It’s not often that I link approvingly to Oxblog (we must be on opposite ends of Bourdieusian social space in addition to having different politics), but I really liked David Adesnik’s review of Spurlock’s documentary Supersize Me. First caveat is that I haven’t seen the film - in any case, Adesnik’s post isn’t about the filmmaking but the politics of the anti-fast-food thesis. But whether he adequate captures the film or not, he certainly latches onto the class politics of the fast food debate:
Although the film never says so explicitly, it has a very rigid, albeit unspoken class structure. The lower class consists of those who love McDonald’s, dozens of whom are interviewed by Spurlock, usually in one of our glorious nation’s many McDonald’s franchsies. The upper class consists of the physicians, nutrionists, scholars and legal experts who practically beg Spurlock not to force himself to eat all that junk food.
According to the pop-psychological theory on which Spurlock bases his argument, manipulative advertising has the ability to instill vulnerable children with unbreakable, lifelong habits of consumption. Yet somehow, all of the educated individuals who advise Spurlock have cleansed themselves of the destructive messages to which they were exposed as children. Although Spurlock never explains exactly how this is possible, the implicit message is clear: educated people simply know better.
I happen to think he takes his thesis too far: in rebelling against the tendency of the bohemian bourgeoisie to see cultural dupes in the lower classes and the non-cultural-elite middle class, he views it all as rational trade-offs. But our eating choices (whether bourgeois, petit or lumpen) are all as much irrational as they are rational. Culture matters, history shapes us, and advertising does influence choices in a non-conscious way (if it didn’t, advertisers wouldn’t pay money for it). In sum, he reverses Spurlock’s problem, subjecting the bobos to sociological gaze but not food choices.
But I quibble. Go read his whole post.
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