Document Type

Honors Project

Abstract

In this study, I interrogate culinary cosmopolitanism, or food consumption practices reflecting an appreciation for cultural diversity, tolerance, and exploration. Culinary cosmopolitanism has grown increasingly popular amongst consumers, alongside the implicit assumption that society is genuinely moving towards acceptance of all cultures and people. However, I argue for a more critical perspective on the consumption practices of culinary cosmopolitanism. Using interviews and survey data with students at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, I also extend current theory on culinary cosmopolitanism, which has focused on older professionals, to an understudied age group. At Macalester, a small Midwestern liberal arts college that invests in a reputation as multicultural, diverse, and inclusive, cosmopolitan capital and authenticity negotiation emerged as strategies students took to align their experiences as emerging cosmopolitans with core tenets of cosmopolitanism: worldliness, exploration, and authenticity. Through these strategies, however, class inequality was reinforced and kept invisible, despite the importance of resources in how individuals explore food. Furthermore, a White American and European center of food culture was reproduced as a standard marker by which all Other cuisines and cultures are measured. Furthermore, ideals of culinary tourism espoused by students justified the exoticization and commodification of racial Otherness. Thus, despite assumptions that multiculturality and egalitarianism are norms of today’s food consumption, culinary cosmopolitanism in practice obscures the role of class privilege in our food consumption and serves the racial project of colorblindness by reinforcing whiteness as central yet invisible.

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