small gourmet food company, and then examine how this same company deploys marketing projects—a different kind of gourmet food writing—in order to create potentially similar forms of distinction. Using Kniazeva and Belk’s (2007) approach to “unpacking packages,” this article uses ethnographic data and textual analysis to ask whether marketing materials engage with the same system of determining whether a food fits within the consumer’s repertoire of desirable food choices according to the discursive system that American gourmet magazines employ to differentiate high status foods within an omnivorous landscape. This paper explores the tension between “top down” and “bottom up” taste-making projects by understanding how cultural consumers learn to read two distinctive forms of gourmet food writing.

Author

• Amy Elisabeth Singer, Franklin Marshall College