On August 10, S. Margot Finn spoke at Literati about her new book, Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution. Her book argues that over the last several decades, Americans have become interested in the way they eat as a result of class anxiety born from increasing income disparity between the middle class and the very wealthy. Finn says the professional and managerial class display their class status through food choices.

While I know Ann Arbor is a food town, I was surprised to find the event was standing room only. Maybe, though, I shouldn’t have been, considering the role food takes in so many areas of daily life, from sustenance and ritual to entertainment. And I suppose it's not a stretch that a town known both for dining and a liberal slant would show up for a book about food that mentions class anxiety in the subtitle.

Finn -- a U-M lecturer in literature, science, and the arts -- let the audience in on how her book came to be. She was in graduate school at a time when the news ran stories about a sommelier shortage, and Finn began to dream about leaving school to become a wine expert. Her advisor encouraged her to stay with her program and to focus her study somehow on wine.

This path led her to study what is often called the "American food revolution," described in the book as “a comprehensive transformation in how many Americans buy, cook, eat, and above all talk about and imagine food.” But this "food revolution" means different things to different people. Some people picture Jamie Oliver and his campaign to get school children to eat better. Others hear Michael Pollan imploring us to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” Maybe Anthony Bourdain’s worldwide food adventures come to mind. Finn sees this revolution expressed through four ideas -- sophistication, thinness, purity, and cosmopolitanism -- that sometimes overlap and other times are in conflict with each other.

Her argument is ambitious, but Finn’s talk remained accessible through her ability to express her clear passion for the topic and through her use of media. She used clips from the movie Ratatouille to illustrate some of the mixed messages we receive about food and cooking’s greater role in the culture, specifically the conflict between the notion that cooking, and by extension eating well, is something everyone can do but that it's often in the domain of the gifted few. Finn also related to the audience when she admitted her research had, indeed, changed the way that she eats. She no longer diets and she has become more relaxed about what she eats -- including shamelessly enjoying the food product that is American cheese.

Discriminating Taste isn’t a light read, but if you’re interested in why it can be difficult to tease out a coherent narrative of what food and eating in America is like right now, the book digs in. A glance at the index shows entries ranging from "Aristotle to The Biggest Loser," "Chef Boyardee to Chez Panisse," and "Theodore Roosevelt to Arnold Schwarzenegger." But it was Finn’s presentation that makes me look forward to finishing what I am confident will be both an interesting and informative book, as well as encourage me to examine what I communicate through my own food choices.

Sherlonya Turner is the manager of the Youth & Adult: Services & Collections Department at the Ann Arbor District Library. She can be found diving headfirst into all sorts of projects over at sherlonya.net.