Let us now turn to how Bourdieu uses this theoretical framework to explain the ways in which culinary taste is socially constructed through habitus. He observes, first, that a simple reading of the statistics of the consumption of different foods leads commentators to:

See a simple effect of income in the fact that, as one rises in the social hierarchy, the proportion of income spent on food diminishes, or that, within the food budget, the proportion spent on heavy, fatty, fattening foods, which are also cheap ... declines. (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 177).

However, as he goes on to point out, this simple explanation cannot account for differences in tastes and consumption between social groups who share similar incomes but have very different food consumption patterns. The broad opposition corresponding to income masks more subtle oppositions within the classes. Within the dominant and middle classes in particular, Bourdieu distinguishes differences between the fractions relatively richer in cultural capital and those relatively richer in economic capital. These differences in the volume and structure of global capital give rise to different habituses and lifestyles within the broad class groupings which are expressed in different tastes in food consumption (see Table 1.1). However, the real principle governing these differences in tastes in food is the opposition between the "tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of necessity" (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 198). Tastes are shaped by the material conditions of existence; the tastes of luxury are the tastes...