Taste Of Necessity Research Articles

Exploring unequal class logics of mealtime food socialisation. An ethnography of family meals in France and Australia

Regular family mealtimes are occasions to model food consumption and have been associated with health and well-being benefits for children. This study aimed to investigate children's mealtime food socialisation in socially diverse households. Nine families from France and five from Australia were recruited, ranging from lower middle-class to upper-class positions, with children mostly between the ages of five to eight. The data is composed of the observations of 47 mealtimes and semi-directive interviews with both parents. The results showed that food socialisation and parents' understanding of children's taste development were linked to the household's social class position as well as to the temporal, cognitive and emotional resources parents possessed at mealtimes, in a similar manner across France and Australia. The more capital and resources the parents had, the more they were able to perform an intensive food socialisation style, which led them to prepare balanced menus and get children to eat the food served. The less capital and resources the parents had, the more they engaged in a hands-off food socialisation style, leading them to serve more child-oriented and less diverse menus. Importantly, all parents strived to serve healthy food, but limited resources prevented some of them from doing so. These food socialisation styles were also connected to the development of different social skills in children: with the intensive model, children were closely managed by their parents at the table but also learnt negotiation skills, whereas with the hands-off style, children learnt to be quite autonomous in their eating. The findings presented here contribute to Hays' intensive mothering concept and to Lareau's class-based parenting models. They also challenge Bourdieu's differentiation between a taste of necessity and a taste of luxury.

Språkliga landskap i Åbo förr och nu

Linguistic landscapes have in recent years been studied from several angles and in many different language communities. However, very few studies in the field have applied a diachronic perspective. This study aims at examining commercial linguistic landscapes in Turku, the oldest city in Finland, by focusing on how the same places in the centre of Turku are linguistically shaped a hundred years apart. Turku is an officially bilingual city, which implies that national and municipal signs need to be in the two national languages (Finnish and Swedish), in accordance with Finland’s language legislation. Commercial signs, on the other hand, are not subject to the same legal framework, which makes them an interesting object of study. The study is theoretically inspired by a view of language as social practice, as well as by ethnographic principles (e.g. Heller 2007, 2008; Blommaert 2007, 2013). Its results illustrate that the linguistic landscape of a hundred years ago shows a systematic parallel bilingualism, in which messages in Finnish and Swedish stand side by side and the same information is consistently mediated in both languages, i.e. a bilingualism that is primarily directed at monolingual recipients. The newer linguistic landscape, however, shows a more heterogeneous linguistic profile. The Swedish language has almost disappeared from the cityscape, but the importance of Finnish has also declined. Instead, English has gained an increasingly salient role, alongside a multilingualism that combines resources from different languages in a more arbitrary way, and these elements hardly ever convey the same contents. This kind of multilingualism can be characterised as postmodern and rhizomatic (Deleuze & Quattari 2015), and it is also linked to superdiversity (e.g. Blommaert 2013), but represents a multilingualism of an elite rather than a migration-based one, as the area under study offers goods and services for tastes of luxury rather than tastes of necessity (Bourdieu 1984).

Gastropolitics: Speaking in Tongues

Gastropolitics: Speaking in Tongues

Aspirational lifestyle journalism: The impact of social class on producers’ and audiences’ views in the context of socio-economic inequality

A growing amount of scholarship on lifestyle journalism and role conceptions has shown its relevance in the context of consumption cultures and societal changes. However, the existing literature has tended to focus on countries with relatively prosperous economies, neglecting to explore those with greater socio-economic inequality. Likewise, scholarship has offered some insight into what audiences expect of political journalists, but we know little about expectations of lifestyle journalism. Exploring role conceptions and expectations in socio-economically unequal societies gives rise to the question: How may social class shape these? To examine this, our study draws on 22 in-depth interviews with lifestyle journalists and three focus groups with audiences from different class backgrounds in South Africa. Findings suggest that lifestyle journalists’ awareness of class disparity and the country’s history of racial segregation and oppression shapes their roles in three ways. First, journalists expressed strong support for roles typically associated with political journalism, albeit interconnected with lifestyle roles. Second, journalists acted as ‘ responsible’ cultural intermediaries, mediating the worlds of luxury and inequality. Third, journalists expressed a strong role orientation toward providing aspiration, as did audience expectations, indicating a level of congruence. Applying a Bourdieusian framework, we argue that lifestyle journalism allows audiences who live under ‘conditions of scarcity’ and who have been conceptualized as having a ‘taste of necessity’, to perform a ‘ taste of aspiration’. We suggest a need to reconceptualize scholarship’s approach to studying journalistic roles by moving beyond a politics-lifestyle binary, and to more closely examine the role of aspiration in lifestyle journalism.

