Assignment 2: Food and Identity
We are what we Eat - Seriously If you can make it through a day without one cup of coffee I envy you greatly, but the reality is most of us who are either students or working class citizens survive on coffee, it is a daily practice. As an American living in New Zealand I will be using Bourdieu’s theory and his key concepts of habitus, field, and capital to examine America’s coffee drinking rituals. I will be looking closely at the way that social class influences coffee preferences and their associated meaning in relation to Starbucks and fair trade coffee. Bourdieu argues, “food and eating is much more than the process of bodily nourishment, it is an elaborate performance of …show more content…
Preferences in coffee, particularly whether you chose to go to Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks and further more whether you chose to pay a little extra for Fairtrade coffee or not, reproduce middle/upper class and working class identities according to Bourdieu’s theory. I will sought to prove Bourdieu’s theory and show that taste in coffee are indicators of class because trends in their consumption are interrelated with an individual’s fit in society. I will start by looking at the background of Starbucks and who their target audience was and how they marketed themselves to this audience. First of all no matter where you are in the world, (although I have found it difficult in NZ to always find a Starbucks, part of the reason I moved to Dunedin….ok not really), you are bound to find a Starbucks with generally the same menu in one of their 15, 756 stores around the world. Starbucks can attribute …show more content…
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