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Family meals are an important topic in food consumption research linked to health, care, morality, etc. Recent consumer surveys show that home cooking and family eating patterns are under pressure due to increasingly busy everyday family lives. Here, fast food meals offer a practical solution. However, several studies in the Danish context (and in other geographical areas) highlight a strong moral ideal among middle-class families to produce healthy and home-cooked meals, which should render fast food illegitimate. This study builds on these studies on food, moralities, and parenting, and the purpose is to explore Danish middle-class parents' attitudes about going to multinational fast-food chains and how they navigate dilemmas around practical and moral issues. Additionally, we explore how new, seemingly more exclusive food products at a multinational fast-food chain in Denmark impact parents' views. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with n = 17 Danish middle-class parents who had been to a multinational fast-food chain in 2021 as a new series of "quality" burgers designed by Michelin chefs was introduced. Our findings show that all participants demonstrated some degree of moral concern about fast-food consumption. These concerns result in strong, affective narratives of disgust and compensation strategies for the most troubled. More particularly, we argue that the consumption of fast food is (1) closely embedded in family rituals, and (2) it entails a meal negotiation between children's pleasure and adults' disgust (particularly mothers' disgust) for most participants. Finally, (3) we highlight that the availability of 'novel' products more closely aligned with Danish middle-class ideals and aspirations around food, like the fine dining chefs, Chefs' Burgers (CB), make those disputes easier for most parents. Others react negatively to the campaign.

Food porn emerged in the 1970s as an academic concept and has since become integrated into everyday social media use. The aim of this article is to analyse the concept of food porn through a critical discussion of the existing literature in cultural and media studies focusing on the definitions of food porn, its uses as an analytical and theoretical lens to explore food aesthetics, and its current relevance. The authors show that the definitions and interpreta-tions vary a great deal and argue that three overarching themes dominate the literature: 1) formal aesthetics; 2) gender, body, and sexuality; 3) excess and transgression. Finally, it is argued that future uses of the concept should either focus on a) an empirically founded approach focusing on the actual use of the concept; or b) a theoretically founded approach with a formal typology focusing on hierarchies and power dynamics.

Boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow products and practices of consumption are blurring, notably in food consumption. In this article, we want to understand how consumers experience and make sense of products that are seen as uniting highbrow and lowbrow by authoritative voices in the field. We focus on gourmet burgers and more specifically the case of McDonald’s collaboration with Michelin chefs in Denmark and the attitudes of middle-class consumers towards this collaboration and its products. Empirically, we demonstrate that consumers, in theory, are very favourable towards food products that transgress the highbrow–lowbrow distinction. At the same time, understandings and evaluations vary. The majority of consumers are favourable, while a minority are strongly negative. These perceptions are strongly shaped by consumers’ initial perception of the collaboration. The favourable informants see it as a fun experiment while those who are critical see it as a fake branding strategy. Via a comparison to another gourmet burger, the NOMA cheeseburger, served at one of the world’s best restaurants, we further suggest distinguishing between highbrow and lowbrow transgression of the highbrow–lowbrow divide. We argue that while both seem legitimate for consumers, it seems that highbrow transgressions confer more status to the consumer. However, in both cases, there is a risk that consumers are disappointed and experience a mismatch between expectations and the tangible product. Finally, we posit that consuming lowbrow–highbrow hybrids differs from what has been labelled ironic consumption, for example, lowbrow products consumed by highbrow consumers in an ironic manner, because highbrow–lowbrow hybrids connect objects and actors from antithetical spheres in the object of consumption. We argue that the focus on highbrow–lowbrow hybrids offers a new lens to study fields of cultural consumption and how consumers subjectively make sense of fields and their dynamics and position themselves via sense-making narratives and taste judgements.

The issue of human eating crosses many conceptual boundaries, from humanities and social science to natural science, and for that reason it must be interpreted from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. In this introductory chapter, we present the area of meal research and, more particularly, the development of the academic subject of Culinary Arts and Meal Science, at Örebro University in the School of Hospitality, Culinary Arts and Meal Science situated in the village of Grythyttan in the Swedish countryside, 70 kilometres from Örebro. The anthology presents original, multifaceted, and revealing perspectives from the institutions’ researchers on how to study culinary arts and meals. The contributions showcase a variety of angles on meal research, from sensory sciences and economics to sommellerie, aesthetics, food history, gender, culture, pedagogics, food innovation, and service and hospitality. The chapters make use of a variety of methods and theories. This variety is needed to unravel the complex phenomenon and understand all the elements of which a meal is composed. We choose to use the word “revealing” in our title, Revealing Meals, to insist on meals as revealing experiences and to highlight the ambition of our research to explore and reveal the “what” and the “how” of different meals. The goal of the anthology Revealing Meals is to present how we study meals at Campus Grythyttan and to inspire others who are interested in meals to take part in this never-ending exploration of how, why, and what 10 Revealing Meals we eat. The anthology brings together the past, present, and future of meal research by explaining the history of the field at our institution while positioning it in the Nordic landscape of meal research; by presenting what we do presently; and, finally, by pointing to new directions in culinary arts and meal sciences.

Purpose: This article explores consumers’ attitudes to the trend of gourmet burgers, notably the gourmet burgers’ combination of highbrow food (gourmet) and lowbrow food (fast food). The authors use the case of the NOMA cheeseburger from the iconic New Nordic restaurant NOMA.

Design/methodology/approach: The data set consists of interviews (n 5 20) with urban Danish consumers attending the NOMA burger pop-up.

Findings: The analysis highlights an acceptance among informants of “gourmetfied” burgers. This signals a change in the culinary status of burgers in Danish food culture. The authors also discovered some ambivalence in relation to the highbrow-lowbrow negotiations: while all informants celebrate the casualization of NOMA during the burger pop-up, half of the informants found the burger underwhelming: it did not live up to the edginess of the NOMA brand.

Practical implications: The authors believe this research can inform people working with culinary highbrow-lowbrow mix in their food designs, notably in relation to developing and matching the relation between symbolic and material aspects of the food design.

Originality/value: The authors argue that the concept of transgression can help us theorize how consumers accept, refuse, and negotiate boundaries in relation to gourmet burgers, and more generally between food consumption mixing highbrow and lowbrow elements. More particularly, the authors propose to distinguish between symbolic, social, and material transgressions. This perspective might also be interesting for practitioners in the field.

While relationships between food and tourism have been extensively investigated in recent decades, the Faroe Islands is a lesser studied food destination. This article analyses the specificities of restaurant scene in the context of food tourism in Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, based on the official promotion of the dining landscape. The authors specifically discuss how the remote Arctic destination of Tórshavn positions itself as a culinary destination based on concepts of authenticity, exoticism, sustainability and innovation. Results show that the small and isolated capital of Tórshavn balances the exoticism of traditional Faroese food experiences with more generic international flavors and urban spaces. Hence, the case opens interesting perspectives on the negotiations of the local and the global in contemporary food tourism marketing of remote island destinations.