"Discriminating Taste" by S. Margot Finn

A few days ago in vox.com I read a very interesting interview titled "'Good taste' is all about class anxiety" by Rachel Sugar. In this interview, author S. Margot Finn talked about several of her unusual ideas about food in modern American life. The central point of the interview:

"In her 2017 book, Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution, [Finn] argues that our beliefs about food — which ones are 'good' and which ones aren’t — is a direct result of economic angst. In the late 1970s, the middle class began to stagnate, while the ultra-rich start getting even richer, and almost immediately after that, middle class Americans got really into brie. By cultivating what we eat, and how we eat, and how we talk about what we eat, Finn writes, we can 'perform and embody a desirable class identity.' You may not have actual dollars, but you can certainly develop a very loud appreciation for the merits of certain natural wines."

This book seemed so intriguing that I immediately ordered it and I have now read it. It's based on Finn's PhD thesis in American Culture at the University of Michigan. The academic origin of the book probably accounts for the excessive historical detail, repetition of reasonably commonplace facts about food myths and misconceptions, and pedantic language that seems to me to make it a little tedious to read. However, although the ideas are somewhat buried in verbiage, Discriminating Taste has some interesting and nonconformist propositions about popular trends in food.

A major theme of the book is the lack of consistency in popular ideals about food, in particular the lack of agreement about what foods are more desirable, tastier, healthier, ethically better, or culturally more authentic. The only consistent way these claimed ideals can be unified, Finn implies, is that people who espouse them are using them to establish their moral or social superiority to others. She shows that these are not new ideas, but ones that have recurred in American culture for around 150 years, which is in itself revealing.

I particularly liked her discussion on "The Misguided Pursuit of Authenticity and Exoticism." Why, for example, are Lay's Potato Chips not considered particularly "authentic" while Sriracha hot sauce, invented and manufactured in Southern California, has "an exotic aura which is probably responsible for at least some of its popular cachet"?  Finn concludes:

"Although both Sriracha and the potato chip are American inventions, the spicy condiment with a Thai name that is made by an ethnically Chinese immigrant and is strongly associated with Vietnamese cuisine is distanced from the mainstream in a way that a snack that could be traced to Euro-American figures such as Mary Randolph and Herman W. Lay, or even the bi-racial George Crum, is not." (pp 120-122)

The author's choices of specific examples to illustrate her points about how food is viewed in America is amusing: she relies on long discussions of several mass-market films and advertisements, particularly the wine snobbery depicted in the 2004 film "Sideways;" the attitude towards fine foods and skillful chefs, especially French as illustrated in the 2007 film "Ratatouille;" and the social status and food taste expressed in the famous and highly successful 1980s commercial for Grey Poupon mustard -- "Pardon me, would you happen to have any Grey Poupon?"

Although these examples do express Finn's points about food theories, when I read these ultra-serious analyses of rather obsolete items from popular culture I couldn't really see them in the here and now. I know they are relevant, but I just couldn't sustain the demanded connection to the many recent books I've read about nutrition, environmental implications of what we eat, what's tasty, what's industrial, and all that kind of thing.

If you are intrigued by these ideas, I suggest that you check out Rachel Sugar's interview with Finn, which has a nice but brief summary of the major thoughts in the book. Rather than try to summarize further, I'll end with an example of the academic jargon that mars the book, in this example, a few sentences about the hostility that can be aimed at people who buy organic or gourmet food with food stamps, or about poorer people who imitate the ways of the upper middle class:

"When the moral valence of a cultural sign shifts with the class status of the person, that's probably a good sign that the normative judgment associated with the sign has more to do with social hierarchies than with any real moral logic. Just as the threat of being perceived as a snob helps police nonwealthy people who might aspire to pass as gourmets, the vitriol inspired by the idea of poor people participating in the food movement helps keeps those trends exclusive enough to continue serving as a source of symbolic distinction." (p. 212)

© 2019 Mae E. Sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com