Abstract
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.
Introduction
In the last decades, studies have argued that traditional distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow products and practices of consumption have been challenged in various domains of consumption such as music (Peterson and Kern, 1996), fashion (Mrad et al., 2019) and the focus of this article: food consumption (Fitzmaurice, 2017; Pearlman, 2013; Smith Maguire, 2018).
In this article, we want to explore gourmet burgers as an example of a lowbrow and highbrow hybrid to try to understand how consumers experience and make sense of such products uniting highbrow and lowbrow food actors and spheres. The case we use is the campaign by McDonald’s in Denmark, initiated in 2021 and continuing through 2022, where the fast-food chain collaborated with a series of Michelin chefs in Denmark who designed burgers for the chain and used their élite brand to promote the products (we refer to the campaign as MichMac).
For this study, we are particularly interested in the consumer perspective and in how consumers make sense of, classify and experience products that challenge traditional understandings of good and bad taste. The object of study is thus on the consumers’ attitudes on highbrow–lowbrow hybrid. We have chosen to focus on consumers from the urban middle class as this group is most likely to simultaneously embrace both lowbrow and highbrow food products (Johnston and Baumann, 2010; Parasecoli and Halawa, 2021).
Previously, we have studied another example of gourmet burgers and the blurring of good and bad taste, namely the NOMA cheeseburger. That is when the restaurant NOMA in Copenhagen, five times ranked as the best restaurant in the world, was transformed into a burger pop-up, exclusively serving cheeseburgers. We will use the NOMA burger case as a comparison to the MichMac case. The goal of the comparison is to understand if middle-class consumers evaluate and experience highbrow and lowbrow food mashups differently depending on whether they are conceived at a gourmet restaurant or at a fast-food chain. Hence, our research questions may be articulated as follows: (1) How do Danish middle-class consumers evaluate, experience, make sense of and engage with the burgers at McDonald’s designed by Michelin chefs? (2) How are these evaluations and experiences distinct from the evaluations and experiences of consumers of the NOMA burger? (3) How can the case of this article and the comparison help us to understand the logics of middle-class consumers’ patterns of distinction in lowbrow and highbrow hybrids in food consumption?
Although there have previously been studies of the reconfigurations of highbrow and lowbrow in food culture (Fitzmaurice, 2017; Johnston and Baumann, 2010; Leer, 2021; Parasecoli and Halawa, 2021; Pearlman, 2013), fast food chains’ collaborations with actors from fine dining is underexplored. Our contribution to the study of highbrow–lowbrow food hybrids is thus two-fold. Empirically, we demonstrate that consumers in theory are very favourable towards food products that transgress the highbrow–lowbrow distinction. At the same time, consumers have varied understandings of how to evaluate a phenomenon like MichMac burgers. The majority of consumers are favourable while a minority are strongly negative. We also show how consumers’ experiences are strongly shaped by their perceptions and expectations of the collaboration. The favourable informants see it as a fun experiment while those who are critical see it as a fake branding strategy.
Theoretically, we combine a Bourdieusian lens with theories of transgression, and our theoretical contribution is to propose a distinction between two types of transgressive practices in the highbrow–lowbrow transgressions (1) a highbrow actor redesigning a type of food which traditionally is associated with low-status sphere (for instance, a fast food restaurant), we call this process a highbrow transgression (as in the case of the NOMA burger); (2) a highbrow actor who collaborates with a lowbrow chain on a product, we call this process a lowbrow transgression (the MichMac case). Finally, based on this distinction, 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 that consumers experience a mismatch between expectations and the tangible product.
Theory: Understanding Highbrow–Lowbrow Hybrids Via the Gourmet Burger
Taste as Distinction
In studies of the sociology of taste, there has been a general debate about how to understand the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow taste, products and practices of consumption. Based on data from France in the 1960s, Bourdieu (1979) argues in a seminal work that classifications of taste depend on socialization and class. Hence, for Bourdieu, taste classifications do not reflect universal, biological structures, nor individuality. Rather, taste classifications reflect and reproduce distinctions in social hierarchies and shared classed identities. Bourdieu explores various domains of consumption and shows how class is manifest in patterns of consumption and the value system behind consumers’ judgements of taste.
In relation to food consumption, Bourdieu opposes the bourgeoisie’s food practices to that of the working classes. The latter is focused on the substance of food (Bourdieu, 1979: 216–218), while the former focuses on formality and refinement (Bourdieu, 1979: 218–221). The bourgeoisie’s formal food practices (which include great attention to composition of meals and the ceremony of serving dishes separately accompanied by distinct wines, etc.) are supplemented by moderate consumption and civilized conversation, which work to elevate the meal from its materiality and its corporal functionality. According to Bourdieu, such considerations are far less important in the working classes, where functionality in food practices, informality in table manners and a focus on quantity over quality are core elements. These highly classed systems of food practices work to affirm the classed identity of each group; the other groups’ foodways are seen as an anti-model (the bourgeois ridicules the vulgarity of the worker, and the worker mocks the snobbishness of the bourgeois formality). However, Bourdieu also accentuates that the bourgeois taste holds a higher degree of cultural capital, expressed through embodied disposition of taste and conduct (knowledge of wine, good table manners, etc.) and cultural goods (e.g. a voluminous wine cellar, consequent use of organic produce). These expressions of cultural capital work to justify and reproduce the superiority of the bourgeoisie’s refined lifestyle and its opposition to the ‘vulgare’ lifestyle and ‘facile’ taste of the working classes (Bourdieu, 1979: 196).