Intra-familial health polarisation: how diverse health concerns become barriers to health behaviour change in families with preschool children and emerging obesity.

In a disadvantaged rural area in Denmark, severe challenges have been identified concerning overweight and obesity in families with preschool-age children. The present paper examines how families with young children and emerging obesity issues perceive 'healthy living' and barriers to practising it. Using data from qualitative workshops with families and professionals working with them, we reveal health perceptions and related family dynamics. Drawing on P. Bourdieu's theory of habitus and 'tastes of necessity', K.L. Frohlich etal.'s notion of 'collective lifestyles' and E. Lindbladh and C. H. Lyttken's theory of preconditions for health behaviour change and reactions to risk-related information, we analyse how risk perceptions and related health practices within the families are influenced by the local contexts in the disadvantaged area under study. Despite shared perceptions of 'healthy living', we found that diverse health-risk perceptions created family dynamics in which parents performed opposed health behaviours, which became a huge barrier to becoming a healthier family. Based on our theoretical approach, we propose that risk perceptions and reactions are highly context dependent, as illustrated in both micro-contexts (family dynamics) and the macro-context (the disadvantaged area).

The biohabitus of scarcity: bio-social dispositions and the "obesity epidemic" in Mexico.

In this article, we explore the potential of Warin etal.'s concept of biohabitus (a set of embodied biological and social dispositions) as a conceptual tool for the understanding of mechanisms behind the "obesity epidemic." Elaborating on this concept, we argue that a context of food scarcity gives rise to a biohabitus geared to energy-saving, expressed in both biological (the thrifty genotype/phenotype hypotheses) and symbolic dispositions (Bourdieu's "taste of necessity"), and the interaction between this type of biohabitus and changes in the food-related environment results in increased body mass index. We exemplify the use of this framework by applying it to the case of Mexico, a middle-income Latin American country with one of the highest prevalences of obesity worldwide. The example shows how the concept of biohabitus can help researchers move beyond disciplinary explanations, towards a more complex understanding of the conjunction of social and biological processes that result in differential patterns of health and disease.

‘The porcupine was a feast’: The Tastes of Luxury and Necessity in Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Storytelling

This paper brings Bourdieu’s concepts of the tastes of luxury and necessity into dialogue with the alimentary habitus that Bundjalung woman Ruby Langford Ginibi records in her lifewriting. The paper argues that Langford Ginibi’s alimentary disposition has much in common with the taste of necessity that Bourdieu attributes to the French working class. The analysis identifies two further characteristics of her relationship to food that Bourdieu does not describe: an emphasis on recounting the adverse material circumstances in which meals are procured and prepared, and a practise of indiscriminate eating in which foods are deemed uniformly and reliably desirable. The paper finds that, despite some public censure, Langford Ginibi maintains much of her habitus as she accrues social, cultural, and economic capital. It concludes that maintaining and valorising the taste of necessity and its associated habitus may be read as a positive strategy that seeks to restructure the colonial field from below.

The relationship between taste and status conspicuous consumption

This research starts with the analysis of conspicuous consumption as a specific means to emphasize one’s social status. As far back as the end of the 19th century Thorstein Veblen developed a theory about a specific class who was characterized by nonproductive activities and specific surrounding - servants, clothing, which is not suitable for work, luxurious furniture. Since that idea was examined many times in various researches during the last century, it appears to be interesting to compare it with the concept of taste, which one cannot help appealing to while choosing anything, especially something that shows one’s status.The article draws attention to the peculiarities of taste development and its role in choosing possessions according to class preferences. In addition, it emphasizes the importance of the correspondence between possessions and their owner’s status as it guarantees to create a true impression about their social status. That idea has been marked out due to Jean Baudrillard’s researches which defined the dependence of home furniture upon income and belonging to a certain class. The question arises as to what role ‘pure’ taste plays in taste of a whole class. The taste typology by Pierre Bourdieu (the tastes of luxury and the tastes of necessity) enables to analyze the social aspect of taste, in particular the way the taste of a certain social group develops under pressure of existing social preferences and stereotypes as well as the way it impacts on the choice of purchases.The author concludes that a need may be considered a basis for both kinds of tastes. Whereas in the first case a need is an obvious component of taste development, in the second one it is more difficult to prove that a need to leave an impression on someone is as severe as a need to live.

