Rural cosmopolitanism: Performing locality and authenticity in Swiss food discourse

Food, like language, plays a central role in the production of culture; it is likewise a powerful resource for the representation and organization of social order. Status is asserted or contested through both the materiality of food (e.g. its substance and raw economics) and through its discursivity (e.g. the way it’s depicted and discussed). This intersection of language and materiality (cf. Shankar & Cavanaugh 2017) makes food 14 an ideal site for examining the place of language in contemporary class formations (cf. Thurlow 2016). As a case in point, my paper examines a dataset of multimodal food texts (e.g. online resources, signage, shop displays, and food tourism activities) drawn from an artisanal cured meats producer in Switzerland who explicitly self-styles as the height of modern, cosmopolitan food practices and trends. Combining critical discourse analysis and social semiotics, I document the linguistic, verbal and material tactics by which stakeholders produce a discourse of elite authenticity indexed by, for example, claims to locality, sustainability, and especially rurality. This discourse hinges on the iconization, romanticization and exploitation of agrarian life in ways that strategically (dis)avow elitist distinction. In fact, I argue that the production – and circulation – of this discourse erases the complex realities of the rural Other (cf. hooks 1992), while elevating the privileged consumption practices of urban life and cosmopolitan elites. As such, particular ways of eating (and particular eaters) are hailed as simultaneously fashionable and socially/politically virtuous (cf. Kenway and Lazarus 2017), while covertly reinscribing privileged standards of good taste (cf. Bourdieu 1984) and class inequality