Josée Johnston

Democracy versus Distinction: A Study of Omnivorousness in Gourmet Food Writing1

The American culinary field has experienced a broadening in recent decades. While French food retains high status, gourmet food can now come from a broad range of cuisines. This change mirrors a broadening in other cultural fields labeled “omnivorousness” within the sociology of culture. The authors take gourmet food writing as a case study to understand the rationales underlying omnivorousness. Their findings, based on qualitative and quantitative data, reveal two frames used to valorize a limited number of foods: authenticity and exoticism. These frames resolve a tension between an inclusionary ideology of democratic cultural consumption on the one hand, and an exclusionary ideology of taste and distinction on the other. This article advances our understanding of how cultural consumption sustains status distinctions in the face of eroding boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow culture.

Good food, good people: Understanding the cultural repertoire of ethical eating:

Ethical consumption is understood by scholars as a key way that individuals can address social and ecological problems. While a hopeful trend, it raises the question of whether ethical consumption is primarily an elite social practice, especially since niche markets for ethical food products (for example, organics, fair trade) are thought to attract wealthy, educated consumers. Scholars do not fully understand the extent to which privileged populations think about food ethics in everyday shopping, or how groups with limited resources conceptualize ethical consumption. To address these knowledge gaps, the first goal of this paper is to better understand how consumers from different class backgrounds understand ethical eating and work these ideas into everyday food practices. We draw from 40 in-depth interviews with 20 families in two Toronto neighborhoods. Our second goal is to investigate which participants have privileged access to ethical eating, and which participants appear relatively marginalized. Drawing conceptually from cultural sociology, we explore how ethical eating constitutes a cultural repertoire shaped by factors such as class and ethno-cultural background, and how symbolic boundaries are drawn through eating practices. We find that privilege does appear to facilitate access to dominant ethical eating repertoires, and that environmental considerations figure strongly in these repertoires. While low income and racialized communities draw less on dominant ethical eating repertoires, their eating practices are by no means amoral; we document creative adaptations of dominant ethical eating repertoires to fit low income circumstances, as well as the use of different cultural frameworks to address moral issues around eating.

Caring About Food Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen

This article draws on interviews with “foodies”—people with a passion for eating and learning about food—to explore questions of gender and foodie culture. The analysis suggests that while this culture is by no means gender-neutral, foodies are enacting gender in ways that warrant closer inspection. This article puts forward new empirical findings about gender and food and employs the concept of “doing gender” to explore how masculinities and femininities are negotiated in foodie culture. Our focus on doing gender generates two insights into gender and food work. First, we find that doing gender has different implications for men and women within foodie culture. Alongside evidence that foodies are contesting particular gendered relations within the food world, we explore how broader gender inequities persist. Second, we contend that opportunities for doing gender in foodie culture cannot be considered apart from class privilege.

Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign

C orporations have a long history of incorporating emancipatory ideals into marketing campaigns, often with limited transformative outcomes (Frank 1997; Heath and Potter 2004). Virginia Slims, for instance, promotes an image of feminist independence in the “You’ve come a long way, baby” marketing campaign, and yet it sells women a highly addictive, cancer-causing product. While “feminist tobacco” contains obvious contradictions, today’s transnational corporations employ a panoply of socially responsible wares ranging from fair-trade coffee to biodegradable yoga mats and organic frozen dinners (Johnston 2001). Because in some instances such corporate strategies appear both well intentioned and well received, we move beyond cynical dismissal to empirically investigate and analyze corporate discourse to identify its transformative possibilities and contradictions. In this article, we question whether transformative visions are exclusively linked with grassroots models for social change—models at the heart of feminist consciousness-raising. Our primary goal is to compare the discursive contributions of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty”—a corporate project that claims to oppose restrictive feminine beauty standards and promote a more democratic vision of beauty—with those made by a Toronto-based grassroots fat-activist organization that also targets feminine beauty ideals: Pretty, Porky, and Pissed Off (PPPO). We use a comparative approach to evaluate how each case challenges feminine beauty ideology while also considering the scale

Feeding the ‘organic child’: Mothering through ethical consumption:

In this article, we examine the gendering of ethical food discourse by focusing on the ideal of the ‘organic child’. Drawing from qualitative focus groups and interviews with Canadian mothers of various class backgrounds, we find that the organic child reflects the intersecting ideals of motherhood and ethical food discourse, whereby ‘good’ mothers are those who preserve their children’s purity and protect the environment through conscientious food purchases. Women in our study express the desire to nurture the organic child, and feel responsible for protecting their children’s purity. At the same time the organic child represents a gendered burden for women, our participants negotiate the ideal in complex ways that involve managing emotions and balancing the normative expectations of motherhood with pragmatic demands. The idealized figure of the organic child not only works ideologically to reinforce gendered notions of care-work, but also works to set a classed standard for good mothering that demands significant investments of economic and cultural capital. We argue that the organic child ideal reflects neoliberal expectations about childhood and maternal social and environmental responsibility by emphasizing mothers’ individual responsibility for securing children’s futures.