Many have disputed the ideas of Bourdieu, for instance, by claiming that they were too deterministic and unable to account for social change, class mobility and subcultures’ resistance to hegemonic taste (Jensen, 2006; Lamont and Lareau, 1988; Thornton, 1996). In the 1980s and 1990s, several social theorists insisted that in the post-modern era, a stronger emphasis on the individual agency was needed (Giddens, 1991). Warde (1997) opposes Bourdieu’s classed perspective on consumption to that of sociologist Zygmunt Baumann who highlighted the role of choice and freedom as a central (and challenging) aspect of modern consumption and self-identity. Although Warde recognizes the merits of both approaches, he is essentially more in line with Bourdieu’s emphasis on the collective nature of taste making (1997: 11). Along the same lines, Lamont (1992) recognizes the importance of Bourdieu’s theory of distinctions while demonstrating a need to adopt an empirically founded approach, which can capture the complexities and the subtleties of classed ‘boundary work’, for instance, when middle-class subjects distinguish themselves from working-class subjects based on moral distinctions rather than merely on cultural capital.
Peterson and Kern (1996) present one of the most radical revisions of the Bourdieusian perspective on the relation between class and taste. Their study explores a comparative survey of American music consumption from respectively 1982 and 1992, and they detect a radical shift in the elite’s highbrow consumption patterns. They find that highbrow taste has altered from an exclusive snobbism to a more omnivorous palate, which would entail an openness to genres previously deemed low status.
Some researchers have also described patterns of ‘ironic consumption’, when well-educated consumers with relatively high cultural capital consume low-status cultural products with an ironic distance for instance watching ‘bad television’ (McCoy and Scarborough, 2014), ‘trash movies’ (Sarkhosh and Menninghaus, 2016) or hanging out in karaoke bars (Peters et al., 2018). Here the focus on how cultural products are consumed is essential. The studies highlight how different strategies (such as irony and camp sensitivity) are used to cross cultural boundaries. At the same time, the ironic consumers put a lot of work into distancing themselves from the lowbrow object of consumption to upholding class boundaries. Although, there are also examples of more ambivalent negotiations (Peters et al., 2018). Hence, the overall impression in ironic consumption is that distinctions in cultural consumption are maintained in the ways boundaries are challenged.
In relation to food consumption, the idea of omnivorousness as an alternative to Bourdieu’s idea of distinction has also been heavily debated. Based on an extensive exploration of foodie discourse in the USA in the 2000s, Johnston and Baumann (2007, 2010) acknowledge that there has been a shift away from a French-oriented and snobbish ideal to a more omnivorous ideal with an openness to food previously associated with the lower classes as well as a valuation of new non-white cuisines. Nevertheless, Johnston and Baumann also stress that the omnivorous age:
does not usher in relativistic cultural paradise where “anything goes” and all foods are made legitimate. Instead, boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate culture are redrawn in new, complex ways that balance the need for distinction with the competing ideology of democratic equality and cultural populism. (Johnston and Baumann, 2007: 179).
They offer the concepts of authenticity and exoticism as new markers of distinction (Johnston and Baumann, 2010). Other studies suggest that ethical and alternative consumption currently function as a way for middle-class consumers to distinguish themselves from working-class consumers and assert their moral superiority (Paddock, 2015).
Several food studies have discussed what could be labelled as ‘hipster food culture’, in which new taste regimes and new forms of distinctions are ostensible (Cronin et al., 2014; Halawa and Parasecoli, 2019; Leer, 2021; Ocejo, 2017; Parasecoli and Halawa, 2021). These highlight a new taste ideal rooted in sustainability, cosmopolitanism, retro and craft that challenges mainstream food consumption as well as traditional fine-dining highbrow taste, notably via a celebration of casualness (Pearlman, 2013). At the same time, studies underline the emergence of new forms of hierarchies and distinctions (Parasecoli and Halawa, 2021).
This ‘hipster food’ literature acknowledges the fact that the signs and boundaries of highbrow and lowbrow are in constant motion and do not follow the system described by Bourdieu. Yet, there seems to be a recognition of the fact that Bourdieu’s fundamental idea of consumption as a distinctive practice is still valid and that ‘taste classifies and classifies the classifier’ as stated in one of Bourdieu’s famous maxims. In this article, we adopt a similar theoretical perspective, but we add another dimension, namely, the concept of transgression to focus more directly on the boundary work of highbrow–lowbrow hybrids via our focus on the case of the gourmet burger.
The Gourmet Burger as a Transgressive Object of Consumption
The (fast food) burger has traditionally been looked down upon in gourmet discourses and notably the fast-food version does not live up to contemporary ideals of authenticity and exoticism (Johnston and Baumann, 2010). It has been considered a symbol of American cultural imperialism (Mantoux and Rubin, 2011) and poor taste (Leer and Hoff-Jørgensen, 2022). From a Bourdieusian perspective, the burger fits the description of working-class taste being a fast, practical and calorie-rich meal solution, which contrasts with the formality of the affluent classes’ meal practices (Bourdieu, 1979: 196–217).
