Mobile trust regimes: modes of attachment in an age of banal omnivorousness

The twenty-first century rise of culturally omnivorous tastes and classifications proffers a new dilemma for how markets create attachments and achieve trust for global consumers. Consumer entities must be both globally circulatable and offer a sense of localized authenticity without compromising either. Drawing from research on market trust and attachment, this article introduces the concept of mobile trust regimes to account for how sets of actors and repertoires attempt to address this tension. Through two case studies from gastronomic industries—food halls and natural wine—we investigate the devices of mobility used to facilitate the global circulation of the local. These include standardized aesthetic and affective templates communicated through physical décor, recurrent narratives, and social media curation. We argue that the concept of mobile trust regimes helps clarify two key issues in contemporary consumer culture: tensions between homogenization and heterogenization and how the symbolic value of omnivorous tastes becomes institutionalized and even banal

Hungry for Status: The Reproduction of the Middle Class Habitus Through Dinnertime

In this thesis, the author assembles a methodology to view the family mealtime, to describe the values and experiences of the middle-class family, and to understand how they are simultaneously changing. The author argues that the meal is central to building a sense of identity on both personal and group levels. It parallels the values, beliefs, and structures of the family's lifestyle as well as their conscious and unconscious association with class membership. The representations and understandings of food and the meal's role in the sociology of the family are complex and diverse inform. Specifically, this paper focuses on three areas of discussion and interpretation because they form the basis for constructing a thorough understanding of the increased recognition and complexity of the meal's position within the middle class household. The three areas of investigation of this thesis are nutrition, social interaction, and gender ideology, focusing on the symbolic roles of each in transmitting messages of larger social forces to members of the middle class household

The carbonara-gate. Food porn and gastro-nationalism

This chapter focuses on gastro-nationalism, specifically in relation to food porn. In general, by food porn we mean the overabundance of discourses around food, which has spread in a reflective way among the different levels and scopes of cultural production, as well as the practice of photographing food and sharing the image on social media. Among the other effects, this also reflects on the overflow of culinary formats shown on television. The idea took shape when the image of food, including its symbolic value and the aesthetics of the dish, started to acquire a greater value than its creators and the techniques of its preparation (Stagi in Food Porn. L\u2019ossessione per il cibo in tv e sui social media. Egea, Milan, 2016)

Chinese food threatening the Japanese table : changing perceptions of imported Chinese food in Japan

Stating that imported Chinese food has a negative image in Japan is neither new nor surprising. Conventional explanations of this phenomenon focus on the litany of food scandals associated with imported Chinese food, together with a near-constant wave of scandals in China itself, which have been subject to saturation media coverage in Japan since the turn of the century. However, this chapter argues that the hyperbolic public and media response is disproportionate to the food safety risks associated with the consumption of Chinese food. This chapter starts by assessing two common explanations for the widespread negative perceptions of Chinese food: (1) the development of a consumer awareness in Japan and (2) a heightening risk of consuming Chinese imported foods in the 2000s. The chapter then outlines potential alternative factors, which have also played a key role in the increasingly negative perceptions of Chinese food imports. While there has been an overall increase in the number of reported Chinese food scandals since the 2000s, broader Japanese perceptions of China, the related nature of media coverage of events in China, and the changing nature of Chinese food incidents, among others, are central factors in the development of the perception of a Chinese food threat