This article draws on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a means to analyse social distinction and change in terms of class and gender through the lens of food consumption. By focusing on urban Vietnam, this qualitative study looks into the daily practices of food consumption, dieting and working on the body as specific means to enact ideal body types. Economically booming Vietnam has attracted growing investment capital in the fields of body and beauty industries and food retail. After decades of food insecurity, urban consumers find themselves manoeuvring in between growing food and lifestyle options, a nutrition transition, and contradicting demands on the consumer to both indulge and restrain themselves. Taking this dynamic urban context as its point of departure and adopting an intersectional perspective, this article assesses how eating, dieting and body performance are applied in terms of making class and doing gender. It shows that the growing urban landscape of food and body-centric industries facilitates new possibilities for distinction, dependent not only on economic capital but on bodily and cultural capital also, and furthermore, how social habitus regarding food–body relationships are gendered and interlaced with class privilege.

本文将布迪厄的惯性概念作为一种手段，通过食物消费的角度来分析阶级和性别方面的社会差异和变化。通过对越南城市的关注，这项定性研究研究了食用食物，节食和在身体上作息的日常习惯，将其作为制定理想体型的特定手段。越南经济蓬勃发展，吸引了越来越多的化妆品和美容行业以及食品零售领域的投资资本。在经历了数十年的粮食不安全之后，城市消费者发现自己在不断增长的食物和生活方式选择，营养过渡以及对消费者沉迷和束缚自己的需求之间相互矛盾。以这种动态的城市背景为出发点，并采用交叉视角，本文评估了饮食，节食和身体表现适用于上课和做性别。它表明，食物和以身体为中心的工业的不断增长的城市景观为区分提供了新的可能性，不仅取决于经济资本，而且还取决于身体和文化资本，此外，关于食物-身体关系的社会习俗如何与性别和性别交织在一起。班级特权。