Consumption, Food and

Taste: Culinary Antinomies

and Commodity Culture
Indicators of Taste: Changing Food Habits

Contributors: Alan Warde

Print Pub. Date: 1997
Online Pub. Date: May 31, 2012
Print ISBN: 9780803979734
Online ISBN: 9781446222027
DOI: 10.4135/9781446222027
Print pages: 55-57
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination
of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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10.4135/9781446222027

[p. 55 ]

Part II: Indicators of Taste: Changing Food

Habits
Part II reports the findings of the different empirical research exercises designed to
estimate the degree and direction of change in British food habits since the 1960s.
It describes change in the nature of media recommendations about taste and in the
domestic practices of food purchase and preparation.

The evidence is presented in terms of the more general issue about how and why
consumers select what to eat. It presupposes that the unprecedented range of
products that are made available for sale, increasingly in the UK by a small number
of supermarket chains, poses a perpetual problem of selection for customers. There
are many reasons why this problem is not disabling, one of which is the widespread
currency of the principles of recommendation outlined in the previous chapter. These
can be flexibly applied as a means of discriminating among a multitude of products.
Hence I have analysed the data in terms of four antinomies of taste.

With respect to the guidance offered to people about what to eat, advice comes from
many sources: from government, mass media and social contacts. On the surface,
the advice is incoherent and inconsistent. Nevertheless, four antinomies of taste
provide a systematic basis for these contradictory messages. These oppositions
novelty and tradition, health and indulgence, economy and extravagance, care and
convenience are values which can legitimize choice between foodstuffs. They were
derived inductively, by inspection of the food and recipe columns in women's magazines
in 1968 and 1992, and refined in terms of the analytic categories of social and cultural
theory. I examine systematically the changes and continuities apparent in these popular
media representations and recommendations about taste.

Page 2 of 4 Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary Antinomies

and Commodity Culture: Indicators of Taste:
Changing Food Habits
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The four antinomies are longstanding structural oppositions, claims and counter-
claims about cultural values which can be mobilized to express appreciation of food
and to make dietary decisions. These are very deep-rooted contradictions, probably
irresolvable, and applicable not only to food, but to other spheres of consumption too.
I maintain that these antinomies comprise the structural anxieties of our epoch: they
are parameters of uncertainty, apt to induce feelings of guilt and unease. Marginal [p.
56 ] adjustments to their content, and to their relative force, may give the impression
of major changes in standards of social action, but they are permanent features
of the modern predicament. They can be seen as the sedimentation in common
consciousness of the most central dilemmas for individuals' actions in the current
stage of the development of modernity. They apply to many situations of uncertainty
where it is necessary to decide between alternative courses of action in the sphere of
consumption. Thus the very mundane activity of feeding households indicates sharply
some of the most trying contradictions or problems involved in regulating personal
conduct and negotiating a decent life in contemporary Britain. Behind the uncertainty
betrayed by antinomies in food recommendation lie the structural contradictions that
render problematic security, identity and belonging in late 20th-century Britain.

These antinomies are widely applicable. They correspond to, and contingently reflect,
principal institutional forms the ambivalence of modern experience, a fetishism with
body maintenance, the distribution of material resources, and gendered household
relations. These are, in turn, derivative of abstract and predominant categories of
modern culture, individuality, corporeality, money and time. The antinomial principles
derive from fundamental cultural classificatory categories. They are irreducible
and irreconcilable oppositions which frame the central dilemmas of contemporary
consciousness and experience.

People regularly make use of each of the eight categories of judgment as guides to
practical conduct and aesthetic appreciation. Vernacular phrases and homilies invoke
the principles: it's time for a change, T deserve a treat', that is much too expensive,
buying cheaply is false economy, life is too short to stuff a mushroom, and so forth.
Because most are familiar, people can appreciate the attractions of both poles of each
antinomy. But these are not always helpful in the process of decision-making. Often
the opposite, as they become a source of anxiety about the best course of action.
Food has probably always been a source of physiological concern, with respect to its

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and Commodity Culture: Indicators of Taste:
Changing Food Habits
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chemical properties, the sufficiency of its provision and its capacity to sustain the body.
But also, and arguably increasingly in late modernity, it is a source of cultural anxiety.
The structural anxieties of our age are made manifest in discourses about food.

Each of these antinomies is explored in turn, in Chapters 4 to 7. The analysis is based

on a combination of detailed commentary on texts, content analysis of magazines
and advertisements, and survey data. These are deployed, as and when appropriate,
to illuminate the nature of the antinomies and their tendencies to change since the
1960s. The analysis of change is completed in Part III, Chapter 8, where trends in food
behaviours are summarized as a means of clarifying the ambiguities of Mennell's thesis
of diminished contrasts and increased variety.

Page 4 of 4 Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary Antinomies

and Commodity Culture: Indicators of Taste:
Changing Food Habits
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