Understanding the food preferences of people of low socioeconomic status

Scholars have long studied consumer taste dynamics within class-stratified contexts, but relatively little attention has been paid to the taste preferences of low-socioeconomic-status groups. We analyze interview data from 254 individuals from 105 families across Canada to explore the cultural repertoires that guide low-socioeconomic-status consumer tastes in food. Empirically, we ask which foods respondents prefer, and for what reasons, across socioeconomic status groups. Analytically, we argue that low-socioeconomic-status respondents demonstrate aesthetic preferences that operate according to four cultural repertoires that are distinctly different from that of high-socioeconomic-status omnivorous cultural consumption. Our respondents display tastes for foods from corporate brands, familiar “ethnic” foods, and foods perceived as healthy. While low-socioeconomic-status taste preferences in food are shaped by quotidian economic constraints – what Bourdieu called “tastes of necessity” – we show how cultural repertoires guiding low-socioeconomic-status tastes relate to both material circumstances and broader socio-temporal contexts. Our findings advance debates about the nature of low-socioeconomic-status food ideals by illuminating their underlying meanings and justifications and contribute to scholarly understanding of low-socioeconomic-status consumption.

Short horizons and obesity futures: Disjunctures between public health interventions and everyday temporalities

This paper examines the spatio-temporal disjuncture between ‘the future’ in public health obesity initiatives and the embodied reality of eating. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a disadvantaged community in South Australia (August 2012–July 2014), we argue that the future oriented discourses of managing risk employed in obesity prevention programs have limited relevance to the immediacy of poverty, contingencies and survival that mark people's day to day lives. Extending Bourdieu's position that temporality is a central feature of practice, we develop the concept of short horizons to offer a theoretical framework to articulate the tensions between public health imperatives of healthy eating, and local ‘tastes of necessity’. Research undertaken at the time of Australia's largest obesity prevention program (OPAL) demonstrates that pre-emptive and risk-based approaches to health can fail to resonate when the future is not within easy reach. Considering the lack of evidence for success of obesity prevention programs, over-reliance on appeals to ‘the future’ may be a major challenge to the design, operationalisation and success of interventions. Attention to local rather than future horizons reveals a range of innovative strategies around everyday food and eating practices, and these capabilities need to be understood and supported in the delivery of obesity interventions. We argue, therefore, that public health initiatives should be located in the dynamics of a living present, tailored to the particular, localised spatio-temporal perspectives and material circumstances in which people live.

The choice of the necessary: class, tastes and lifestyles

Purpose– Our attitudes, values and tastes are shaped by our position in social space. At least, that was the argument Pierre Bourdieu set out in his seminal work,La Distinction. The purpose of this paper is to consider Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction and his argument that working-class families exhibit cultural attitudes and tastes for social necessity.Design/methodology/approach– Attitudinal data relating to social necessity are taken from a national social survey of the British population. The results provide a rich source of data for exploring classed attitudes towards necessity in contemporary Britain.Findings– Bourdieu's original claims for working-class “choice of the necessary” and working-class “taste for necessity” are based on his observations grounded in social survey evidence drawn from 1960s French society. Analysis of contemporary British social survey and attitudinal data also reveals sharp contours and differences in attitudes and tastes according to class fractions. These are evident in classed tastes and preferences for food, clothes, the home and social life.Social implications– Within the Bourdieusian theoretical framework, we understand that the tastes of necessity are preferences that arise as adaptations to deprivation of necessary goods and services.La Distinctionand Bourdieu's approach to unmasking inequalities and structures in social space continue to be relevant in contemporary Britain. More generally, study findings add to the growing evidence that casts some doubt on current arguments concerning “individualisation”, claiming that social class has ceased to be significant in modern societies.Originality/value– This paper sheds fresh light on the empirical validity and continuing theoretical relevance of Bourdieu's work examining the role of social necessity in shaping working-class culture. Bourdieu argues that the real principle of our preferences is taste and for working-class families, this is a virtue made of necessity.

