ABSTRACT
We are, of course, interested in what foodies eat. As scholars who are personally interested in eating, we think a lot about the texture, flavor, aroma, freshness, and general deliciousness of foods. We admire the skills involved with finely dicing an onion into perfectly uniform pieces, creating a flavorful fish stock, or piping perfect macarons. However, as sociologists studying food, we need to go beyond the specific details of the food itself, to investigate the social conditions of food’s production and consumption. Food scholar and historian, Warren Belasco, identifies a “food studies axiom”: “what we think about food may have little to do with the actual material properties of the food itself ” (2002: 13). This means that we are interested in not just what foodies eat, but how foodies talk about food, write about food, use food in public culture, and how food operates as a source of status and distinction. In this chapter, our goal is threefold: (1) to briefly situate our study within a larger literature on the sociological study of food, culture, and taste; (2) to demonstrate food’s connection to discourse, or, put differently, the significance of how foodies think, write, and talk about food; and (3) to outline some of the debate surrounding the term “foodies,” including the thoughts of those that we interviewed. By fulfilling these goals, we will provide an overview of key concepts that we use throughout the book.
