I don’t know highbrow or lowbrow are the right words but I’m sure you get my point.
I know certain types of restaurants are considered lowbrow like McDonald’s or Burger King. And I suppose certain foods are considered lowbrow like Cheese Whiz or Twinkies.
Is there some kind of classification for food? I don’t think it is healthiness because there are highbrow foods that aren’t particularly healthy. Is it the way they are prepared? Is it the ingredients? Or is the way they are eaten?
This is all came to me when having lunch with my girlfriend. She was hoagie/submarine and I thought to myself unattractive it looked and how unattractive she looked eating it. Opening one’s mouth that wide to eat something, well maybe one thing, doesn’t seem to side with classiness.
A while back I pickedup a wonderful book – The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. An entire book on the subject of Tacky. It’s great. One reason it’s great is that it showed me things that I didn’t realize were considered tacky.
I’m not surprised about Cheese Whiz, for instance, or Cool Whip, or Hamurger Helper (each had an entry), but I must admit that I was surprised that Jello was in there. Jello? They serve it in hospitals! They use it at luncheons and to make weird salads.
But Jello is definitely low-class. It’s loaded with artifical flavor and color and doesn’t take much time or effort to prepare. The ordinary stuff is full of sugar, but using suger-free gelatine won’t redeem it.
Spam - definitely lowbrow. You can find lots of recipes for it and other wonderful lowbrow cuisine in The Treasury of White Trash Cooking. Most recipes are various combinations of canned goods.
I read a thing once that said most artificial fruit flavoring is basically the same. They change the color and tell you what they want you to think it tastes like, and your brain fills in the blanks. Don’t know how much truth there is to that.
Very little of what humans do or say is driven by logic, so I don’t think you’ll find any classification system. And, of course, low-brow and high-brow are pretty much in the eye of the beholder. Here in the trailer park, some of what we consider high-brow (the thick/soft paper napkins) would be considered low-brow by the linen napkin crowd.
Well, if you’re talking ‘gourmet’ which would be the ‘highbrow’ term for fancy food, it would mean that you obtain fresh ingredients and prepare them carefully. So throwing a bunch of frozen fries in the deep-fryer - not gourmet. Hand-cutting potatoes and then frying them in a pan of high-end oil would be gourmet. Even more so would be seasoning them with fresh herbs and baking them and then finishing them with a basamic sauce or something along those lines.
Well, generally any meal that isn’t served by a waiter and that is eaten out of a wrapper in a booth won’t be ‘classy’.
To make a hoagie classy, as suggested by Emily Post, no less, you simply eat it with a knife and fork. She suggests this for bananas and Snickers. This made for a fair Seinfeld episode when they tried it and it caught on where they hung out.
Isn’t it the same for everything on the lowbrow vs highbrow thing? Isn’t it popularity mainly? Now of course popularity has a few causal factor and price is often the key but not always.
Things are classed as highbrow simply due to the fact that the consumer of highbrow products is considered some kind of elite class, either rich e.g. gourmet food almost always more expensive or intellectual e.g. newspapers or arthouse vs hollywood - the price aint different but one appeals to a much wider audience and therefore by default becomes lowbrow.
I remember reading somewhere (sorry, no cite, maybe somebody else knows where it was?) that certain food sales, such as rice and beans, are inversely related to income, whereas other food’s consumption, such as lobster, are directly related.
My teenage daughter once opined to me, in a superior tone of voice, that Honey Buns packaged in cellophane and prominently labeled “HONEY BUN” are “white trash food”. Dunno how she came by that opinion, 'cause I certainly thought they were just another donut. Apparently not.
Uh, no it wouldn’t - it would be the ignorant, uneducated term for fancy food. A gourmet is a person. Even those panderers at the dictionary company haven’t relinquished this wordto the popular misusage you cited.
adjective
of or characteristic of a gourmet, esp. in involving or purporting to involve high-quality or exotic ingredients and skilled preparation: gourmet meals; gourmet cooking.
Guys, guys, let’s not fight. As a noun, pizzabrat’s right, and as an adjective, rocksolid’s right.
Is the food itself enough to be highbrow or lowbrow? I’d (for example) call a ribeye from Outback Steakhouse lowbrow, one from Ruth’s Chris highbrow, and one from The Keg just right in the ballpark for me. Am I now confusing the place with the food? I lean towards “no” because I don’t hold Outback in any especially low esteem; it ranks considerably higher than National Coney Island, which is a place I ardently enjoy, and which I’d consider lowbrow serving lowbrow food.
It comes down to is it cheap or expensive on a regular basis. The low brow as you discribed is cheap food most people would perfer not to eat if they could. Hih brow is what people eat if they don’t have a financial limit on food. You of course can have a taste for anything you wish, the associations are not immutable.
In economics, they have this distinction between, I think, “normal” goods and “inferior” goods. Normal goods are goods you’d buy more of if you had more money; like jewelery or cars. Inferior goods are goods you’d buy less of if you had more money; like ramen noodles or spam. I don’t see why this classification scheme wouldn’t work for food. But of course it doesn’t have the elitist overtones of highbrow and lowbrow.
I agree with your daughter on that one. Let’s see. It is a cheap food, prepackaged, covered in sugary sweetness, fatty, and it goes the extra mile to market itself generically to those that can’t afford the “gourmet” honeybuns for a few more cents. It has a negative association with its core market as well but that is a little harder to describe.