Can organic farmers be ‘good farmers’? Adding the ‘taste of necessity’ to the conventionalization debate

Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in the rate of conversion from conventional to organic farming, as organic farming shifted from an alternative production approach practiced by a small number of idealists, to the de facto alternative to mainstream conventional production. Although there has been considerable academic debate as to the role of agri-business penetration into the production and marketing chains of organic farming (‘conventionalization’), less is known about how the economic drivers of conventionalization are negotiated into practices at the farm level. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of economic and cultural capitals, the direct connection between symbols of ‘good farming’ and the economic requirements of maintaining a viable farming business (i.e., the ‘taste of necessity’) is demonstrated. Findings indicate that conventional and organic farmers in the study sites identified a similar range of cultural symbols, but organic farmers emphasized different symbols within this range. This diversity and selectivity demonstrates the fragmentation and contestation of ideals resulting from economic challenges at the time of the study. Economic capital is important to the decision to consider conversion to organic farming, but formal conversion reflects re-weighting of forms of cultural capital. The author argues that recognition of the impact of economic pressures on conventional farming, which in the study sites often led to reduced input use rather than intensification, is missing from the conventionalization debate. The mainstreaming of organic farming production has presented conventional farmers with a set of alternative or re-weighted symbols and a crucible for reflexive consideration of their own standards and practices of farming.

Lifestyles in distressed neighborhoods: A test of Bourdieu's “taste of necessity” hypothesis

In his theory of social inequality and lifestyle groups, Bourdieu (1979) argued that lower classes exhibit a “taste of necessity”. His main argument is that members of the lower classes are not able to sufficiently convert economic capital into cultural or social capital and vice versa, i.e. to successfully increase their capital volume. This hypothesis has neither been operationalized nor tested so far. We will give an explicit formulation of Bourdieu's theory and develop a test, using indicators derived from Bourdieu's work Distinction. We then apply our model to data from lower class members living in distressed neighborhoods in Cologne, Germany. Groups belonging to the lower classes are located in a “social space”, with dimensions to be interpreted as “capital volume” and “composition of cultural and economic capital”. We show that members of the lower classes cannot sufficiently increase their capital volume since they cannot efficiently convert “cultural capital” into “economic capital” and vice versa, a fact that supports Bourdieu's assumption of a “taste of necessity”.

Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790-1840 by Andreas s> Sch�nle (review)

7I8 SEER, 8o, 4, 2002 A common feature of their translating methods was their fidelity, to the point of slavish adherence, to their source texts. Even abridgement and cultural adjustment were rare. The only two radical exceptions who were prepared to take liberties with their originals were Catherine II and Anna Bunina. Significantly it is these same two who were also prepared to use foreign works as stepping stones to their own original compositions. The overall diffidence in the methods of the majority was reflected in the ritual modesty displayed in their prefaces and dedications and their coy reluctance to discussthe problems of translation.A rare exception was Bunina, the only woman to attempta scholarlypreface in her translationfromBatteuxin I8o8 which was not only the firstmanual on poetics publishedby a woman but one aimed specificallyat young ladies. It is these latter who would be able, in the new century, to benefit from the openings to publishingand the public realm substantiallypioneered, as this study demonstrates,by the useful endeavours of theirtranslatingforebears. Bangor W. GARETH JONES Schonle, Andreas. Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, I790-I840. Russian Research Center Studies, 92. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000. Vi+ 296 pp. Notes. Bibliography . Index. ?30.95. IN this in-depth study of the Russian literaryjourney from I790 to I840, Andreas Schonle arguesthat this genre be consideredas a distinctprose form evident in the Russian literarytraditionsince the Middle Ages. Ranging from the last decade of the eighteenth century (the era of Classicism and Sentimentalism),through the firstdecades of the nineteenth (fromRomanticism to the beginning of Realism), Schonle examines both well-known texts, such as Radischev's A J7ourney from Petersburg toMoscow, Karamzin's TheLetters of a Russian Traveller,Zhukovskii's RafaelevaMadonna and Pushkin's Journey to Arzrum, as well as those rarelycited by critics.These include TheNewSterne, a comedy by Shakhovskoi, Journeyto LittleRussiaby Prince P. Shalikov, The VWanderer by Vel'tman, 7ourney toSouthern Russiaby Izmailov, Fragmentfrom Letters of a Russian OfficeraboutFinland by Batiushkov, journey to Revelby BestuzhevMarlinskii ,JourneyacrossTaurisin I820 by Imurav'ev-Apostol,and 7he Fantastic JourneyofBaronBrambeusby Senkovskii. Schonle approachesthese worksfrom an aestheticaland culturalperspective , exploring them in termsof fashion, genre, ritual, histrionics,history,and irony. In chapter one, 'Fashion and Genre: The Two Instigators', Schonle examines the journeys of Radishchev and Karamzin, connecting them through his analysisof two distinctelements:'The Taste of Necessity' and the 'The Taste of Fiction'. In chaptertwo, 'Ritualand Histrionics:SentimentalViews ofAuthenticity', Schonle explores the work of Shakhovskoi,Prince Shalikov and Zhukovskii, subtitlingeach section 'Abuseof Theatricality', 'Ritual of Social Integration', and 'Ritual of SpiritualElevation' respectively.The sections on Shalikovand Zhukovskiiemphasizetheiruseof ritualasan 'experientialparadigm'(p. I09), REVIEWS 7 I9 thus elucidating a key point where the otherwise diametrically opposed aspirationsof these two writersconverge. Chapter three, 'Creating History: Presences and Absences', explores four works in the context of 'the journey' and the generation of a historical consciousnessto reveal, as Schonle contends, 'a shiftfrom a mythological era to a philological' (p. 157).Travellingon the very edges of the Russianempire, each writer was influenced by their earlier political outlook, he argues. Izmailov 'looked into the past mostly as a mirror of political structures entrenched in the present' (p. 204), Batiushkov'engaged in a meditation on the availabilityof history', Bestuzhev-MarlinskiidescribedRevel as a 'Sentimentalist utopia', and Murav'ev-Apostol 'withheld unqualified credence to extant historicalchronicles'(p. 205). It is here, however, that Schonle's analysis, which up until this point has been engaging and well-informed,begins to weaken, and it is in chapterfour, 'The Space of Irony', with his examination of worksby Vel'tman, Senkovskii and Pushkin, that it really falters. His inclusion of Vel'tman's novel,The Wanderer, is puzzling, since it cannot be considered as belonging to the genre of the Russian literaryjourney, and his comparison of Pushkin'sJourneyto Arzrum with Karamzin's 7he Letters ofa RussianTraveller does not stand up to serious scrutiny, although Schonle insists that 'an implicit dialogue' exists between the two (p. I8I). Schonle compares an array of elements in the experience of the two travellers:their destinations, motivations, ideas about travelling,relationswith the indigenouspopulation, theirrelationshipsto their names, their social and national identities, and their attitudestowardsdeath. Whilst Schonle seems to be emphasizing their differences in everything, he...

