Fashioning Appetite. Restaurants and the Making of Modern Identity

It can no longer be said that we are just what we eat. In the contested sphere of gastronomy divided between the golden arches of McDonalds and the prized stars of Michelin where personal identity is expressed through a frenetic quest for socially-approved tastes and distinctions, where, when, how and with whom we eat has become just as fundamental in defining who we are. In this follow-on to her classic 1989 work "Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners", Joanne Finkelstein takes a fragment of social life, dining out in restaurants, and uses it to examine the nature and meaning of manners and social relations in the modern world. This book examines how body images on billboards, social documentaries on the human and environmental cost of food and the abundance of choice in cosmopolitan and crowded cities contribute to a culture in which every forkful is weighted with meaning. When food is fetishised and identity is a capitalist commodity, the social solitude of the restaurant may be read as a semiotic realm where the satisfaction of appetite becomes both pleasure and torment. "Fashioning Appetite" explores the restaurant as a liminal space where the boundaries between public and private are constantly renegotiated, where our personal celebrations and seductions are conducted within view of the people sitting at the next table and eating alone has become a cultural minefield so perilous that there are how-to guides devoted to traversing it safely. Applying new theoretical developments in understanding emotional capitalism to the pervasive images of conspicuous consumption in popular culture, the vocabulary of appetites, tastes and distinctions is decoded to demonstrate how being satisfied with one's meal goes to the heart of being satisfied with oneself. From the social solitude of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to the burgeoning phenomenon of the celebrity chef, Joanne Finkelstein demonstrates how eating in public has become a complex cultural and consumerist transaction exhibited for the critical gaze of the other, and argues that in our atomised society, our most voracious appetites and deepest anxieties are enacted in the restaurants where we serve up our splintered selves for public consumption.