5.3 Aspirational Food and the Gastronomical Imaginary
As we discussed in Chapter 3, the aspirational consumer is the ideal consumer group for engaging with curated content and thus for engaging with aspirational food practices. In this section, I specifically look at the aspirational consumer and their gastronomical imaginary in the context of what Margot Finn calls in Discriminating Taste the “food revolution” of the past decades (2019: 6). For Finn, the food revolution is assigning social status to food according to four central ideals: “sophistication, thinness, purity, and cosmopolitanism” (2019: 20). In platformized cultural production, the food revolution appears as an expert discourse, communicated by authorized social agents, including critics, celebrities, influencers, star chefs, and pundits, who regulate not only what “good taste” is but also what kind of food and dietary arrangements correspond to ideal, beautiful, and ethical bodies. In this way, the practices of eating, drinking, or cooking are recontextualized as carriers of distinction-based meaning. The popular figure of the foodie is evocative in this regard, as it refers to “somebody who thinks about food not just as biological sustenance, but also as a key part of their identity, and a kind of lifestyle” (Johnston and Baumann, 2014: 2), that is, to someone whose diet is suggestive of their overall “self”. Expert gastronomical discourse transforms the thinking and practicing around certain foods and drinks by defining what is more and what is less appropriate to do with them. For instance, “[b]eing interested in wine”, in the context of wineries, wine tasters, and wine seminars, classes, and schools, “became a sign of refinement instead of addiction, impoverishment, or the dangerous— if sometimes alluring—sensuality and lack of self-control associated with wine-drinking immigrants” (Finn, 2019: 4; see also Inglis and Almila, 2019; Inglis, 2022). To know about wine and especially wine in its global dimension is a sign of sophistication and cosmopolitanism rather than addictive or potentially problematic behavior. In the age of mass communication and platforms, this expert gastronomical discourse becomes an everyday—rather than an exceptional—encounter. Yet it is often the elites that legitimize it rather than everyday people. Celebrities, for instance, are key in the proliferation of certain food patterns and they can both embody and propagate the proper food ideals. Finn mentions how in American popular culture of recent years, a president-celebrity like Barack Obama was the epitome of the foodie in particular via “his afinity for gourmet or upscale foods […] his body size and its relationship to his eating habits and health […] his knowledge of natural foods […and] his appreciation for diverse regional and ethnic cuisines” (2019: 20). Both a president with refined taste as well as a “man of the people”, Obama personified ethical values, healthy choices, and sophisticated style in his gastronomical persona. This persona encountered audiences with middle-class habitus or aspirations for a lifestyle of “critical eating”, that is, the experience of eating as a “form of collective belonging and meaning making” (Mihalache, 2016: 318) rather than merely a response to body instincts and being hungry.
The Babushka–Nonna Experience
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