Description: This is a book about how people talk and write about food - in the New York Times, on social media, in restaurants, and around the dinner table. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, Mapes focuses in particular on how "authenticity" proliferates in these various examples of "elite food discourse," and how it is used by stakeholders to simultaneously claim and deny social prestige. By emphasizing things like simplicity, historicity, and locality/sustainability (among others), people downplay their eliteness on the grounds of "good taste" and responsible consumerism. Ultimately, this work is a critique of that ways in which contemporary food practices (re)inforce status competition and class hierarchy.
Review Quotes: "Mapes highlights how the dismissal of food privilege has become everyday. Readers of Elite Authenticity can feel that this is 'the right kind of' elitism: uncomfortable to dismiss but hard to ignore." -- Allison Checkeye, Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, Language In Society