Foodies

As Johnston and Baumann show in their stimulating analyses of the gourmet foodscape today, food both divides people and brings them together. Their illuminating interviews take the reader into the foodie subculture where food becomes lifestyle, where the food-possessed daily negotiate the contradictions of class, gender, and work, the tensions of pleasure and necessity, and the dynamics of the individual in our contemporary world. The new chapter on gender is an especially welcome addition to studies on the sociology of food.

-Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Sociology, Columbia University

When Johnston and Baumann first wrote about them, foodies were an exotic minority. Now they are everywhere. We perform our social being through increasingly exquisite food practices and signals, so the analysis of foodies is really the analysis of social life. This new edition goes beyond the first by dissecting how gender complicates the foodscape. A remarkable book.

-Wendy Griswold, Sociology, Northwestern University

Johnston and Baumann's taxonomy of foodie discourses is illuminating. My students received a great introduction to methods of textual analysis.

-Julie Guthman, Social Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz

In this new and improved edition of Foodies, Bauman and Johnson lead us in a fascinating discovery of how exoticism and authenticity organize a world of hyper cultural sophistication structured by pleasure and knowledge. Their book is a first rate scholarly contribution to our understanding of how frames, ideologies and discourses feed group boundaries in a context of growing inequality. And as a bonus, the book is as entertaining and appealing as it is an insightful read!

-Michele Lamont, Sociology, Harvard University, author of Money, Morals and Manners: the culture of the French and the American Upper Middle Class

With the proliferation of books claiming to examine food culture – an explosion reminiscent of kudzu or zebra mussels – a reader should begin the singular text that examined that phenomena in all of its richness. Foodies, now in its Second Edition is that iconic text. If one only examines one book about gastronauts, this is the book. Examining the strains of egalitarian and authentic food culture and a food culture that privileges inequality, Johnston and Baumann have the wisdom to see this phenomenon as a social comedy, but one that they view with a generous and critical vision. Foodies demands a dialogue among all of those who care about our expanding culinary culture, and the ways that it enriches our lives as well as separating the wealthy and the struggling. This is the big enchilada.

-Gary Alan Fine, Sociology, Northwestern University, and author of Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work