Marketing elite authenticity: Tradition and terroir in artisanal food discourse

Abstract

Scholars have shown that ‘slow’ foods such as organic or artisan products are marketed primarily at the middle-class, allowing consumers to supposedly resist anonymous corporate culture and mass production, while at the same time performing cultural capital and “good taste” (cf. Bourdieu, 1984; Shugart, 2014). As a case in point, my paper examines a multimodal dataset of food texts (e.g. online resources, shop displays, and interviews) drawn from an artisanal cured meats producer in Switzerland who explicitly self-styles as the height of modern, cosmopolitan food practices and trends. This so-called ‘progressive’ discourse hinges on the iconization, romanticization and exploitation of agrarian life and peripheral vernaculars, in ways that strategically both claim and deny elitist distinction. I argue that this case study of Swiss artisanal food marketing therefore represents what I call “elite authenticity” (Mapes, 2018); as such, particular ways of eating (and particular eaters) are hailed as simultaneously fashionable and socially/politically virtuous (cf. Kenway and Lazarus, 2017), while covertly reinscribing privileged standards of good taste and class inequality.