Excerpt from :

......
The biggest difference between the use of consumption to display status then and now is that there are many more strata today. When a middle class began to rise in urban society, the first new strata in society in several hundred years had emerged. The members of this stratus needed to differentiate themselves from the peasantry, but now the ruling class needed to differentiate themselves not only from the peasantry but from the new middle class as well. Food consumption patterns illustrate how this played out. The peasantry remained strictly associated with subsistence levels of consumption. The ruling class, however, had to differentiate themselves a bit more. Spices, for example, could be afforded by the middle class as well. Therefore, the ruling class began to use fewer spices in their cooking. Likewise they moved towards vegetables that were insufficiently nutritious to meet the needs of peasant diets, such as mushrooms and herbs

The same trends emerged with the rise of the bicycle and subsequent rise of the automobile. The bicycle was easy to produce and had many interchangeable parts. It very quickly became a mass market product. The automobile, however, was not a natural mass market product. It was

Need this essay? If it's not quite what you're looking for there are over 50,000 more to search from, so you can find the term paper or essay that meets your needs.