Tortillas, Pizza, and Broccoli

Abstract

Marked dietary changes are occurring nationwide in Mexico, yet these manifest differently among distinct socioeconomic status (SES) groups. This article examines several complex relationships among: SES; food preferences, norms, and aspirations; and actual dietary practices in a Mexican city. Drawing on data from an in-depth ethnographic study conducted in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, this study takes a multidimensional qualitative approach in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of contemporary dietary changes and nutritional health disparities. Very few studies distinguish actual dietary behaviors from food preferences, interrogate disjunctures between dietary patterns and aspirations, or investigate tensions between normative and temptation food preferences. This work advances the literature by bringing together insights from Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, (critical) consumer demand theory, and Popkin’s theory of nutrition transitions to shed light on how SES not only shapes food consumption patterns but also the diets that people aspire to consume in a developing-country setting. The study finds that food practices and preferences are driven by economic constraints but also different kinds of socially structured exposures, access, beliefs, and norms.

Keywords:

• Mexico
• Bourdieu
• habitus
• preferences
• social class
• consumption
• diet
• nutrition transition

Acknowledgments

The author offers thanks to editor Jennifer Smith Maguire and anonymous reviewers at Food, Culture, and Society for their astute critiques and suggestions on an earlier draft of the manuscript. She thanks the participating families in the three study communities for sharing their experience and insight and research assistants Jazmín Ramirez and Oscar Hernandez for assistance with data collection. This study was supported by a fieldwork grant from the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies and by a postdoctoral fellowship at Tulane University’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies.

Notes

1. “Consumer choice theory” refers to the typical presentation of consumer behavior in mainstream microeconomics textbooks, which has been the “standard” conceptualization since the late 1940s.

2. For preference utilitarians, the criterion for determining what is good for an individual is only her own wants and preferences. The content of the preferences do not matter, nor their origin, only that they are satisfied.

3. While economic and cultural resources often are closely correlated, Bourdieu’s division of economic and cultural capital enables a distinction between those whose elite status is determined primarily by their high levels of cultural knowledge from those whose elite position is due primarily to their financial resources .

4. In this study, SES is conceptualized as a composite of household income, parental education and occupation, household living conditions, and car ownership .

5. Bernard asserts that study participants should be compensated at the local rate for their time. In this study, I provided grocery gift certificates worth 65 or 100 Mexican pesos (equiv. of US$ 5 or 7.70), depending on the length of the session. This is a bit more than the local median hourly wage.

6. The food patterns depicted here rely primarily on accounts from participating mothers and teenagers. These participants reported on their own dietary habits as well as those of their household. While the patterns described do reflect household food experiences, particularly regarding food supplies and cooking habits, the findings weigh the experiences of mothers and children (including their eating experiences outside the home) more heavily than those of fathers, and may not adequately reflect fathers’ eating behaviors, particularly those who do much of their eating outside the home.

7. Cena in Mexico is typically a light and informal meal eaten at night. The main meal of the day (la comida) traditionally is eaten in the early to late afternoon.

8. The high-income participants had had greater exposure to nutrition education and information, and had more knowledge about what foods are forms of carbohydrates, than the other SES groups. All of the high-SES mothers believed that starchy carbohydrate foods were not among the healthiest foods.

9. Findings from this study lead me to hypothesize that the middle-class participants’ rejection of pork is an expression of distancing/distinguishing themselves from the consumption preferences and practices of lower-SES groups. Liking and regularly consuming pork may be what Parker refers to as a “stigmata or anti-marker” of membership in the middle class, that is, “characteristics that would exclude a person from society’s consideration as middle class, characteristics that indelibly brand someone as plebian or ignoble”.

10. My findings during my work in this study with high-SES women and girls are consistent with studies that have found that higher social classes monitor weight more closely, have greater perceptions of being overweight, are more dissatisfied with their bodies, and have a greater likelihood of deliberate efforts at weight control than socially disadvantaged women (McLaren & Kuh, 2004; Wardle & Griffith, 2001). Study participants of different SES shared a similar slender body “ideal,” however, the high-SES participants had stronger expectations and pressures to personally embody this ideal compared to the middle- and low-SES participants.