(De)constructing distinction: Class inequality and elite authenticity in mediatized food discourse

Abstract

Orienting to recent work on language materiality (Cavanaugh and Shankar) and elite discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski 2017a), I examine the discursive production of class status and the management of distinction/privilege in mediatized food discourse. Specifically, this paper presents a critical discourse analysis of a New York Times food section corpus comprised of 259 articles (e.g. restaurant reviews, celebrity chef profiles, features concerning cooking techniques or trending ingredients, etc.) in which I identify an over-arching discourse of elite authenticity. I show how elite authenticity is a key strategy by which distinction is nowadays both (re)produced and (dis)avowed in food discourse, and that it is accomplished via five rhetorical strategies: historicity, simplicity, pioneer spirit, lowbrow appreciation, and locality/sustainability. Thus, food discourse, rooted in familiar bourgeois anxieties and privileges, sustains the post-class ideologies (Thurlow) and omnivorous consumption (Khan) at the heart of contemporary class formations.