Food consumption, habitus and the embodiment of social change: Making class and doing gender in urban Vietnam

Judith Ehlert

doi:10.1177/00380261211009793

Abstract

This article draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a means to analyse social distinction and change in terms of class and gender through the lens of food consumption. By focusing on urban Vietnam, this qualitative study looks into the daily practices of food consumption, dieting and working on the body as specific means to enact ideal body types. Economically booming Vietnam has attracted growing investment capital in the fields of body and beauty industries and food retail. After decades of food insecurity, urban consumers find themselves manoeuvring in between growing food and lifestyle options, a nutrition transition, and contradicting demands on the consumer to both indulge and restrain themselves. Taking this dynamic urban context as its point of departure and adopting an intersectional perspective, this article assesses how eating, dieting and body performance are applied in terms of making class and doing gender. It shows that the growing urban landscape of food and body-centric industries facilitates new possibilities for distinction, dependent not only on economic capital but on bodily and cultural capital also, and furthermore, how social habitus regarding food–body relationships are gendered and interlaced with class privilege.

Highlights

This article investigates food consumption and body work in contemporary urban Vietnam in order to examine the rapid social transformations taking place there
This article has spotlighted a specific field of consumption in urban Vietnam that is located at the very intersection of indulgence and restraint and has led to the burgeoning food and diet industries
To repeat again Earl’s statement: ‘it is unthinkable to be social without sharing food’ (Earl, 2014, p. 153) as commensality, community and social belonging are constituted deeply through food

Summary

Introduction

This article investigates food consumption and body work in contemporary urban Vietnam in order to examine the rapid social transformations taking place there. In reference to Bourdieu’s habitus concept, it will show how mundane practices such as eating, dieting, feeding children and exercising can offer insight into these social transformations by elaborating how food-related body work helps to draw and maintain social distinctions. In relation to the field of nutrition, this means that taste for certain foods and the ways they are consumed are socially learned. The way bodies are treated in terms of sustenance and appearance produce and are embedded in social differentiations The way bodies are treated in terms of sustenance and appearance produce and are embedded in social differentiations (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 187ff.)

Objectives

Conclusion