Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste*

The basic opposition between the tastes of luxury and the tastes of necessity is specified in as many oppositions as there are different ways of asserting one's distinction vis-a-vis the working class and its primary needs, or-which amounts to the same thing-different powers whereby necessity can be kept at a distance. The taste for rare, aristocratic foods points to a traditional cuisine, rich in expensive or rare product. The system of differences becomes clearer when one looks more closely at the patterns of spending on food. The quasi-conscious representation of the approved form of the perceived body, and in particular its thinness or fatness, is not the only mediation through which the social definition of appropriate foods is established. The relation to food-the primary need and pleasure-is only one dimension of the bourgeois relation to the social world.