Consumption Behavior Based on Social Gaps in Urban Fiction and its Potential as Sociolinguistic Teaching Material

Abstract

This study examines how social disparities are represented through food consumption behavior in two contemporary Jakarta urban novels: Home Sweet Loan [1] and Jakarta Sebelum Pagi [2]. Using a gastrocriticism approach based on the four dimensions of consumption (what is eaten, where, with whom, and in what way), this study analyzes how the eating choices of the characters in both novels reflect the class position, social identity, and power relations at work in Jakarta's urban life. The findings show that both novels present two different models of representation: Home Sweet Loan depicts inequality as a tiresome pressure from below, in which every decision to eat the protagonist Kaluna is a negotiation between financial limitations and social demands that cannot be resisted; while Jakarta Before the Morning Describe the gap as a real boundary but can be crossed through personal relationships across classes. In addition to the gastrocritical dimension, this study also identifies the richness of sociolinguistic data stored in both novels, including registers, diglossia, code switching, language variation, language ideology, and language identity, all of which are present simultaneously in one simple dining scene. Based on these findings, this study designed the potential of the two novels as authentic and integrative sociolinguistic teaching materials at the university level. This study confirms that urban fiction is not just a work of entertainment, but a medium that is able to record the workings of social inequality from within, through small details that are not accessible by statistical data: the price of coffee, the position of the pudding on the table, and the sound of the beans in the food court.