However, the image of the burger has changed over the last years. This development started with the craft burger movement, which was a response to the poor quality of burgers in fast-food chains (Gonzales, 2019). While the craft burger was, to a large extent, true to the original burger concept with the addition of serious craftsmanship and high-quality ingredients, the burger also started to emerge on the menu of fine-dining spaces, often in more experimental versions (Pearlman, 2013).
To explore these dynamics around perceptions of the burger, we understand the MichMac campaign as an example of a food transgression (Goodman and Sage, 2014). Goodman and Sage (2014) understand transgressions not just as breaking rules, but as breaking boundaries, notably as the movements of materials, people or ideologies move from one sphere to a new one (2014: 11). For Goodman and Sage, a focus on food transgression offers a lens to analyse and understand the dynamics of contemporary food systems rather than understanding them as stable systems that could be explored via a synchronic analysis. This means that the researcher focuses on what happens when objects and actors move beyond their habitual habitat in the food system. We believe this perspective to be important to our case of MichMac burgers, in which elements of antagonistic spheres in the world of food meet, namely industrialized fast-food restaurants and chefs from the fine-dining scene.
For Goodman and Sage, transgression can take many forms, and a central question arises: When is something a transgression in a given context and who decides what counts as a transgression? In thisarticle, we highlight that what counts as a transgression must be understood in context. Hence, we think that it makes sense to use the dominant institutional voices in the field as reference points. These authoritative voices discursively produce normative boundaries to structure the field and create hierarchies. These boundaries are socially constructed and thus dynamic, but also very powerful in attributing power and status to various actors and ideologies by establishing what is legitimate and illegitimate (Johnston and Baumann, 2010). The indicators of what counts as a transgression is what these authoritarian voices describe as transgressive and boundary breaking.
So, we understand transgression as being novel constellations of elements (including people, objects, ideologies, spaces, etc.) that the authoritative voices previously understood as belonging to distinct and antagonistic spheres and that they describe as breaking the boundaries of the field.
In the empirical context of this article, the central authoritative voices include the major Danish newspapers renowned for their food critics, including Børsen, Politiken and Berlingske, as well as popular social media food personalities (Krogager and Leer 2021). These authoritative voices in the Danish food media (including all the aforementioned newspapers) covered the arrival of the first burger in the MichMac series intensely and described the phenomenon as highly surprising and even as an ‘act of genius and haram’, as the influential Instagram profile @tosultnepiger [two hungry girls] described it (@tosultnepiger, 23 January 2023). Børsen describes one of the chefs in the collaboration as courageous and innovative, as he dares to enter a sphere of the food scene that is perceived as antithetical to his own (Børsen, 23 December 2020). Opposingly, the popular chef and Instagrammer Christian Puglisi, criticized the collaboration and saw it as a chef selling out to ‘the biggest imperialist villain out there’ (@Chrifrapug, 5 February 2021). In relation to our study, the important thing qualifying the MichMac case as an example of a transgression is not whether these authorities qualify the phenomenon as positive or negative, but that they all see it as a transgression of the usual ordering of the field.
We see a difference between transgression and cultural change which we see as a slower development in which the status of a cultural object changes. For instance, Fitzmaurice (2017) describes how rosé in the period of a decade went from being seen as an unworthy subject for wine reviews to becoming accepted as legitimate alternatives to white and red wine in prominent wine magazines. It might be difficult to point the finger at the exact moment of change in this type of process of cultural change, whereas the transgressions we are interested in here are loud and provoke strong reactions by institutional taste makers (newspapers, media, social media) because the transgressions are interpreted as something radical and unseen. It is because of this that we see these transgressions of cultural boundaries as interesting analytical focal points to study the fluid boundaries of the contemporary foodscape that become ostensible in the moments they are transgressed.
In other words, when we add Goodman and Sage’s concept of transgression to Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, we build a theoretical perspective that enables us to explicitly focus on what happens with the processes of distinctions in food consumption as actors, materials and symbols moves from one sphere in the food systems to another, and on how consumers make sense of and experience boundaries.
It is important to note that we only use authoritative voices here to see what qualifies our MichMac case as an example of transgression, as described earlier. The object of this study is consumers’ views on the phenomenon to understand how they perceive and evaluate a phenomenon that is seen as a transgression by authoritative voices in the field.
Methods
For this study, we conducted interviews with 20 informants. We chose to focus on urban, middle-class consumers, as this group fits the omnivorous foodie consumer segment who are most likely to engage in omnivore patterns of food consumption (Johnston and Baumann, 2010). It could potentially have been very interesting to explore different groups of consumers with different class and identity profile, but we were inspired by Johnston and Baumann and other studies highlighting middle-class consumers as the group that are most engaged in novel taste-making and boundary negotiations (Ocejo, 2017; Parasecoli and Halawa, 2021). It thus seemed most obvious to focus on this group before expanding the scope, notably as we saw the comparison to the NOMA burger case as important and in that case, all our informants were Copenhagen middle-class consumers.
