Negotiating “Good Food” at an Elite Elementary School in New York City

Abstract

This article explores the discourses produced, circulated, and enregistered by administrators, teachers, and parents around and about “good food” at an elite elementary school in New York City. The larger research goal was to understand how privileged school children are socialized into elite foodways (how to identify, procure, and consume food) and elite forms of food talk (the codes and registers used around and about food) that contribute to the social field within which they develop the cultural capital needed to succeed as privileged worker-consumers in the neoliberal, late-capitalist world their parents are building. Here the analytic focus is on the intertextuality and indexical stance-taking of adults at the school and how these contribute to the sedimentation of elite signs and values and their imbrication into a moral economy of food and language in this privileged setting. The negotiation of contradictory messaging holds some hope for the roles these children may play as late capitalism unravels.