Reading a water menu
Bottled water and the cultivation of taste
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8091053 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Andrew Biro (Acadia University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 231-251 |
| Publication date | 2017-07-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Consumer Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1469-5405 • E-ISSN: 1741-2900 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1469540517717779 |
| OpenAlex | W2738299647 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 25 |
The market for bottled water is growing and increasingly segmented. How do we explain not just the willingness to pay for a substance (water) that is almost free but also the increasing discernment in a drink generally considered tasteless? We argue that bottled water market segmentation is a leading edge of processes of water commodification, associated with the crisis of Fordism and rise of consumerist capitalism, where the assertion of status through commodity consumption is increasingly necessary. The extensive Ray’s & Stark water menu is analyzed to show how the taste for bottled waters is cultivated. In the menu, references to gustatory sensation are limited. Instead, the tastefulness of water inheres in the distance from anthropogenic influence, made visible through scientific (geological) discourses. The tension between the desire to consume unmediated nature and the scientific abstraction necessary to recognize it reveals the social character of the taste for bottled waters. The highly refined sense of taste that the water menu’s readers are presumed to have is a reflection of consumerist capitalism’s distinctive ways of reproducing socio-economic inequality and metabolizing non-human nature
Bottled water · Capitalism · Commodification · Commodity · Consumption (sociology · Economics · Economy · Market economy · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Taste · Chemistry · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Environmental Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Food Science
The making of modern champagne
Managing Toxins and Making Water ‘Safe’
Bottled Water and the Social Sciences
Filtering for purity
Blind Taste, Clear Insights
Catch-all technopolitics
Exploring Bottled Water Purchase Intention via Trust in Advertising, Product Knowledge, Consumer Beliefs and Theory of Reasoned Action
Hydraulic Hospitality and the Waters of New York City Restaurants
What Is Water?
Greening Citizenship
Subculture
Constructing Purity
The Taste of Paradise’
A Battle Against the Bottles
The Affects of Water—The Materialized Morality of Wells, Pipes, and Pumps in Tarawa, Kiribati
The taste machine
Science, normativity and skill
Lost in the Supermarket
This Is Not Your Practice Life
Meat, Mask, Burden`
Making practice theory practicable
Bottled Water
Privatizing water
Commodified Meanings, Meaningful Commodities
The environmentalist
Liquid Politics
Fijian Water in Fiji and New York
Those Things That Hold Us Together
Consumers and Consumption
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,6 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2026 (6) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |