Judging, Tasting, Knowing “Good” Food

Abstract

Though public discourses of “good” food exert a powerful influence, cooks and eaters construct our own understandings in ways that may simultaneously reflect and resist these norms. Our knowledge of “good” food may sometimes present itself as “vague” (Schaefer et al., this issue), yet is often quite nuanced, based on disparate factors—economic, logistical, nutritional, temporal and political, along with individual preferences—as the articles featured in this special cluster illustrate (Thomas et al., Tsui, this issue). Cooks (and also eaters) often exhibit sophisticated epistemic functions not unlike those of judges. They navigate multiple modes of knowledge—lay and expert, embodied, situated spatially and relationally—between eaters and food environments, between eaters and cooks. Cooks’ and eaters’ discussion of good food reveals moral imperatives translated into foodways, a range of interpersonal and institutional interactions and the traces of social hierarchies, as we see in these articles. Thus, “good” food is less a series of discrete choices by individuals than a domain in which cooks, eaters and their environments constitute interdependent networks. Through the emerging picture of these processes, this special cluster advances our knowledge of the cultural politics of “good” food, the epistemic politics of food “choices,” the workplace as an underexplored site of food cultures and just and sustainable health promotion efforts through food.

Keywords:

• “good” food
• food literacy
• epistemology
• social construction of health
• food choice

Notes

1. See, for example, Michael Ruhlman, “No food is healthy. Not even kale” (WashingtonPost.Com 17 Jan. 2016. 4 Mar. 2016).

2. Reiner Jumpertz von Schwartzenberg and Peter J. Turnbaugh, “Siri, What Should I Eat?” (Cell 163 [Nov. 19, 2015]: 1051-2. Web. 4 Mar. 2016.)

3. Katie King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in US Women's Movements (Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995).

4. Thanks to Michael Fakhri for this framing, in the discussion following the May 2014 Association for the Study of Food and Society panel, which gave rise to this article cluster.

5. This article and and Thomas et al. (also this issue) are based on data from a single broader project.