Place, Ethics, and Everyday Eating: A Tale of Two Neighbourhoods

In this article we investigate how ‘ethical eating’ varies across neighbourhoods and explore the classed nature of these patterns. While our focus is on ‘ethical eating’ (e.g. eating organics, local), we also discuss its relation to healthy eating. The analysis draws from interviews with families in two Toronto neighbourhoods – one upper and the other lower income. We argue that understandings and practices of ‘ethical eating’ are significantly shaped by social class as well as place-specific neighbourhood cultures which we conceptualize as part of a ‘prototypical’ neighbourhood eating style. People compare themselves to a neighbourhood prototype (positively and negatively), and this sets a standard for acceptable eating practices. This analysis helps shed light on how place is implicated in the maintenance and reproduction of class-stratified food practices.

Spectacular Foodscapes: Food Celebrities and the Politics of Lifestyle Mediation in an Age of Inequality

Abstract This editorial introduces a special issue of Food, Culture & Society and works to add a parallel, substantive take on the phenomenon of the food celebrity and the mediated, everyday cultural politics they create. We start by exploring the concept of the foodscape. Specifically, we argue that food celebrities represent a fundamental component of contemporary foodscapes, how they “perform” and function, and the socio-material means by which they are produced. We then explore the key roles and privileges of food celebrity, arguing that the celebrity chef is not the only high-profile, mediating figure at work on the foodscape. Key food celebrity paradoxes are identified and discussed: food celebrities must work to be authentic and aspirational, accessible yet exclusive, responsibilizing but also empowering. We conclude with a short contextualization of the papers in this special issue, and argue for the rich potential of food celebrity scholarship as a way to better understand food inequalities.

Hope and activism in the ivory tower: Freirean lessons for critical globalization research

Abstract This paper uses Freirean theory and field studies of counter-globalist campaigns to add greater lucidity and normative deliberateness to our understanding of resistance to neo-liberal globalism. A difficult tension exists between complete submersion in movement struggles, versus a mythical position of objective analytic detachment. We sketch out the basis for a productive dialogue between these two competing pulls of political engagement and analytic objectivity. To do this, we draw from the writings of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian thinker famous for his theories of popular education. Freires writings have not seriously entered academic studies of globalization, even though activists in the ‘globalization-from-below’ camp frequently draw on his words for inspiration. We seek to remedy this omission, and construct a dialogue between Freire and social movement struggles on four dualisms centred on epistemology, normativity, methodology and strategy. In each dualism, we outline how Freirean concepts can help redefine these binaries as productive tensions to be developed, rather than conflicts to be suppressed. These insights are not intended as a theoretical injunctive delivered from upon high, but are used in dialogue with examples from global justice campaigns in order to clarify what is already taking place on the ground. Identifying Freirean priorities can also encourage openings for more emancipatory approaches to critical globalization scholarship. While academics cannot engineer resistance to neo-liberal globalism from the top down, they can contribute their research energy and resources, becoming more actively engaged in the process of envisaging alternatives.

Food activists, consumer strategies, and the democratic imagination: Insights from eat-local movements:

Scholars remain divided on the possibilities (and limitations) of conceptualizing social change through a consumer-focused, “shopping for change,” lens. Drawing from framing theory and the concept of the democratic imagination, we use a case study of “eat-local” food activism to contribute to this debate. We ask two questions: first, how do activists in the local food movement come to diagnose and critique the conventional industrial food system? and second, what roles do they envision for participants in the sustainable food movement? We address these questions by drawing from activist interview data (n = 57) and participant observation of the eat-local movement in three Canadian cities. Our findings illuminate a mixed picture of possibilities and limitations for consumer-based projects to foster social change. On the one hand, the diagnostic frames presented by food activists suggest skills in critical thinking, attention to structural injustice, and widespread recognition of the importance of collective mobilization. This framing suggests a politically thick democratic imagination among eat-local activists. In contrast, when it comes to thinking about prescriptions for change, activist understandings draw from individualistic and market-oriented conceptualizations of civic engagement, which indicates a relatively thin democratic imagination. These findings demonstrate that despite the sophisticated understandings and civic commitment of movement activists, the eat-local movement is limited by a reliance on individual consumption as the dominant pathway for achieving eco-social change.

A Corporation in Feminist Clothing? Young Women Discuss the Dove ‘Real Beauty’ Campaign

The Dove campaign for ‘real beauty’ has been exceptionally successful, generating public attention and increased sales. This article uses focus group analysis to investigate how young, feminist-identified women understand the campaign, and how they respond when a corporation encourages them to exercise their politics through consumption. We ask whether the campaign is seen as compatible with their vision of feminism, and whether corporations are potential vehicles for feminist change. To conceptualize critical consciousness, we suggest that classical critical theory, particularly Herbert Marcuse, can be fruitfully connected with contemporary critical and feminist theories of capitalist cooptation. Participants varied in their critiques, but relished the opportunity for deliberation, and displayed a clear capacity to disentangle ‘opposites’ like feminism and corporate profiteering. Most women saw the campaign as ‘better than nothing’ and supported some notion of ethical consumption – a kind of pragmatism that suggests the difficulty of imagining alternatives to consumer capitalism.