Anna North challenges the myth of a latte-drinking elite:
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a professor of English and gender and women’s studies who’s a former food journalist and the author of “Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century,” told Op-Talk that “the latte, while it may be attached on a certain level to too much upper-class food knowledge and pretension, it really is no longer an upper-class drink.” She explained: “No matter how many kale salads Starbucks puts in their case, Starbucks is a fast-food purveyor.” The latte, she argued, “is a high-calorie food that’s being pushed in an industrialized way largely to working-class people.” And, she added, “it’s important to think about the explosion of all of these industrialized lattes, all these frozen lattes, all the Frappuccinos, as links to a larger problem of creating cheap, high-calorie, low-nutrition food for working-class people.”
Making latte seem upper class, though, may be to its purveyors’ advantage: “The more that the latte can be attached to expressing a kind of elite class or race or gendered identity, the more profitable it is, no matter how many billions of them get sold by Tim Hortons or at your local gas station.”
The Dish 