Eating for Taste and Eating for Change: Ethical Consumption as a High-Status Practice
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Under what conditions is ethical consumption a high-status practice? Using unique food consumption survey data on aesthetic and ethical preferences, we investigate how these orientations to food are related. Existing research on high-status food consumption points to the “foodie,” who defines good taste through aesthetic standards. And emergent evidence suggests the “ethical consumer,” whose consumption is driven by moral principles, may also be a high-status food identity. However, ethical consumption can be practiced in inexpensive and subcultural ways that do not conform to dominant status hierarchies (e.g., freeganism). In order to understand the complex cultural terrain of high-status consumption, we investigate how socioeconomic status (SES) is related to foodie and ethical consumer preferences and practices. Using a k-means cluster analysis of intercept survey data from food shoppers in Toronto, we identify four distinct clusters representing foodies, ethical consumers, ethical foodies, and those whose preferences involve neither aesthetic nor ethical ideals. Through multinomial logistic regression, we find that while high-status consumers can be foodies or ethical consumers, the highest status consumers prioritize ethical and foodie preferences. Respondents’ reported shopping locations corroborate the results of the regression analyses. The taste preferences of the highest status consumers are associated with culinary sophistication and moral considerations, suggesting that high cultural capital tastes incorporate aesthetic and ethical dimensions. These results contribute to literature examining how food consumption repertoires can produce and reinforce classed boundaries and to literature on tastes that has focused on aesthetics to the neglect of ethical ideals.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it