Food Consumption

Effects of Consumer Culture on Food Consumption

Recognition of variation—within and between societies—raises some pertinent questions about the effects of consumer culture. Stepping over many thorny issues regarding the specification of the concept—like its coherence, its date of origin, and its causal powers—this entry proposes that consumer culture has intensified, propelled by globalization, commodification, and the stylization of everyday life. Globalization, commodification, and lifestyle segmentation are among the key processes that have [Page 611]changed the nature of food consumption and that have come to determine the specific character of eating in the twenty-first century in the richest societies. As Arjun Appadurai observed, globalization entailed increasingly rapid circulation of products, money, people, ideas, and images, tending thereby to spread cultural knowledge and options across a wider geographical canvass. Foodstuffs, chefs, and cuisines traverse continents. Commodification of food, partly cause and partly consequence of globalization, has promoted the circulation of commercial products and entrenched the idea that it is better to buy things than to make them at home. The march of the ideology of consumer sovereignty, and the associated glorification of consumer choice, has reinforced dispositions that Zygmunt Bauman referred to as “the consumer attitude.” Segmentation, the modern technique of the market research industry to target products at specific groups of people, exploits the potential of the aestheticization of everyday life, a prominent tendency of the later twentieth century, according to Celia Lury. Lifestyles, the symbolic aspects of social divisions around consumption, are highlighted. The consequences of these three processes are contentious. Does it, as is anticipated by some theories of globalization, presage convergence of eating habits across countries, or will it encourage eclectic diversity? Will it lead to uniformity of behavior within societies, to greater differentiation, or to anarchic individualism?

Eating tells us a lot about social patterns, rhythms, and relations. It is worthy of study for many reasons, not least its current political visibility through food scares and the “crisis” of obesity, but also because it is a fine test bed for analytic consideration of social change. Eating more than once daily is normal, and indeed a prime practical objective, for almost all human beings. In many societies, its achievement has proved extremely difficult. The reasons why getting one's next meal might be precarious vary enormously over human history, not just because the problems facing hunter-gatherer societies differed from those with settled agriculture. Seasonal availability and annual variation, with years of plenty and years of dearth, were always expected. Interruptions of supply through natural disasters, wars, profiteering, and ineffective political management have often resulted in populations, or sections of populations, having access to insufficient food. Such eventualities have strongly affected social relations—witness the impact of food riots, migration consequent on famine, and colonial expansion. In capitalist societies, obtaining enough food has often occupied most hours of a laborer's day and a large proportion of a household's financial resources. On the face of it, many of these problems have been eliminated in societies with highly developed capitalist economies and mature consumer cultures. In rich societies like the United Kingdom and the United States, where few starve, the proportion of the average household budget devoted to food is small (little more than 10 percent), and regional, seasonal, and annual variation in supply have long been minimized. Food supply has probably never been more secure than during the last fifty years in Europe and America. Yet food and eating remain sources of considerable popular and institutional anxiety. These anxieties differ from those of the past, and it is interesting to explore how much can be attributed to aspects of consumer culture.

...