Our first criterion of inclusion was that informants should be living in greater Copenhagen. Over the last decades, this area has become a global foodie hotspot (Leer, 2016, 2021), and Danes increasingly dine out, notably in metropolis areas (Lund et al., 2017). The second criterion was that they had a higher education and/or work in what might be considered a middle-class job by Danish standards, according to a 2020 survey by the Economic Council of the Labour Movement (Arbejderbevægelsens Erhvervsråd, 2020). According to this survey, one might distinguish between the middle class (nurses, public school teachers, police officers, office workers in private companies and so on), 24% of the current Danish population, and a higher middle class (doctors, academics, faculty in higher education etc.), 12% of the current Danish population. We include people working in both middle-class and higher middle-class jobs in our study. The third criterion was that they had consumed one or more burgers from the MichMac series. Also, we were very careful to secure a relatively equal division between male and female informants. Table 1 gives an overview of the informants. The informants were recruited via a call we shared on social media from our personal and institutional accounts and asked friends and contacts to share. We did not include personal friends and contacts, but only persons with whom the interviewer had no previous contact.
Overview of the informants.
We were interested in relatively open interviews, leaving space for informants to give us their view on McDonald’s, their experience of the MichMac burgers and how they saw the collaboration between McDonald’s and the chefs. Hence, we organized our interviews around a series of relatively open questions, which could be divided into six themes: (1) personal information (name, age, occupation) (2) consumption of fast food (when, how, what, with whom, why, etc.) (3) views on and consumption of McDonald’s food (when, how, what, with whom, why, etc.) (4) thoughts on the collaboration with Michelin chefs (initial thoughts, motives for both parties, expectations and so on). (5) the customer journey of eating the burger (thick descriptions of the experience from the idea of going, ordering, consumption, evaluation and returning home) and (6) overall impressions (afterthoughts, associations, any further comments).
The informants had a lot to say in general and were easy to get talking. We often faced strong emotional expressions concerning fast food, both from those who were very sceptical and those who were very enthusiastic. The interviews were conducted during the campaign from spring 2021 till summer 2022, and they had a duration of 29–47 minutes. Most were conducted in person, while a few were conducted online due to COVID-19. However, we did not notice any substantial differences between these two interview formats.
All the interviews were subsequently transcribed. For this study, the data were coded after repeated readings and we looked for passages on (1) description and evaluation of the MichMac experience, (2) attitudes on the collaboration between McDonald’s and the chefs, and (3) attitudes on McDonald’s before and after. Several patterns were discovered. These were visualized in separate documents and reread and clustered in themes. After repeating the reading process three times, we ended up with two overarching themes: (1) Differentiations in expectations and evaluation of the burgers and (2) Fun or fake Gucci? Transgressive collaboration and consumers’ experience. These themes will structure the analysis. It is important to underline that with this qualitative research design and our social constructivist lens, we aimed to get in-depth understanding and narratives of how consumers make sense of the MichMac burger and the transgressions it implies. Via the comparison with the NOMA burger, we focused on whether these sense-making narratives differed depending on the type of transgression. Hence, beyond the empirical insights, we are particularly interested in the data as illustrative of the different attitudes and as theory-generating in relation to our in-depth understanding of consumers’ attitudes towards highbrow and lowbrow hybrids. Concretely, the comparison between the MichMac case and the NOMA burger case was conducted in the following manner. The interview guides in the two studies followed comparable outlines and the main foci being, of course, adapted to case of the study. Also, we followed similar coding strategies. Hence, after having conducted the analysis of the MichMac data, we went back through the notes and coding of our NOMA data to do the comparison. We compared the data from the NOMA material relevant for the topic of the present study. For each interview from the NOMA data, we summarized the findings. Hereafter, we tried to find patterns in the data. For space considerations, we tried to summarize these patterns into main conclusions. Hereafter, we compared these conclusions with the main findings of the MichMac study.
Finally, we should highlight that for this study (and the comparison), the focus was not on the media discourses around the two hyped phenomena, but on the consumer attitudes expressed in the interview data. The media discourses were only included if they were mentioned in the interviews by the informants.
Findings
The Case: McDonald’s Collaboration with Michelin Chefs in Denmark
In December 2020, McDonald’s Danmark announced that they would launch a new burger designed by chef Paul Cunningham, who is head chef at a rural restaurant, Henne Kirkeby Kro, with two Michelin stars. Cunningham was acknowledged in the restaurant business and among the food intelligentsia. The Cunningham burger turned out to be the start of a series of gourmet burgers in McDonald’s Danmark designed by Michelin chefs. Over the next two years, McDonald’s Danmark would launch a new chef every six months who would design two limited-edition burgers. These would be on the menu for approximately three months each. All four chefs were white males, and they were portrayed in their uniform to signal culinary craftmanship and authority (Leer, 2016). In addition to Cunningham, the chefs were: (1) Henrik Jyrk, who has worked at various Michelin restaurants and has owned Asian-inspired restaurants and is currently working primarily with private dining; (2) Chef Jonathan Berntsen, who has run two French-inspired Michelin restaurants, including his current The Samuel with one Michelin star; and (3) Per Thøstesen, who is the senior of the group and has been in the business since the 1980s. He worked in Paul Bocuse’s establishment for three years and now runs an exclusive bistro in the centre of Copenhagen.
Table 2 shows the timeline and the different burgers. It was highlighted by McDonald’s marketing that the chefs brought a personal aspect or idea into the burgers, they designed, and these are highlighted in the commercials for each burger. For instance, Jyrk wanted to bring Asian flavours into his burgers, which was new for McDonald’s in Denmark, and he designed a teriyaki burger. Similarly, Berntsen introduced red wine sauce in his ‘beef burgundy’ burger, reflecting his roots in the French cuisine.
