Youth Consumers and the Fast-food Market

Abstract

This paper provides a frame for thinking about youths' public consumption of fast foods. It draws attention to the significance of the social encounters that surround food by giving greater analytical focus to the late sociologist, Erving Goffman's conception of “the situation” than is typically given in research on youth food consumption. Focusing on the role of the situation in structuring the experience of youths' consumption of fast food directs attention to the significance of the body as symbolic resource, the collective mood, emotional energy, affective gains, and the socio-spatial context to young people's participation in fast-food settings as consumers. A shift away from the individual youth food consumer as unit of analysis to a focus on situations provides greater analytical purchase in trying to work through the complicated relationship between youth agency and the consumer markets' influence over youth, as it plays out around and through food.

Keywords:

• youth
• youth culture
• fast food
• consumption
• micro-sociology
• situational emotions

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy L. Best

Amy L. Best is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University. She teaches courses on ethnography, micro-sociology, and youth and social inequality. She is author of Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2000) and Fast Cars: Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars (NYU Press, 2006). She is presently completing her manuscript on youth and the changing American food landscape (NYU Press, 2015). George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA ([email protected]).