you
Well-known member
Hmmm, couple of issues with this:
Firstly, I'm not sure how much you can read into the original class context of the food being recuperated this way - it's just another way of staying ahead of the curve, in the way that people used to eat progressively more obscure foreign stuff. Now that you can get beef redang sauce in a jar in Sainsburys and sashimi in service stations, differentiating yourself from the mainstream means going to a farmers' market to buy organic pig cheeks and turnips.
And I don't think that this sort of differentiation through obscurity is an inherently middle class thing, either - it happens in pretty much all taste cultures.
Also, equating "middle class" with the sort of people who eat at St John / up-to-the-minute gastro pubs is the sort of thing that I was trying to question when I started the thread. Sure that's a part of the middle class - youngish, urban, plenty of disposable income, early-adopter types - but a lot of equally middle class people - suburban, culturally conservative little-englanders, for instance - are basically no more likely to eat pigs trotters in a trendy gastropub than a kid from a council estate is. Food is a great meter of class in many ways because of just how close to socio-economic factors it rides. Maybe my first explanation wasn't very delicate - soz.
Oh, and finally oysters became posh (and I'd say borderline upper class rather than middle class) because they became scarce and hence expensive after stocks collapsed some time in the early 20th century. But that's kind of a side point...
no, maybe not an exclusively middle class phenomena, I don't think I said it was, but an interesting meter instead..... re-appropriation of things goes both ways (white bread over ages, burberry over 80-90's etc) - but I think the fact that it is deployed as 'different' or 'new' shows a gap between the new and old contexts - -Food is a great meter of class in many ways because of just how close to socio-economic factors it rides. Maybe my first explanation wasn't very delicate - soz.
Kitchens have a gone-dun a 360 two..... when you think about the architecture... they used to have separate buildings for them, now bitches be knocking down walls, aspiring to have a massive one like nigella....