Timeline with an overview of the chefs and their burgers.
For each burger, a prudently organized promotion campaign was launched with carefully curated videos featuring the chefs, who narrate their ambitions for the burger. For instance, in the video for the first burger, Bearnaise, we see Cunningham in his Michelin restaurant, while, in a voice-over, he tells the viewer that he normally only serves 40 guests per night, but what if he were to scale up and cater to the number of McDonald’s, which is 500,000+ per week in Denmark. He then poses with his McDonald’s burger as he states: ‘Challenge accepted!’
This initial campaign with Cunningham received a lot of attention due to the unusual nature of the collaboration. The burger was sold out after a couple of weeks due to the popularity, which led to shortage of ingredients. This generated a new wave of media attention, and it came back on the menu shortly after. For each launch of a new burger, a new wave of media attention arose. It was during this unusual and highly mediatized campaign that we conducted the interviews with our informants.
Differentiations in Expectations and Evaluation of the Burgers
It was noticeable that the informants disagreed on how to evaluate the new burger series. The informants had distinct understandings of and expectations of the concept. Some, a smaller group of five informants, had extremely high expectations. These were driven by the respect they held for the chefs. The high expectations were heightened by the videos from the commercials. All informants had noticed these videos and commented positively on them.
This group of informants with high expectations anticipated a burger experience that would go far beyond the food you would usually get at McDonald’s. Knud is one of these informants. He praised the videos: ‘He [Cunningham] is very appealing, and it is a beautiful commercial, he has made. It is wonderfully staged. He presents it [the burger] and puts everything in the burger and it looks tasty.’ However, after Knud tried the burger, he feels differently: ‘I had high expectations due to the commercial . . . It was extremely disappointing. They are not able to make it [what you saw on the commercial]. It is just a bunch of crap they threw together . . .’. Having worked in the restaurant industry, he even feels that it is a betrayal of a chef’s level of craftmanship: ‘That a chef could do something like that and then serve it in a fast-food restaurant and that it in no way lives up to the expectations. It is so disappointing . . .’. Knud is not necessarily against the idea of a collaboration between the chain and Michelin chefs, but he just expected that the chef would be a guarantee for a product that exceeded the usual standard at McDonald’s. It is a general assumption in this group that the chefs would ensure a better and more ethically sound product, which this group of informants do not feel they get.
The majority of the informants did not share Knud’s high expectations. They expected a product within the standard of McDonald’s maybe with a slight twist. This group was also impressed by the commercials, but they were ‘realists’ in the sense that they did not anticipate a revolution of the McDonald’s machine. They still expect a McDonald’s experience with the ordinary level of quality. For instance, Jens: ‘I had no expectations of it . . . [nor] that it would be “gourmet burgers”. But they had a higher standard than other burgers [at McDonald’s], so I was pleasantly surprised.’ Similarly, Lars did not have high expectations, but he was pleasantly surprised by the Paul Cunningham Sticky Lemon Chicken, which he felt was above the general level of McDonald’s and better than the chicken burgers, he had tasted at various street food places. This surprised him as he generally sees street food outlets as having a higher standard than McDonald’s. Similarly, Sisse, who is very sceptical of McDonald’s due to health concerns and uncomfortable about her kids eating there, was surprised by the Chicken burger: ‘I had a great experience, it was tasty. But it is also because I entered with my low expectations and my disgust. This is a food standard that I could enjoy while being at McDonald’s with my kids.’ The people in this group are generally positive about the new burgers.
Finally, there is a third group of three, who did not appreciate the way that the chefs introduce novel tastes at McDonald’s. In this small group, the expectation is that what they eat at McDonald’s should be identifiable with the traditional McDonald’s taste universe. For instance, Josefine finds it very strange to use teriyaki in a McDonald’s burger. She describes it as pretentious and not attuned with the taste of the target audience of McDonald’s. In the same group, we find Karl, who is also ambivalent. In theory, he applauds the idea of developing the menu at McDonald’s and he acknowledges that the burgers designed by the Michelin chefs are better than the traditional McDonald’s burgers. Nonetheless, he declares that when he goes to McDonald’s, he goes there for what he calls ‘the McDonald’s taste’. Hence, paradoxically, he acknowledges that the new burgers are better, but they do not match his expectations of going to McDonald’s. The traditional (and in his description poorer) McDonald’s taste is a part of the experience of going to McDonald’s.
To sum up, the informants had very different expectations of these new burgers, which also affected their evaluations. The first group had very high expectations of an improved standard at McDonald’s with the new gourmet burgers, but they were very disappointed. The second group, which was by far the biggest group, were not expecting a revolution of any kind and even though they found the commercials exciting, they were more realistic and did not expect the new products to be as transformative as the commercial promised. They were generally pleasantly surprised and thought that these burgers were better than the standard repertoire. Finally, there was a group, who expected something that would be in line with the classic McDonald’s taste, and they felt that the new tastes were too innovative and too far from the taste universe of McDonald’s.
Fun or Fake Gucci? Transgressive Collaboration and Consumers’ Experience
In this section, we turn to consumers’ attitudes towards this transgressive collaboration and how it became a part of their experience. Overall, in theory, the informants were rather positive about the collaboration and thought it was good and an original idea. Many informants underlined that they were very surprised when they heard about it, but in a positive manner, and no informants were critical about the principle of breaking down the highbrow–lowbrow divide between Michelin chefs and McDonald’s. The informants shared the general perception of the media discourse and identified MichMac as unseen and transgressive.
