“Pastured Beef, Air-chilled Poultry, and Heritage Pork”: Authenticity and Materiality in Food Discourse

Dr Gwynne Mapes (Universität Bern)

Building on work concerning elite discourse and “good taste” (Bourdieu 1984), in this paper I orient specifically to the ways in which status is asserted or contested through both the materiality of food (e.g. its substance and raw economics) and through its discursivity (e.g. the way it’s depicted and discussed). This intersection of language and materiality makes food an ideal site for examining political economy and contemporary class formations. As a case in point, my paper draws on a range of data from previous projects (e.g. Mapes 2021), including celebrity chefs’ Instagram accounts, multimodal food texts from an artisanal cured meats producer in Switzerland, and ethnographic fieldwork in high-end, Brooklyn, NY restaurants. This eclectic sample of elite food discourse features stakeholders who specifically self-style as the height of modern food practices and trends – all of which hinge on the responsible production and consumption of meat. Combining critical discourse analysis and social semiotics, I document the linguistic, verbal, and material tactics which construct particular ways of eating meat as simultaneously progressive/egalitarian and fashionable/status-producing. My main aim is to demonstrate how a discourse of “elite authenticity” proliferates these data – by emphasizing features like simplicity, historicity, and locality and sustainability, stakeholders justify and downplay their elite food practices, effectively (dis)avowing their distinction. Ultimately, this paper comments on the subtle and complex ways “ethical” meat consumption discursively reinforces status competition and hierarchies of good taste in contemporary life.

• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, trans. by R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Mapes, Gwynne. 2021. Elite authenticity: Remaking distinction in food discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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