Stratification on the Menu: Using Restaurant Menus to Examine Social Class

Abstract

LONG RECOGNIZED AS a source of conspicuous for the wealthy (Veblen 1899), over the past two decades food has increasingly become a signifier of social and cultural capital for a growing number of Americans. Celebrity chefs, television food channels, international cooking schools, cookbooks that line the shelves of corporate booksellers, as well as the proliferation of international restaurant chains are evidence of our efforts to differentiate based on food (Johnston 2003). The explosion of fashionable Napa Valley farm stays, French country cooking schools, and farm-tofeast weekend getaways suggest that food holidays have become a highly sought-after organizing theme for the well-heeled and conscious. Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, has helped make organic and local produce an up-market designer food and marker for the highly educated upper-middle class, while Martha Stewart raised lifestyle and to an art to be emulated and, in the process, diffused a massified model to the lower-middle and working class. As a result, kitchen supply retailers Dean and Delucca and Sur La Table are the new cathedrals of consumption for the upwardly mobile middle (Ritzer 1999), venues for the socially mobile to acquire and display cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). Sociologists are frequently guided to the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) to understand the role that food habits, taste, and desire play in creating distinctions. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Bourdieu persuasively argues that aesthetic tastes are markers of social class (1984:2). Others have analyzed the changes that have occurred to the American diet and the relationship between food and (Critser 2003; Ehrenreich 1985; Goody 1982; Kaufmann 1991; Levenstein 1988; Roseberry 1996; Schlosser 2001). Food and social is not simply about economics (i.e., Marx) or symbolism (i.e., Weber). Roseberry (1996:773) elaborates on the economic and the symbolic values of the global food system with his work on yuppie coffee segmentation by class. He writes: