Feeding the Middle Classes: Taste, Classed Identity and Domestic Food Practice

Political and public stories about class and food rarely scrutinize how socio-economic and cultural resources enable access to certain foods.

Tracing the symbolic links between everyday eating at home and broader social frameworks, this book examines how classed relations play out in middle-class homes to show why class is relevant to all understandings of food in Great Britain.

The author illuminates how ‘good’ food, and the identities configured through its consumption, is associated with middle-class lifestyles and why this relationship is often unquestioned and thus saliently normalized.

Considering food consumption in a wider social context, the book offers an alternative understanding of class relations, which extends academic, political and public debates about privilege.

Kate Gibson is Lecturer in Social Science in the Population Health Sciences Institute at Newcastle University, UK.