Tastes for Luxury: How Dietary Aspirations Underpin Food Regimes

Abstract

The human penchant for luxury foods has spurred mass migration, dietary overhaul and environmental change in many places around the world. Desires for foods like sugar, bread, beef and packaged foods were also central to the success of the British Empire and were a key part of American hegemony in the 20th century, and prestigious foods continue to be an important part of capital accumulation and power today. In this paper, I explore how the social value of food underpins the pursuit of prestigious food consumption and how aspirations to consume specific luxury foods align with periods of capital accumulation. This paper is organized by the traditional food regime's temporal periods, and in it, I explore the historical evolution and adoption of prestigious foods, illustrating both the need for food regime scholarship to pay more attention to dietary aspirations and highlighting the persistent utility of this approach for revealing connections between ideology, class relations and power as they are manifested through food.