Making culinary worlds: Craft, commodity and cuisine in American restaurants

This study is located within the considerable tension around social class in American food practice. It argues that commercialized food and eating are important windows into contemporary American ideals and anxieties about social change and living well. I assert that what restaurants produce---chefs, foodstuffs and aesthetic orientations---offers a privileged lens on consumptive performances and collective fashioning in the nation, for the meanings imbued in culinary objects and practices reflect specific intersections in America's cultural, political and economic landscape. More than a consuming enterprise for elites, the restaurant is a space that entails a class of workers and ascendant bourgeois selves in a common purpose. In practice and discourse, American production, consumption and circulation of elite food and culinary expertise are interdependent processes that coalesce in the creation of new subjectivities. The production of elite cuisine, I argue, is at once an attempt to radically aestheticize bodily pleasure as an art form and to place these sensations into the service of the market and a class structure, the process whereby a national culture is constructed.;Through the study of everyday praxis, working alongside cooks and servers in prominent American restaurants across three cosmopolitan cities, I examine the production of chefs and their consuming publics. My ethnographic project looks closely at the ways in which cooks, staff and diners are indoctrinated into cultures of expertise through bodily and discursive practices, to understand the relationship between craftwork and embodiment in this process. I study the articulation of aesthetic and technological orientations---the affects and systems of value---that are reproduced in culinary craft and which emerge from restaurants as commodities and discourses to circulate in global and local spheres.;Ultimately this dissertation examines how intimate modes of embodiment and practice develop, and are articulated and performed within the present global social and economic conditions. It aims to shed light on the centrality of food and the emergence of eating well as a model of broader experience in contemporary America. This work makes larger contributions to the socio-historical trajectory of artisanal labor in the US, especially as it relates to the gastronomic discourses which characterize the present; the study of expert cultures---as both social worlds of meaning-making and as reflections of the aspirations of the larger social worlds in which they are embedded and out if which emerge new theories about learning through embodiment, practice and storytelling; a critical evaluation of taste as it has been construed in social theory that posits the individual and the nation as mutually implicated in the production of American philosophic and aesthetic orientations articulated through the medium of food under Capital; and finally, an approach to the study of American culture that in its concerns both fosters and benefits from a diverse disciplinary commensality.