‘A smoked salmon salad and a glass of Bordeaux.’ Cultivating social distinction and negotiating femininity through the consumption of Western food in post-reform China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Consumption of Western food and wine has been on the rise in the Chinese middle-class since Deng Xiao Ping’s 1980s reforms and is particularly prevalent among the young urban generation who grew up in post-Maoist China. Ethnographic observations at events organized by the Food & Beverage Unit of French Consulate in Shanghai and 10 semi-structured interviews with Chinese young female professionals belonging to the French business circles and French gastronomy professionals were undertaken. Food photographs on the social media WeChat were also examined in a cyber-ethnography. Drawing on Farrer’s concept of culinary Occidentalism and on the role of food in post-socialist states, this paper explores how temporary migrations as international students and culinary tourism in France shape a cosmopolitan capital which young Chinese female professionals use to help their peers domesticate the complex world of Western gastronomy in Shanghai. I argue that through their appreciation of French gastronomy, they perform social distinction and negotiate a post-socialist, transnationally connected urban femininity. Their search for refined, healthy and “authentic” Western and French food and wine consumption, frequently displayed on social media, is embedded in a complex realm of glamorized representations of Western modernity and French romanticism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".