When, after you have cleaned out your sock drawer and stopped doomscrolling for sanity’s sake in the idle space between 3 and 4 a.m., sleep still refuses to come, there remains one option. There is the ubiquitous personality quiz.
These always beckon; multiple-choice attention traps purporting to reveal your style, likability, the way you love, how you lean politically or where you land on the spectrum of psychopathy. That the conclusions reached after taking these tests should be obvious from the outset is irrelevant. Logic is elusive in the predawn hours or, come to think of it, at pretty much any time when you’ve made the choice to take an online quiz.
Now, from IDR Labs, comes the social media-friendly Food Social Class Test, a casual online survey based on a data-driven academic report published in 2020 by Silvia Bellezza and Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania. That work was broadly derived from research into the connections between social class and the things we choose to put in our mouths — a link explored in the early 1980s by the French academic and intellectual Pierre Bourdieu.
Mr. Bourdieu’s work sharply skewered myths of social mobility in a postindustrial society. He found, unsurprisingly, that in many ways those at the top of the capitalist food chain go to considerable lengths to safeguard and maintain social privilege and generational wealth.
Which brings us to the twice-baked potato topped with melted Cheddar and bacon bits: Reader, I took the test.
In it, each of the 35 menu options is offered as a silhouetted photo with a bar beneath it for rating a selection. Users are encouraged to rate such things as a Cheddar-topped baked potato by indicating the degree to which they “agree” or “disagree” with it. Though there are plenty of things with which this reporter quibbles on a daily basis, seldom has a baked potato provoked him to argument.
Still, I only partly found agreement with the twice-baked potato, with its bubbling topcoat of melted cheese studded with bacon bits, because, at 510 calories, a single serving constitutes one-fourth of the recommended daily food intake. Given that 40 percent of adults in the United States are obese, according to recently released data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (a slight decline from a study conducted from 2020 to 2023) and that those at the upper end of the income ladder are notoriously food shy, it is a cinch to cheat on the survey.
Simply select menu items with caloric values in the low triple digits and you are quickly aligned with high-class culinary ways. If it is true that you can never be too rich or too thin, as the Duchess of Windsor is believed to have remarked, it goes without saying that you cannot achieve the latter benchmark by scarfing down Sloppy Joes. We live, after all, in an Ozempic era.
So never mind the fried fish sticks, the potato chips, the defrosted pizza, the chicken nuggets, or the hot dog with all the trimmings. Forget the Mac ’n Cheese or even the Truffle Mac ’n Cheese, presumably featured on the survey as a snob trap. Adding two small discs of fragrant fungus to a dish that is otherwise a gloppy, glutinous cholesterol nightmare does not significantly elevate it on the class scale.
Instead, choose the southern Cobb salad, the sashimi, the mussels, even the tuna tartare tacos. Sure, there are carbs in the tacos, but if you have ever watched a person of means scraping the filling from a taco at a Mexican fine dining joint you understand that its function is not nutrition. It is a disposable delivery system.
Still, though I tried to skew the results in the favor of class elevation by sticking to stuff Babe Paley might have pecked at between puffs of the Lucky Strikes she chain-smoked, my stomach won out and I found myself “agreeing’’ with stuff like beef stew, chili con carne and meatloaf. (For unknown reasons, the quiz has almost nothing for vegans or vegetarians, who apparently exist outside the class system.) In doing so, I forfeited Veblen-esque aspirations I may have clung to.
It happens that I hate stuff like petits fours or foie gras burgers, considering them the culinary equivalent of a raised pinkie. I love meatloaf and admit to eating French fries. After responding to all 35 questions, I hit the results button and was rewarded with an immutable digestive truth.
When it comes to food, I am hopelessly middle-class.
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