The Biggest Table

Host Andrew Camp interviews University of Michigan lecturer and food studies scholar Margot Finn about her book "Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution." Finn describes shifting from a post-9/11 media project to food studies, tracing how contemporary “common sense” food ideals—sophistication, thinness, purity, and cosmopolitanism—are learned, historically recurring (notably in the 1920s), and tied to inequality and middle-class status striving, rather than steady progress. They discuss how taste is shaped by context and social cues (including studies on wine perception), and how post–World War II values emphasized reliable, shared abundance over distinction. Finn cautions against individual consumer fixes, critiques simplified organic/local claims and fraud examples, and argues for policy-level change and reform efforts shaped by target communities. They affirm inclusive tables, reciprocity metaphors, and share personal food preferences and a last-meal choice.

Margot Finn holds an MA and Ph.D in American Culture focusing on Food Studies, Media Studies, and 20th Century U.S. History. As a lecturer in Applied Liberal Arts and affiliate of the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative at the University of Michigan, Margot seeks to help students integrate the many different academic disciplines they encounter in their liberal arts degrees and connect their academic work to their personal lives. She encourages students to develop critical thinking skills and more informed perspectives on contemporary food debates such as the ecological impact of Organic vs. conventional agriculture, local vs. imported foods, the biology and culture of fatness, immigrant labor in the food system, and the history of elite food reform efforts. 

 

Her writing has been featured in the collection Sensory Rhetorics: Sensation, Persuasion, & the Politics of Feeling (Penn State UP 2026, eds. Steph Ceraso and Jonathan W. Stone), the anthology Food Fights: How History Matters to Contemporary Food Debates (UNC Press 2019, eds. Charles Ludington and Matthew Morse Booker), The Breakthrough Journal, Slate, and Vox. She is also co-editor with Mark Johnson of Critical Food Studies, a new series out of University of Arkansas Press.

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