ASPIRATIONAL EATING: CLASS ANXIETY AND THE RISE OF FOOD IN POPULAR CULTURE by Stephanie Mariko Finn A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (American Culture) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Paul A. Anderson, Chair Professor Susan J. Douglas Professor Penny M. Von Eschen Professor Warren Belasco, University of Maryland-Baltimore County Shaka Freeman, “#4,” Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault? © S. M. Finn 2011 To my parents ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a large debt of gratitude to all of the people who supported me in the writing of this dissertation. Paul Anderson first suggested to me that rather than leaving graduate school with the vague hope of becoming a sommelier, perhaps I should write a dissertation about the significance of wine in U.S. popular culture. His support for the project that grew out of that inquiry and my development as a scholar has far exceeded the obligations of an advisor or committee chair. Warren Belasco provided generous, thoughtful, extensive feedback on chapter drafts and conference presentations, as well as many kind words of encouragement along the way. Susan Douglas and Penny Von Eschen helped shape my thinking from the very beginning of my graduate coursework and have also given generously of their time and expertise. I hope this project does some credit to their collective efforts and brilliance. Marlene Moore provided invaluable assistance in navigating the institutional pathways of the Ph.D. process. In addition to her expertise and tireless work on behalf of all graduate students in American Culture, her deep compassion humanized what might have otherwise been a formidable bureaucratic gauntlet. I am also grateful for the hard work and innumerable small acts of kindness performed on my behalf by the support staff and administrators in the Program in American Culture, the Department of Communications, the First-Year Writing Program, and the Sweetland Writing Institute. I received generous funding support from the Program in American Culture, the Center for the Education of Women and Mary Malcomson Raphael Fellowship Fund, the Center for Ethics in Public Life, the Sweetland Writing Center, and the Rackham iii Graduate School. Many people aside from my committee members offered feedback on parts of this dissertation. With apologies to those I have probably forgotten, I am especially grateful for comments from Paul Barron, Jesse Carr, Natalie Knazik, Emma Garrett, Kelly Sisson- Lessens, Susanna Linsley, Sebastian Ferrari, Manan Desai, Kayte Steinbock, Michael d'Emic, Dana Jackson, Mickey Rinaldo, Magdalena Zaborowska, Erik Morales, Wendy Michaels, Annah MacKenzie, Troy Costlow, and all of the members of the Fall 2009 Feeling Theory seminar. Thanks also to the numerous people who have asked questions or made suggestions at the conference panels and public talks where I presented parts of this work in progress. I'm also grateful to Matthew W. Stiffler, Jesse Carr, Susanna Linsley, Sebastian Ferrari, Emma Garrett, Victor Mendoza, and Candace Moore for writing sessions that were both motivational and therapeutic. I could not have completed this dissertation without the love and support of friends and family members, and especially Brian Cook, who has not only been a loving and supportive partner, but also a brilliant editor. Any sentences in this dissertation that appear to be written in English were probably twice as long and half as interesting before he excised the unnecessary words. Lastly, I owe every success to my parents, who taught me to read, write, cook, and love. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION..................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................... .................. i i i LIST OF FIGURES................................... ............................ v i INTRODUCTION THE POPULAR APPEAL OF THE FOOD REVOLUTION...........1 CHAPTER ONE NO CULINARY ENLIGHTENMENT: THE POLITICS OF THE FOOD REVOLUTION................................................. ....... 3 6 CHAPTER TWO THE RISE, FALL, AND RETURN OF ENLIGHTENED EATING..................................................................... .... 8 3 I. Gourmet Food and the Ideal of Sophistication................. .. 9 3 II. Weight-loss Dieting and the Ideal of Thinness.............. .. 1 1 3 III. Natural Food and the Ideal of Purity....................... ..... 1 3 3 IV. Ethnic Food and the Ideal of Cosmopolitanism.......... ..... 1 5 0 CHAPTER THREE MERITOCRACIES OF TASTE AND THINNESS.............. ...... 1 6 2 CHAPTER FOUR THE LEGITIMATION OF CULINARY CAPITAL..................228 CHAPTER FIVE FOOD, FLOURISHING, AND CLASS FORMATION............ 