Spatializing Authenticity

In this chapter Mapes turns to ethnographically informed data from four renowned restaurants in Brooklyn, New York, to consider the spatialization of elite authenticity. Based on interviews with chefs, owners, and employees; field notes and photos; as well as archived material from the restaurants’ individual websites, she considers how these restaurants represent various semiotic micro-landscapes. Importantly, it is not just that they comprise complicatedly layered texts, but also that they reflect the social stratification of people, objects, and spaces, as well as a simultaneous and careful disavowal of said stratification.

Co-constructing the Fashionable Eater

This chapter, which focuses on 83 “throwback Thursday” (#tbt) posts from the @nytfood account, departs slightly from the discourse of elite authenticity. Instead, Mapes identifies three orders of elitist stancetaking which collectively paint the decades-old food trends pictured in the #tbt posts as derisible and inferior—in direct contrast with “progress”-oriented notions of sustainability or simplicity in contemporary food discourse. While much of this work is institutionally produced, @nytfood Instagram followers are also complicit in elitist stance acts. In their various comments, participants demonstrate how putatively inclusive, democratic digital platforms can be spaces of/for social hierarchy, and how the elitist performances of #tbt produce privileged standards of good taste and fashionable eating.

Mediatizing Taste

This chapter begins with an explanation of “elite authenticity” in full, including a definition of the five rhetorical strategies of which it is composed: historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. Using theories pertaining to media discourse and mediatization, the author presents an analysis of the New York Times food section, relying on a corpus of 259 articles (including restaurant reviews and top-viewed articles). Throughout her analysis she demonstrates how the aforementioned interconnected rhetorical strategies are not only indexical of what is considered “authentic” in contemporary society, but also essential to the construction of status based on a purposeful distancing from traditional markers of eliteness. In sum, this chapter sets the groundwork for the simultaneous (dis)avowal of distinction which is integral to contemporary class maintenance.

Between Rough and Refined

In this chapter Mapes elaborates on the rhetorical strategies of historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. She turns to a data set of 90 corresponding Instagram (@nytfood) posts, documenting the multimodal tactics by which food media writers and users perform a kind of acceptable or “palatable” eliteness. One such tactic is the framing of “rough” and “refined,” and the juxtaposition of various forms of supposedly low and highbrow cultural artifacts or practices. These tactics, in turn, help establish two interdependent strategies or rhetorics for manufacturing status in capitalist society: fetishism and condescension. She argues that these two processes support the production and maintenance of elite authenticity and class privilege.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the main topics addressed in the book, beginning with a consideration of “eliteness” in contemporary society and how this relates to food consumption, to language, and to authenticity. Here Mapes also lays out the theoretical cornerstones of her research: social class, neoliberalism, and elite discourse; contemporary eating and food rhetorics; material culture and language materiality; and terroir and authenticity. After addressing each of these bodies of literature in turn, Mapes proceeds to explain her methodological approach, which includes a critical/multimodal/autoethnographic orientation to discourse. The chapter concludes with an overview of the rest of the book, and an introduction to “elite authenticity.”

Food “Insiders”

This chapter presents additional data from Mapes’s ethnographic fieldwork in Brooklyn, New York. Here she examines the dinner table as a less-institutional setting in which participants engage in similar acts of (dis)avowal. Using interactional sociolinguistic methods, Mapes demonstrates how elite authenticity is present in talk about food in private settings, where the speech is informal and uncalculated. Furthermore, in this chapter she more specifically considers how shared values and norms come to be interactionally achieved and constituted in a so-called community of practice. Ultimately, this chapter offers insight into how exactly elite authenticity comes to be produced and (re)circulated in the minutiae of everyday practices and interactions, such as those that occur during mealtime conversations.

Conclusion

In the final chapter and general conclusion of the book, Mapes demonstrates the global spread of elite authenticity across so-called light and thick communities. She briefly analyzes additional data from outside New York, including food texts from Australia, Germany, and England. Ultimately, Mapes explains how the generative workings of reflexivity within neoliberal societies have pushed forward the tendency to deny elite status, and instead to claim distinction based on individual work ethic and meritocratic reward. Thus, the discourse of elite authenticity is a means of detecting—and, indeed, reflexively coming to terms with—the pervasive trend in society to ignore implicit claims to eliteness and status in favor of performed (and learned) egalitarianism.