The author examines the underlying forces behind contemporary trends such as normcore fashion, clean eating (what's "dirty" then?), and the commodification of life itself in our "experience economy."

Through analysis of home decor, fashion, beauty, food, and leisure (holiday), the author reveals how moral judgments about taste often obscure the economic conditions that shape taste formation. For instance, the proliferation of quick, healthy cooking recipes reinforces a social norm that individualizes responsibility for public health crises. While middle-class critics might glibly suggest that "a pound of liver is cheaper than McDonald's," they overlook how working-class individuals, facing inadequate labor protections and corporate exploitation, often lack the time and energy for daily grocery shopping. Such critiques implicitly deny working-class people's right to pleasure - while middle-class families can enjoy weekly restaurant outings, their less privileged counterparts might be restricted to repetitive meals like liver, chosen solely for its affordability.

As the author astutely observes, "Good taste finds new ways to justify the inequality that it also quietly promotes, incorporating the language of sustainability, good health and responsibility in ways that often distract us from the corporate forces at play" (p. 217).

The book argues that taste functions as a marker of temporal privilege - whether through the ability to spend time or purchase others' time, exemplified in the consumption of handcrafted goods (p. 186) and the cultivation of "time connoisseurship" through elaborate skincare routines or wine expertise. By emulating wealthy lifestyles and disdaining those who can only afford synthetic materials, we become unwitting agents of capitalism. "The fixation with taste constitutes a form of violence, and one that we are maybe all guilty of perpetrating at times as we are encouraged to exert whatever power is available to us" (p. 217).

The pursuit of "good taste" often leads to the erasure of traditional meanings, as the author notes we "fail to acknowledge the necessity of the things' earlier and more traditional definitions" (p. 199). This manifests in the aestheticization of dining at the expense of nutritional value, or in the transformation of holidays from simple pleasure-seeking breaks into mandated opportunities for meaning-making and memory creation - imposing new forms of social pressure in the name of taste.

Lastly, for readers interested in exploring how beauty standards are constructed under a racialized gaze, Tressie McMillan Cottom's essay "In the Name of Beauty" provides an excellent incisive analysis.