Years ago when I was still teaching, I was in the school cafeteria eating a salad. A notoriously conservative leaning student, who happened to be a player on my baseball team sidled up next to me and announces, ” A salad…you are such a Liberal”. It started a debate as to what were Liberal foods (sushi, mesclun salad, Indian) and Conservative foods (steak, potatoes, fast food). The idea seemed preposterous…but it made me think.
Was there was any truth to his statement…that even the food choices we make are influenced by the way we identify politically? I don’t particularly like the Liberal / Conservative tags and feel that truly informed political beliefs are much more complex than those monikers infer. But, our society has increasingly embraced these labels and Madison Avenue has capitalized on it as well. In advertising, much of our stereotypical social/consumer/entertainment behavior seems to be have been analyzed through the lens of our polarized political beliefs… technology (iPhone/Blackberrry) the music we like (Hip Hop/ Country Western)…the sports we follow (Tennis/NASCAR), etc. So why not food?
Anyway, I had been thinking about what that student said for many years wondering if anyone had actually done any research on the matter. I had my own theories based on personal experiences but had no data. This afternoon, I came across an article titled, How Food Preferences Vary Based on Political Ideology, on hunchblog, outlining this very theory with a link to the entire report and the methods by which they collected the data. It’s really fascinating stuff, very entertaining and worth a read.
Now of course as with any theory and set of data there will be anomalies and contain the possibility of spin…so read with a grain of salt…but read for sure…you will enjoy it.
Sunday Saucer
1 Comment
November 13, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Great stuff.
There is actually a sociology of food, part of the sociology of consumption (tastes and preferences, that sort of thing), in which a big name is Pierre Bourdieu. Turns out all of our tastes, including political ones, can be mapped as a series of homologies pretty neatly. Don’t know how deep into this you want to get (Bourdieu himself is pretty dense going), but here’s a link to an article viewable in html titled “More Mental than Dental” on Bourdieu’s relevance for food taste analysis and nutrition. Cheers!