The informants also recognize the initiative as a clever and audacious move by McDonald’s. The most enthusiastic informants describe it as ‘super fun’ (Daniel), ‘a scoop for McDonald’s’ (Malte) and Mark even sees it as a democratization and acknowledges that it is very positive ‘that they have challenged the assumption that chefs only make food for the economic élite and . . . that you can democratize it [food by fine-dining chefs].’ At the same time, he acknowledges that it might be perilous for the chefs because they risk devaluating their high-end brand. There is a concern that is shared by a few other informants like Birger, who states that ‘it [the collaboration] has really succeeded in establishing McDonald’s as something delicious . . . but dammit, it is seriously a step down the ladder for the chef[s]’. There seems to be a consensus among the informants that in terms of image, the collaborations have been more profitable for the McDonald’s brand than for the chefs’ brands. The chefs provide legitimacy to McDonald’s, while the chefs might gain attention from new parts of the public, but they also run the risk of being accused of selling out.
In relation to the collaboration, Ana says that she feels more comfortable eating at McDonald’s when they work with chefs because ‘they [the chefs] would not put their name on something that wasn’t ok’. At the same time, she thinks that the collaboration has increased the chefs’ recognizability beyond the world of fine dining. After they have been part of McDonald’s marketing campaign, she recognizes their faces. So, like several other informants, she acknowledges that the collaboration has helped the chefs in expanding their brand. Thus, we noticed that most recognize that they can distinguish between the chefs’ fine-dining food and their McDonald’s burgers. As explained by Line: ‘In my view, it is two different genres and he [here Cunningham] can work within both genres. It is not something completely new.’ This seems a generally accepted view among those who were most positive about the burger and thus had set their expectations relatively low. In this group, the informants valued the collaboration because they see it as fun, innovative and a source of variation.
In terms of variation, eight informants noticed that it is appealing with novelties in the McDonald’s repertoire, particularly items that cater more to the adult palate like the MichMac burgers. Jens describes it explicitly as innovative, and although he is the only one to use that word, the informants in this group recognize the boldness of the initiative. For this group, the unexpectedness and the unusual nature of the collaboration add a certain coolness to it.
Five use the word ‘fun’ to describe their sentiment of the collaboration. In relation to the ‘fun’ aspects of McDonald’s, it is noticeable that none of the informants describes the usual experience of eating at McDonald’s as fun. None of our middle-class informants eat at the restaurant unless they go with children. Otherwise, people have their food to go, most often in the drive-through. So, while most have reservations about the food at McDonald’s, all are very critical about the restaurant space, which is described in very negative terms. The least negative descriptions include ‘not very cozy’ and ‘noisy’, while the most negative descriptions are ‘disgusting’, ‘greasy’ and ‘depressing’. However, the MichMac series introduces a new fun element in the eating experience at McDonald’s. Mathilde underlines that ‘it is usually not fun being at McDonald’s’, but her kids love it and so she goes there to entertain them. This view on eating at McDonald’s is shared by all parents: it is a burden for parents, but fun for the children. The adults only eat onsite because of the children. However, this changes for Mathilde with the Cunningham burger. She devoured it in a new way: ‘it is a different experience, more sensory and fun . . . you are sitting there and using your senses [and asking yourself]: “is it crispy?”. That’s very fun.’ In this example, the fact that the burger is designed by a Michelin chef alters her way of sensing, eating and being in a McDonald’s restaurant.
Line is also using ‘fun’ as a label for her experience, but for her it is more about the mash-up of two so fundamentally different culinary worlds. She tries the burger with a group of friends before a night out as a ‘social experiment’, as she says. They all get the gourmet burger and eat it in a nearby park. She describes how they had an ironic approach to the experience. They take photos where they pose with the brown bags with the McDonald’s logo as a prank. Going to McDonald’s is not a regular activity for this group of friends and it clearly clashed with their middle-class identities. Line does not really remember the taste or any specifics about the burger, but she recalls it as ok. For her, it is clearly the symbolic contrasts that attract her, both the contrast between Cunningham and McDonald’s and between herself and McDonald’s, and this opens a space for playfulness around the burger.
The example of Line could be seen as an example of ironic consumption, in which she clearly feels above the object of consumption and establishes a symbolic boundary between herself (and her friends and their lifestyle) and the object consumed (McCoy and Scarborough, 2014) as if it was ‘bad television’ or a ‘trash movie’ (Sarkhosh and Menninghaus, 2016). It is noticeable that among our middle-class informants this is actually the only example of ironic consumption. For Mathilde, ‘fun’ is used to describe a somewhat unusual excitement of going to McDonald’s, and, in general, the informants are actually quite serious about the evaluation and explaining their expectations and criterion for the evaluation without irony.
Those who were more sceptical about the collaboration are not seeing any ‘fun’ in the initiative. Rather, they had high hopes for the collaboration in terms of improving the quality of the food and a more ethically sound experience at McDonald’s. These expectations were not met. In this group, the informants have difficulties in accepting the duality of the chefs as both representatives of fine dining, and thus high quality and ethical sound food, and as collaborators with McDonald’s. Nikita felt like a ‘victim of commercials’ after tasting the burger. She knew of Cunningham and had been to his Michelin restaurant, and she described that meal as ‘divine’. She was therefore open to try the burger, although she is extremely sceptical of McDonald’s and expresses great sadness about the fact that her kids love going there. Nikita was deeply disappointed about the burger and did not find anything she could relate to her previous Cunningham experience. Ana experienced a similar mismatch between the product and the chefs, and she suspects that they only do it for the money like when movie actors appear in commercials.
