Front cover image for Culinary capital

Culinary capital

TV cookery shows hosted by celebrity chefs. Meal prep kitchens. Online grocers and restaurant review sites. Competitive eating contests, carnivals and fairs, and junk food websites and blogs. What do all of them have in common? According to authors Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, they each serve as productive sites for understanding the role of culinary capital in shaping individual and group identities in contemporary culture. Beyond providing sustenance, food and food practices play an important social role, offering status to individuals who conform to their culture's culinary norms and expectations while also providing a means of resisting them. This book analyzes this phenomenon in action across the landscape of contemporary culture. The authors examine how each of the sites listed above promises viewers and consumers status through the acquisition of culinary capital and, as they do so, intersect with a range of cultural values and ideologies, particularly those of gender and economic class
Print Book, English, 2012
Berg, London, 2012
Cross-cultural studies
ix, 145 pages ; 24 cm
9780857853820, 9780857854155, 9780857853837, 0857853821, 0857854151, 085785383X
795909419
Defining culinary capital
Fixing dinner/fixing the self: the contradictions of new trends in food procurement
Television cooking shows: gender, class, and the illusory promise of transformation
Democratizing taste?" culinary capital in the digital age
Culinary resistance: state fairs, competitive eating, and "junk" foodies