Food Awards: “Staying slim and eating well shows that you have the means.”

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A food sociologist, Faustine Régnier has spent fifteen years studying food through the prism of social class. She shares her fascinating discoveries about tastes and norms in "Distinctions alimentaires," published this spring by PUF.

For Faustine Régnier, "food is a way of establishing boundaries with others." (Émile Loreaux/Hans Lucas)

Preferring lentils to meat. Swearing by slimming. Choosing to eat organic. Growing your own vegetable garden... For sociologist Faustine Régnier, a researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Research (INRAE), all these choices are not just a matter of taste or political awareness, but also of social class. We choose our food based on the categories we belong to or want to join. Her research, published under the title Distinctions alimentaires by PUF in April, is a fascinating fifteen-year investigation into how eating practices are shaped by the norms induced by our environment.

Several times in your book, you emphasize that one of the strongest divides between social classes revolves around meat. How do you explain this?

Today, it's meat that crystallizes a certain number of oppositions; yesterday, it was fruits and vegetables. While it had a very positive image until recently, meat is today the object of a form of discredit. In 2015, the WHO warned of the health risks of excessive consumption of red meat. To which were added environmental issues. We therefore have an accumulation of injunctions. The divide comes from the fact that in the working classes, meat is more associated with pleasure. It is a central food that strongly embodies "eating well," more strongly