Here, we are very far away from any kind of ironic consumption. These informants take the MichMac burger very seriously and genuinely believe that the involvement of the Michelin chefs means that they will get a gourmet experience. When these expectations are not met, they react strongly and express disappointment, deception and guilt as we also saw in the aggressive statement from Knud in the previous section.
Janne takes a slightly different stand where she kind of blames herself for the high expectation and that she should not have been seduced by the commercials which leaves her with a feeling of fakeness. She describes the MichMac burger experience as fast deliciousness contrary to real deliciousness, and she compares it to a fake Gucci bag:
It is like the fake handbags you buy at the market in Bangkok. It is kind of that feeling. That easy, cheap, fast fix that looks like the real thing, but you know you should have saved the money. I think that is what I felt, like buying fake brand product. ‘Buy a proper burger’ [I said to myself]. When you buy a Gucci at Pad Pong, you know what kind of Gucci it is.
Discussion: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgressions
As the analyses have shown, all informants were very positive about the collaboration between McDonald’s and the Michelin chefs. Some were even very enthusiastic, labelling it as innovative. There were, however, quite some differences in the expectations and evaluations, as we have shown. Some had high expectations and saw the collaboration as a guarantee for higher quality and they were disappointed, while the majority maintained moderate expectations and were pleasantly surprised. Finally, there was a small group who felt that the tastes of these novel burgers did not match the McDonald’s taste profile. Those who were critical about the experience were driven by a feeling of a mismatch between, on the one hand, what was promised in the commercials as well as the expectations of the chefs based on their status in the culinary landscape and, on the other hand, the actual product, which they found very disappointing.
In this regard, it seems pertinent to compare this case study to the previously mentioned study on the NOMA cheeseburger. It was introduced in May 2020 when the world-famous new Nordic restaurant NOMA in Copenhagen reopened after the first COVID-19 lockdown as a burger bar serving only two types of cheeseburgers instead of their usual new Nordic tasting menu. We have also explored the NOMA burger as an example of the blurring of highbrow–lowbrow boundaries. The transgression here is that a type of food usually related to the lower registers of food culture (the burger) entered a world-class restaurant associated with ideals of locavorism, sustainability, vegetables and lightness.
For the NOMA study, we similarly interviewed middle-class consumers about their experience and evaluation of the NOMA burger (Leer and Hoff-Jørgensen, 2022). As with the MichMac case, informants were very surprised about the collaboration and saw it equally as a transgression of the highbrow–lowbrow divide, also being positive about the idea of a mash-up of the highbrow and lowbrow food culture. All the informants described the NOMA burger experience as a very nice experience and even queueing for 2–3 hours was not an obstacle, rather a fun part of the experience (Hoff-Jørgensen and Leer, 2022). All the informants also enjoyed the NOMA burger and many even described it as the best burger they had ever tasted. Nonetheless, half of the 20 informants expressed a slight disappointment, even some of the informants who described it as the best burger they had ever had. The NOMA burger was a relatively traditional cheeseburger with no kind of deconstruction or artistic reworking of the burger, which has been noted in other fine-dining establishments (see Pearlman, 2013: 131). The informants, who were dissatisfied, had expected something more radical from NOMA as the restaurant is known for its cutting-edge and innovative gastronomy.
In both the NOMA burger and MichMac examples, a clash between fast food and fine dining is at the centre of the storytelling, yet the cases are also distinct in many ways. We will now discuss these differences and similarities in the consumers’ attitudes using the concept of transgression as developed in the theoretical section (Goodman and Sage, 2014).
In our study on the NOMA burger, we argued that it would be helpful to distinguish between different kinds of transgression in understanding the processes of transgressing traditional understandings of highbrow and lowbrow. On the one hand, we found that informants appraised a symbolic transgression in NOMA serving a cheeseburger. On the other hand, there is also a material transgression in the process of redesigning the burger at NOMA. It is here that half the informants were disappointed. They felt that there was a mismatch between the ‘material’ burger, which was quite traditional, and NOMA as a symbol of cutting-edge, rule-breaking gastronomy, which should also be reflected in their burger. For those mildly disappointed informants, the symbolic and the material transgression did not match.
If we transfer this theoretical perspective to the MichMac case, there is a striking parallel in the way that the informants here also address a symbolic transgression in the collaboration. All the informants in the McDonald’s study highlighted and applauded the transgressive nature of the collaboration between McDonald’s and the Michelin chefs. However, also in this case, some informants expressed a sense of mismatch between the symbolic transgression and the material transgression. Here, we refer to the informants who were dissatisfied with the MichMac burger. These consumers found a discrepancy between the symbolic transgression of fine-dining chefs working at McDonald’s and the material transgression, the actual burger they had designed. In the symbolic transgression, they saw a promise of change in relation to everything they were sceptical about in relation to McDonald’s, including the quality of the products, the poor taste, the unhealthiness and so on. They had hoped that the collaboration would lead to a product that would address these points. After experiencing the burger, they felt that this promise was not kept. The burgers were just as bad as the other burgers from McDonald’s.
