Elsevier

Poetics

Volume 92, Part B, June 2022, 101654
Poetics

Moral and aesthetic consecration and higher status consumers’ tastes: The “good” food revolution

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2022.101654Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • We analyze survey and focus group data to investigate moral and aesthetic evaluation in cultural consumption.

  • We ask about consumption preferences and behaviours in food, with a focus on meat, to investigate moral and aesthetic evaluations.

  • Through latent class analysis, we identify four orientations toward food and meat consumption.

  • The highest status respondents hold a moral aestheticism orientation that upholds high status moral and aesthetic concerns.

  • The moral aestheticism orientation in food is associated with high status moral and aesthetic orientations beyond food and holding symbolic and social boundaries.

Abstract

Research on the tastes of higher status groups has long prioritized analysis of aesthetic preferences. However, recent work has brought more attention to the moral dimensions of tastes. In this paper, we investigate the intersection of morality and aesthetics in tastes. Drawing on survey data and focus groups, we investigate how aesthetic and moral concerns operate in the domain of food, and meat specifically. A latent class analysis identifies four orientations to food that differ in their emphasis on aesthetic versus moral concerns. We identify classes that we label pragmatism, aestheticism, moralism, and moral aestheticism . These orientations toward moral and aesthetic concerns in food are associated with economic capital, cultural capital, age, political ideology, race, and gender. Respondents with higher social status are most likely to hold the moral aestheticism orientation, which simultaneously upholds moral and aesthetic concerns. Analysis of focus group data brings the nature of each of these four orientations into sharper focus. Further survey analyses show these four orientations predict high status aesthetic preferences and moral orientations beyond food, and they also predict the holding of symbolic and social boundaries related to moral judgments in food. We argue that research on high status cultural consumption must conceptualize and measure moral consecration alongside aesthetic consecration in order to better understand the social stratification of tastes.

Keywords

Food
Tastes
Morality
Aesthetics
Social status

Cited by (0)

Shyon Baumann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He is a cultural sociologist who studies questions of classification, evaluation, legitimacy, and inequality. He is currently working with co-authors on a large-scale project on the meat industry in North America, drawing on original data on meat producers and meat consumers. He is also involved in a project that seeks to refine the conceptualization and measurement of classed cultural consumption.

Emily Huddart Kennedy is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests bring together environmental sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of consumers and consumption to interrogate how individuals, groups, and communities seek to effect positive changes to the natural environment and to understand consumer perceptions and motivations.

Josée Johnston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research is centrally concerned with understand how cultural and political forces reproduce and legitimate the inequitable and unsustainable features of capitalist economies. She primarily uses food as a lens for investigating questions relating to consumer culture, ethical consumption, gender politics, sustainability, and inequality. Her most recent research stream investigates the cultural politics of meat consumption.