Eating is Believing: An Exploratory Research of Taiwan Gourmands
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Feng, Chung-Tien
Abstract
In the late 1990’s, Taiwan became a mature consumerist society. Social changes, such as having two days off per week, loosening of regulations for cable television and the development of the Internet, have stimulated leisure consumption in Taiwan. The increase in gourmet exposition reflects and shapes social movements. Eating has become a process of learning, training and of showing one’s taste. he gourmet expositions of the late 1990’s are different than the educational recipes or gourmet literature that existed before because the former had the ability to stimulate people to consume. Gourmet food guides became a new category in the publishing market, major newspapers started to increase the amount of articles on gourmet topics, and TV stations started to air various types of gourmet food shows. Gourmet expositions use an educational and captivating method to seduce consumers into opening their wallets to enjoy gourmet meals.ourmands are the elite of the gourmet writing field. As professionals, they hold sway over how gourmet food should be eaten and tasted. Their authority comes from symbolic struggles in their field, also known as the legalization process of arbitrariness. This paper studies five gourmands, each with different specialties. Through studying Hu Tianlan, Jiao Tong, Ye Yilan, Wu Enwen and Wang Haoyi, the process in which gourmands receive their legality and the resulting social effects can be understood and analyzed. hrough exploring the process in which these five gourmands develop their habits and capital, it can be seen that gourmands require long periods of time to accumulate their cultural capital in order to obtain knowledge of gourmet culture and a palate that exceeds and is more refined than those of normal people. However, accumulation of cultural capital is only the first part of becoming a gourmand. If one wants to enter the gourmet exposition field and become a renowned gourmand, one also needs to put in the work and understand the strategy of transforming cultural capital into symbolic capital. This strategy differs according to the field in which one is in. ourmands use the symbolic struggles in their field to showcase their professionalism and solidify their position in the field of gourmet exposition. The articles on gourmet topics written by news reporters are of the “information gourmet exposition” type, which is dominated by economic capital. Conversely, the gourmet articles written by gourmands are on the other side of the spectrum, belonging to the “food culture gourmet exposition” type, dominated by cultural capital. esides their own efforts, gourmands also utilize the assistance, recognition and recommendations of their colleagues as well as media coverage to obtain their legality. Thus, besides conducting in-depth interviews with five gourmands and analyzing the content of texts, this paper has also chosen six reporters, cooks and bloggers who are acquainted with gourmands within the gourmet exposition field and conducted long-term observations on these people, turning them into sources of information.
Subjects
symbolic strggle
cultural intermediaries
gastronomist
field
capital
Type
thesis
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