lower social groups. Even though good taste appears to come naturally to social elites, it is developed through socialization and cultivated by a rigid set of norms. This notion of taste is particularly applicable to the realm of food, which is so rich in symbolism. In contrast to the working class who by necessity favor heavy and filling food, those with higher socioeconomic status are free from the worldly concerns of biological sustenance and have the leisure to enjoy food aesthetically. The settings, ingredients, presentations, table manners, and timing of meals all contribute to creating a sense of sophistication denied to the lower classes.
Bourdieu’s work has been criticized for privileging class over other forms of social difference (Sloan 2004). In a postmodern context where individual identities are seemingly less constrained by socioeconomic attributes and more fluid than in the past, many scholars have argued that class has become less relevant in understanding taste and culture (Ollivier 2008). Today, people use lifestyles, including food, fashion, décor, travel, and music, to define their identities and reveal their good taste in new ways (Binkley 2007). Lifestyle practitioners embrace unique diets and exotic ingredients that relate to their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity. For example, the recent popularity of turmeric, which was named “spice of the summer,” “ingredient of the year,” and “the world’s healthiest food” in 2016, illustrates the way food defines identities in fluid ways. Typically associated with immigrants from southeast Asia who use it for cooking and medicine, turmeric has now become popular among cultural elites and health-conscious urbanites who enjoy it in “gold lattes” and “anti-inflammatory stir-fries,” revealing very different identities or values. The ostensible cultural openness to a much greater variety of food has been described as “omnivorousness” and “cosmopolitanism” (Johnston and Baumann 2010). The idea of omnivorousness has been applied to cultural studies of music, art, and food and refers to the rejection of overt snobbery and the espousal of eclecticism as signals of social status (Peterson and Kern 1996). Similarly, cosmopolitanism emphasizes a preference for ethnic and international cultures (Beck 2006). Both have been facilitated by globalization, immigration, and a new kind of cultural politics that has made identities less rigid and more malleable through individual lifestyles and experiences. In that context, food is providing individuals, especially those with economic means, with more freedom to express various aspects of their identities.
Bourdieu’s work has also—perhaps unfairly—been criticized for its emphasis on the representational aspect of taste over its more active role in shaping class relations (Sloan 2004). As Bourdieu noted, taste is not static but negotiated. For example, when luxury or exotic food commodities become more affordable, the upper class must redefine taste to maintain its distance from the vulgarity and tastelessness of the lower classes. Taste itself becomes contested, appropriated, manipulated, and guarded in ways that are constitutive of class relations. In that context, practices often become more important than objects of consumption. Although cosmopolitanism and omnivorousness threaten the exclusiveness of upper-class behavior, distinction is reproduced through consumption of food described as “authentic,” “communal,” “locally produced,” and “ethically sourced.” Cultural elites are therefore not literally omnivorous, but instead pick and choose food carefully to navigate the fine line between the authentic and the vulgar and maintain their social position.
In the large body of research influenced by Bourdieu’s work on taste, little attention is given to the role of place (Cheyne and Binder 2010). We argue that a place perspective may be useful in generating a broader understanding of how taste is produced—one that acknowledges social difference beyond class and the active role of taste in (re)producing these differences. By “placing” taste within the material settings and geographic imaginaries where it is formed, acquired, and enacted, we aim to draw attention to the intricate and co-constitutive connections between taste and place. In particular, we highlight how food and understandings of good taste have an impact on place, while at the same time, place contributes social and cultural meanings to particular foods and influences the formation of taste. As Urry (1995) argues, the significance of place is heightened in a postmodern context where aesthetics and sensory experiences are an important aspect of consumer cultures. An aesthetically stimulating restaurant, for instance, is a place that broadens the role of food in the pursuit of postmodern lifestyles and the expression of cosmopolitan tastes. In other words, there is an increasingly important dynamic relationship between taste and place in ways that tend to reproduce social difference.
Within that place-based framework, it is also useful to think about taste as an embodied experience (Holt 1997). Cresswell (2002) suggests that Bourdieu’s work on the body might be his most influential contribution to critical human geography and an important step toward conceptualizing place. According to Bourdieu (1984: 190), “the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste.” It is in the body that social distinctions are activated through practices like standing, walking, speaking, eating, and feeling. These practices are part of the “habitus” of social groups—the “embodied dispositions that reproduce social difference.” Time and place are critical in imbuing such practices with social significance. For instance, the concert hall, the museum, the travel destination, or the restaurant are social spaces that shape bodily functions in ways that permit the upper class to express their superiority while exposing the lower class’s social inadequacies and lack of cultural capital. In a cosmopolitan environment where consumers venture into increasingly more diverse cultural worlds, places that are perceived as authentic have more symbolic value (Zukin 2008; Johnston and Baumann 2010). Yet, some people are better positioned than others to explore the outer reaches of their taste by accessing and controlling space that is culturally exciting and valuable, hinting at a colonial mind-set.
Thus, although scholars have acknowledged the role of place in shaping taste, it is primarily as a setting or backdrop to social interactions that play a more important role in defining social superiority (Cheyne and Binder 2010). In this chapter, we want to go beyond this perspective to consider how taste and place work jointly and dynamically to reproduce social inequality.
The Taste of Gentrification
The way taste and place influence each other is uniquely visible in gentrifying neighborhoods, where rapid demographic change and associated social tensions can be witnessed in the foodscape. In these previously neglected urban areas, the transformation of the material and discursive food environment creates what we call a “taste of gentrification” which in turn exacerbates the process of cultural and spatial displacement (see also chapters 2, 3, and 5).
Recent research, including work published in this volume, has highlighted the role of food in promoting gentrification. Studies have focused primarily on two elements of urban foodscapes, including so-called alternative food spaces such as community gardens and farmers’ markets (Joassart-Marcelli and Bosco 2018b; Paddock 2015), and new retailers like upscale supermarkets (Anguelovski 2015), craft breweries (Matthews and Picton 2014), coffee shops, and artisanal food boutiques (Zukin et al. 2009). Many of these spaces display an urban aesthetic of simplicity and authenticity, while seemingly embracing ideals of community, sustainability, and food justice (Bosco and Joassart-Marcelli 2017; Joassart-Marcelli and Bosco 2018b). However, they tend to attract primarily affluent and white people and exclude longtime residents who do not have the time, financial resources, and/or cultural capital to enjoy them (Slocum 2007; Guthman 2008). As more people are drawn to these new food spaces and the bohemian character of the neighborhood, lower-income households are eventually displaced financially and physically by rising rents and ensuing evictions, as well as culturally and emotionally through a lost sense of place and belonging (Zukin 2008; Kern 2015). This seriously challenges the legitimacy of the moral claims that are explicitly or implicitly made through various representations of the changing foodscape.
Together these studies point to changing urban dynamics that are partly reflected in current