2 7 3 CONCLUSION STOP FEELING GOOD ABOUT WHERE YOU SHOP........... .. 3 2 3 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................ .... 3 3 8 v LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE I.1/Sales of Table Wine and Fortified & Sparkling Wine....................... .......... 5 I.2/1911 Advertisement in Everybody's Magazine with Mulligatawny Soup........ .. 3 3 1.1/Obama Foodorama Screen shot....................................... ............ 3 7 1.2/Arugula on the cover of Newsweek, April 26, 2008.......................... ...... 4 6 1.3/Obama Shirtless on Washingtonian Magazine....................................50 1.4/Who Eats Free At Ben's, Before and After..................................... ... 5 9 1.5/The Yuppie Handbook..........................................................78 2.1/The Foodies Timeline........................................................ ... 8 6 2.2/Income Share for top decile of American households................... ............ 9 1 2.3/Vargas Pin-ups from the 1920s........................................ .......... 1 2 6 2.4/Vargas Pin-ups from the 1930s-1950s..........................................126 2.5/A Salt and Battery Screen shot.......................................... ........ 1 5 1 3.1/Remy's Palate, Visualized.................................................. .... 1 7 0 3.2/Emile's Palate, Visualized............................................. .......... 1 7 1 3.3/Rat-atouille............................................................ ........ 1 7 3 3.4/Anton Ego, Before and After........................................... ......... 1 7 4 3.5/Jeffrey and Wing (1995)................................................ ........ 1 8 2 3.6/Long-term Weight Loss Trends, Jeffrey et al (2000)..................... ......... 1 8 5 3.7/Craighead et al (1981)................................................. ......... 1 8 7 3.8/Anderson et al (2001).............................................. ............. 1 8 9 3.9/Do You Have the Willpower?..................................................194 3.10/The Biggest Loser First Week Weigh-in.................................. ...... 2 1 4 3.11/ The Biggest Loser Mid-Season Weigh-in................................. ..... 2 1 5 3.12/O Magazine covers January 2005, January 2009.................. ............... 2 2 6 4.1/Images Created By I Can Has Cheezburger? Users...................... ......... 2 3 4 4.2/ “Pinot Noir...then how come it's white?”................................ ........ 2 3 8 4.3/Mrs. Raymond's Living Room................................ .................... 2 4 1 4.4/“When do we drink?” “Now.”......................................... .......... 2 4 8 4.5/“Just a flutter, of uh, like a, nutty Edam cheese.”........................ ......... 2 5 0 4.6/Burger and Wine.................................................. .............. 2 5 5 4.7/Volume of Red Wine Sales Indexed to Their 1999 Sales....... ..................... 2 6 0 5.1/The Moral and Physical Thermometer, Benjamin Rush................. .......... 2 8 2 5.2/Up and Down the Income Ladder (Bradbury and Katz 2002)....................298 5.3/Median Family Income Compared to Productivity..................... ........... 3 0 0 5.4/Is it still possible to start out poor in this country, work hard, and get rich?.. ...... 3 0 6 5.5/Wright's Class Typology........................................... .............. 3 1 5 C.1/Billboard in Shorewood, Wisconsin, 2006.............................. ......... 3 2 3 C.2/Cherian et al. ....................................................... ........... 3 2 9 vi 1 INTRODUCTION: THE POPULAR APPEAL OF THE FOOD REVOLUTION Popular culture is one of the sites where th[e] struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. —Stuart Hall1 From Winos to Wine Snobs My mother called me in the Spring of 2005, distressed about a conversation she'd had with one of her coworkers about wine. She had started “getting into” wine after I left home for college in 1999, perhaps partially in celebration or mourning of her newly empty nest, but probably also because of the wine-drinking trend sweeping the nation at that time. Between 1991 and 2005, U.S. wine consumption jumped 50%,2 “cocktail hours” were increasingly replaced by “wine and cheese receptions,” and words like Shiraz and terroir became part of the popular American vocabulary. My mother's participation in that trend was relatively casual. She purchased most of her wine at the supermarkets where she did the rest of her grocery shopping, she stuck mostly to a handful of varietals and national brands she knew she liked, and she rarely drank more than a glass or two per week. However, after one particularly stressful day at work, she had gone home and