Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape [Paperback]

This important cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent hole in the wall ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline insists that anybody can be a foodie, the second  asks foodies to look in the mirror and think about their relative social and economic privilege. By simultaneously considering both of these stories, and studying how they operate in tension, a delicious sociology of food becomes available, perfect for teaching a broad range of cultural sociology courses.

Introduction: Entering the Delicious World of Foodies 1. Foodies, Omnivores and Discourse 2. Eating Authenticity 3. The Culinary Other: Seeking Exoticism 4. Foodie Politics: This is one delicious revolution 5. Class and its Absence 6. Caring about Food: Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen Conclusion. Foodie Continuity, Change, and Moral Ambiguity

As Johnston and Baumann show in their stimulating analyses of the gourmet foodscape today, food both divides people and brings them together. Their illuminating interviews take the reader into the foodie subculture where food becomes lifestyle, where the food-possessed daily negotiate the contradictions of class, gender, and work, the tensions of pleasure and necessity, and the dynamics of the individual in our contemporary world. The new chapter on gender is an especially welcome addition to studies on the sociology of food.

-Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Sociology, Columbia University

When Johnston and Baumann first wrote about them, foodies were an exotic minority. Now they are everywhere. We perform our social being throughl1