The Quantity of Style

This article analyses 178 essays written in April 1997, in which Siberian students (15-22-year-olds) described their understandings of Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The main change between the two regimes is perceived in these essays as the change in patterns of consumption. Moreover, as the essays indicate, the new Russian style of consumption, usually associated with the style of the new rich classes in Russia, finds its fullest representation in the figure of the `new Russian' man. The article suggests that students' attempts to envision unfamiliar patterns of wealthy consumption bring with them the reproduction of their own cultural dispositions and habits. Being unable to easily come up with adequate cultural signifiers that could homologically represent the distinctive economic location of the new rich, students chose to follow the path of quantitative rather than qualitative representation, expressing `the taste of luxury' in terms of the `taste of necessity'. Along with this subjective factor, that is, the students' own cultural dispositions, the prominence of the quantitative factor in their descriptions of the new Russian style of consumption is determined by the absence of a developed field of post-Soviet cultural production, which could have provided the new Russian style with distinctive status symbols.

Socializing taste

Though eating and taste are central to social and moral order, we know little about the mundane practices that socialize children into the world of food. This study pioneers direct observation of the practices involved in socializing taste. Utilizing Bourdieu's distinction between ‘the taste of necessity’ and ‘the taste of luxury/freedom ‘, it examines the discourse of taste that prevails at the dinner tables of middle‐class Caucasian American and Italian families. Across these families, food is depicted as nutrition, a material good, a reward, and pleasure. American families gave high priority to food as nutrition, a material good, and reward and low priority to food as pleasure; whereas Italian families gave priority to food as pleasure over all other qualities. American families devoted their dinner conversation to what children must eat for physiological and moral reasons, while the Italian families concentrated on what children and adults want to eat. Overwhelmingly, American children could obtain what they wanted to eat only after they finished what they must eat (dessert as reward). In addition, Italian adults encouraged children to express individual tastes as part of what it means to have a personality (child qua person); while at the American dinner table, adults typically treated the tastes of children as generically distinct (child qua child) from those of adults.

Mary Wilkins Freeman and the Taste of Necessity

Rapport dialectique entre valeurs physiques et esthetiques chez M.W. Freeman: Art pour l'art ou pour le profit, approche ideologique du gout et de la neceesite ; la metaphore de l'art comme nourriture.