When comparing the two cases, it is noticeable that the number of people who felt a mismatch between the symbolic and the material transgression was bigger in the NOMA case compared to the gourmet McDonald’s burgers. However, the informants, who were disappointed with the NOMA cheeseburger, were only mildly disappointed (some still claimed, it was the best burger ever, they had just expected even more from NOMA). On the contrary, the disappointed informants in the McDonald’s case were extremely disappointed and they used quite strong language to express this disappointment (‘victim of commercials’, ‘a bunch of crap’, ‘fake’) and they seemed deeply affected by this experience. Hence, it seems that the McDonald’s case is more divisive, because even though the majority were favourable, it called for very strong negative reactions.
The gourmet burger is one of many examples of highbrow–lowbrow hybrid in food culture for example the gourmetification of barbecue (Leer, 2022), the sophistication of beer culture in the craft beer movement (Ikäheimo, 2020) or making porridge a hipster food (Leer, 2021). We would argue that it makes sense to understand this phenomenon via the concept of transgression because this concept provides us with a theoretical tool to understand and compare different aspects and examples of highbrow and lowbrow hybrids, and to understand differences in consumers’ attitudes.
Based on the comparison between the NOMA cheeseburger and the MichMac burgers, we would propose to distinguish between two different types of transgressive practices in the highbrow–lowbrow hybrids (1) a highbrow actor gourmetfying an object, the burger, which is traditionally associated with low-status spheres (such as the fast-food restaurants); we propose to call this process a highbrow transgression and (2) a highbrow actor who collaborates with a lowbrow chain on a product; we propose to call this process a lowbrow transgression. Here, we obviously see the NOMA burger as a highbrow transgression, and the McDonald’s burgers designed by Michelin chefs as a lowbrow transgression. They signal different hierarchical movements, moving the burger up to be fine dining or moving the fine-dining chef down to the sphere of fast food. These are obviously just basic distinctions, and there are many more to be developed.
We would need further studies to understand more broadly consumers’ attitudes towards these different types of transgressions. Based on a traditional Bourdieusian perspective and on the description by Johnston and Baumann (2010) of novel forms of distinction in foodie discourses, it might be hypothesized that the lowbrow transgression would be more difficult to accept within a middle-class understanding of good taste because it involves a movement down to a standardized, lowbrow food and to spaces like a fast-food space which is completely antithetical to the new distinctive concepts of ‘authenticity’ and ‘exoticism’ (Johnston and Baumann, 2010). The physical space of McDonald’s was described with some degree of disgust by all our informants, and it was the biggest obstacle to eating McDonald’s food for the informants.
At the same time, we saw various strategies to legitimize the lowbrow transgression, for instance, when informants described it as radically innovative (Jens), making it acceptable for a parent to eat at McDonald’s with your kids (Sisse) or using it as an outset for ironic consumption (Line).
It seemed that the consumers found that the NOMA burger was less ‘contaminated’ with lowbrow food culture because it was only the form and the idea of a lowbrow product: the burger that was used in the lowbrow–highbrow mash-up. In the MichMac, the ‘lowbrow contamination’ was much higher, it was materialized in the lowbrow sphere and the highbrow dimension remained more symbolic. Hence, the middle-class consumer needed to do more boundary work and identity negotiation to legitimize it as a worthy object of consumption.
Overall, our two studies of gourmet burgers show that middle-class consumers in theory are favourable towards these radical transgressions of highbrow and lowbrow registers in food consumption. There is, however, as our study has shown in both lowbrow and highbrow transgression, a risk of consumers being disappointed and experiencing a mismatch between (1) the expectations set by the strong narrative, which lays in the symbolic transgression and (2) the actual experience of the tangible product. With this in mind, we would like to stress that this signals that the consumption of highbrow–lowbrow hybrid is something very different from ironic consumption for most informants (with the possible exception of Line), because most of our middle-class informants took the process of evaluating the hybrids quite seriously although they differed on the parameters for their judgement. Some expected a high-quality and ‘more ethical’ burger at McDonald’s because it was designed by a Michelin chef. Others expected a little twist on the ordinary fast-food burger. Some expected a completely innovative deconstruction of a NOMA burger. Others were intrigued by eating a burger in an unusual setting. However, most did not expect it to be ‘bad’ as ironic consumers of ‘bad television’ who celebrate the ‘badness’ of it and expected a ‘bad’ experience (McCoy and Scarborough, 2014). Rather, our informants (except for Line) went to great lengths to describe the criteria for their evaluation and their expectations. This signals that they took the lowbrow–highbrow hybrid quite seriously as an object of consumption.
We thus argue that the focus on highbrow–lowbrow hybrids offers a new lens to study fields of cultural consumption at a time such categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste are constantly negotiated, and, in particular, we assert that this lens can help us see how consumers subjectively make sense of fields and their dynamics.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all informants for their contributions as well as the research unit Tourism, Consumption and Sustainability at Aalborg University for their valuable comments on earlier versions of the article, notably dean Anette Therkelsen for her detailed feedback. Also, a big thanks to the two anonymous reviewers who gave us detailed and inspiring feedback which has made the article much better. Finally, a great thanks to associate professor Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager for inspiring talks about revisions of the article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
