A Taste of Inequality: Food's Symbolic Value across the Socioeconomic Spectrum

Abstract

Scholars commonly account for dietary disparities across socioeconomic status (SES) using structural explanations that highlight differences in individuals' wealth, income, or location. These explanations emphasize food's material value. But food also carries symbolic value. This article shows how food's symbolic value helps drive dietary disparities. In-depth interviews with 160 parents and adolescents and 80 hours of observations with four families demonstrate how a family's socioeconomic position in part shapes the meanings that parents attach to food. These differing meanings contribute to distinct feeding strategies across the socioeconomic spectrum: whereas low-SES parents use food to buffer against deprivation, high-SES parents provision food to fulfill classed values around health and parenting. The findings suggest that an understanding of how families' material circumstances shape food's symbolic value is critical to fully account for dietary differences across SES.

Knowledge, Attitude and Practices (KAP) of Sugar Sweetened Beverages (SSBs) Amongst Adolescents in Malaysian Secondary Schools: A cross-Sectional Study

“…The concern was more on satisfying hunger, and to ful l the desire of food with good taste. Therefore, there was a higher tendency to buy high sugar foods and SSBs (23). It was also shown that parental in uence on the intake of a child's drinks may be linked to the knowledge associated with diet and health (24).…”

Defending Motherhood: Morality, Responsibility, and Double Binds in Feeding Children

“…The ascendance of a narrow set of feeding expectations takes place against a backdrop of public anxiety about the decline of the family meal (Bowen, Elliott, & Brenton, 2014;Murcott, 2012;Musick & Meier, 2012;Trubek, 2017), a widespread (and incorrect) perception that the poor rely more on convenience food than middle-class consumers (Zagorsky & Smith, 2017), and growing gaps in the "dietary quality" of the rich and the poor (Rehm, Penalvo, Afshin, & Mozaffarian, 2016;Wang et al, 2014). Diet disparities are linked to variations in access to healthy food as well as differences in the symbolic ascriptions people attach to food (Backett-Milburn, Wills, Roberts, & Lawton, 2010;Fielding-Singh, 2017).…”

“…Past research has documented the practical, moral, and symbolic components of low-income mothers' foodwork (e.g., Backett-Milburn et al, 2010;Chen, 2016;Daniel, 2016;Fielding-Singh, 2017;Wright et al, 2015). Yet many low-income women also encounter institutional monitoring and regulation around food and parenting.…”

“…Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with a diverse group of low-income mothers in North Carolina, this study analyzes the discursive and interpersonal strategies mothers use to make sense of and defend their feeding and mothering practices. Beliefs and practices around food and weight reflect and reinforce social inequalities (Beagan et al, 2015;Brenton, 2017;Cairns & Johnston, 2015;Fielding-Singh, 2017) and thus represent an exemplary case in which to examine the standards associated with intensive mothering, how they are tied to growing inequality, and what happens when people are called to account for them.…”

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“…Таким образом, не только вкус [32], но и время разносит людей по разным социальным слоям, оставляя некоторым возможность накапливать социальный и культурный капитал, что в конечном счете и определяет их габитус. У низших социальных слоев большую часть времени занимает работа (у кормильца) или ведение хозяйства.…”