Book Review: DeSoucey, Michaela. 2016. “Contested Tastes—Foie Gras and the Politics of Food.” Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press

Abstract

W hat can a sociologist actually learn by looking at foie gras lying on their plate? What can we say about culture, ethics, taste, relations, social movements, consumers, and producers, looking at food? To what extent can food become the object, the protagonist of sociological analysis? These are the questions which Michaela DeSoucey is attempting to address in her book reviewed here.The book may be located within a broad interdisciplinary trend of research into social, economic, and cultural aspects of food. One of its poles is marked by economized, neo-Marxist analyses of industrial and alternative networks of food production (e.g., Goodman, DuPuis, and Goodman 2014). The other