Different preferences, different social classes

According to Joshua Freedman and Dan Jurafsky, food, language and culture are all powerful approaches to determine the social classes, considered as the markers of group identity. Apparently, people from different classes are different in these three aspects. To be specific, food can be divided into two categories: expensive food and inexpensive food. Most people from upper classmay prefer expensive food while lower-class people are willing to have inexpensive food. Due to the various choices of different classes, food advertising should be various.

Language differences are closely related to the socioeconomic status. In order to appeal to people from different social classes, food advertising should be respectively designed for the target customers. As the article mentioned, “education and health are two factors that have been strongly associated with differences in socioeconomic status for a longtime.”(48) People from upper class seem to have relatively high education level, which becomes the reason why the language used on expensive food is more complex and more difficult to comprehend than that on inexpensive food. In the example of potato chips, expensive chips use longer words, sentence and  complex grammar while inexpensive chips mainly use common and easy language. Also,comparing to inexpensive chips, expensive chips emphasize more about their healthiness, using the phrases like “never fried” and “no fat”. Moreover, somefood may use negative negation to show that they do not have the bad qualities of other brands, such as “no fake colors” and “no fake flavors”. Similarly,expensive chips are supposed to have more negative negations.

Not just language differences, but also cultural differences correlate with the social status. The dissimilarities of different classes’ tastes and habits reflect various cultural preferences. According to the article, people from lower-status class are fond of traditional hearty meals, which are rich inquantity. Nevertheless, upper-status class pays more attention on the quality of food and is more likely to choose healthy and high-quality food. This reveals the relationship between food and culture.

The most interesting point in the article is the authenticity. The authenticity in food is being natural for upper class while that is rooted in historicity for lower class. So expensive food advertising emphasizes the natural ingredients while inexpensive food advertising emphasizes the family recipe and the American location of their products.

Different social classes require different food, that is, different preferences of food reveal different social class. Food advertising, therefore, is a kind of culture, which is worth studying and analyzing. Further, the analyzing method applied to the potato chips is also useful for advertising of mobile phones. Upper-class people may choose expensive mobile phones while lower-class people prefer inexpensive mobile phones. Inexpensive mobile phones keep emphasizing the practical utility while expensive mobile phones pay more attention on the quality and durability of them. I believe if we make a careful examine on various mobile phones, we will find many similarities to potato chips.