The Trouble with Brunch
Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
What do your Eggs Benedict say about your notions of class?
Every weekend, in cities around the world, bleary-eyed diners wait in line to be served overpriced, increasingly outré food by hungover waitstaff. For some, the ritual we call brunch is a beloved pastime; for others, a bedeviling waste of time. But what does its popularity say about shifting attitudes towards social status and leisure? In some ways, brunch and other forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions. For award-winning writer and urbanist Shawn Micallef, brunch is a way to look more closely at the nature of work itself and a catalyst for solidarity among the so-called creative class.
Drawing on theories from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Florida, Micallef traces his own journey from the rust belt to a cosmopolitan city where the evolving middle class he joined was oblivious to its own instability and insularity.
The Trouble with Brunch is a provocative analysis of foodie obsession and status anxiety, but it's also a call to reset our class consciousness. The real trouble with brunch isn't so much bad service and outsized portions of bacon, it's that brunch could be so much more.
Praise for Shawn Micallef:
‘As Toronto grows into a more mature, more compelling city, a new group of non-academic, street-smart urbanists has emerged to appreciate it — with-it young writers, architects and men and women about town who love big cities and see things in Toronto that most of us miss. Shawn Micallef is one of the sharpest of this sharp-eyed breed.’ — Globe and Mail
‘A smart and intimate guide to the city that makes you feel like an insider from start to finish.’ — Douglas Coupland [on Stroll]
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A screed against brunch, a "cesspool of stress"? A polemic directed at "a religion of aesthetic wastefulness," overpriced food that is "overthought and overrated" and turns an otherwise socially aware individual into a "monstrous amalgam of Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher"? Yes and yes. Adopting the acerbic, curmudgeonly persona fitting for an attack against such a beloved institution and building on work by Victorian social theorist Thorstein Veblen, "creative class" popularizer Richard Florida, and brunch historian Farha Ternika, Micallef lobs insistent criticism at the middle class (especially the urban hipster subclass in Toronto, London, Brooklyn, and Buenos Aires) and its "uncritical milieu of consumption." Though focusing tremendous ire on the meal and the word "foodie," his true concern is with a class that is steadily losing leisure time, wealth, and social position while adamantly refusing to see the truth. Of course, a polemic comes with its dangers: the author often appears self-righteous, inflexible and smug. And his stances, whether about middle class delusions or fruitless quests for authentic experiences (or the meal itself, a "ritual intake of grease") can likewise register as wildly overstated. Still, acid-tongued, witty, and drily clever, the book is a pleasure to consume.
