The taming of taste: The commodization of authenticity and the rhetoric of tradition in urban restaurants

Restaurants in their multiple incarnations, and in particular in the larger urban centers in the United States, bear enormous responsibility in the commoditization of tradition and authenticity. Restaurants' appropriation of traditional culinary lore and the manipulation of the notion of authenticity associated with it effectively limits consumer agency in matters of cultural production and reproduction. In my argument, the creative culinary process is attributed to restaurateurs, while individual agency on matters as simple as food is disputed; this may appear counterintuitive to the habitual diner (academic and non academic alike). However, a close analysis of the data based on a sound mixed methods approach has revealed this to be the case. A narrowly designed quantitative study would have misrepresented the strong subjective link between food and the participants in the project, but on the other hand a self reflexive qualitative study would have emphasized the quality of this relationship alone to the detriment of the model. In other words, diners possess discrete taste yet their choices are subject to a number of influences; my model is an attempt at identifying some of these potentially significant influences, in particular the role of perceived authenticity in restaurant food