City Food Navigation: About Tastes, Places and Professions

Abstract

This text is a summary of an online interview with gastrojournalist. The conceptual basis of the text is P. Bourdieu's concept of taste. On the one hand, taste was considered as a way of building symbolic boundaries between social groups, on the other hand, as a skill acquired by physical and mental training. Taste was correlated with food choice as interrelated components of behavior. Аgents of gastronomic discourse were identified as mediators for the audience in the process of demonstrating their social status, group, or ethnicity through food consumption. The interview showed the high importance of drawing a line between journalists and bloggers as agents of gastronomic discourse, as well as the non-triviality of this task due to the blurring of boundaries between these professional statuses. Knowledge, professional qualities, and skills necessary for functioning as an agent of discourse were taken as the main criteria for distinguishing between journalists and bloggers. What was said in the interview made it possible to conclude that the distinction between bloggers and journalists as professional statuses is accompanied by their coexistence as social roles — the revealed duality may be the main reason for the difficulty of formalizing the demarcation criteria. The criteria by which the agent of gastronomic discourse forms an idea of the audience were also discussed. The image of readers and the intentions of discourse agents are formulated, with the help of which the audience of various Internet platforms is influenced. The means of influencing the audience, which are available to agents of discourse, are mentioned. As a result, it was found that professionalism in a certain sense also serves to organize ideas about the audience and to determine the style of building interaction with it.