Matcha, Virality, and Youth Consumer Culture: The Social Making of Taste in Princeton and New York City

Abstract

Matcha’s rise among American youth consumers is not of individual preference, it is sociologically motivated. This study argues that taste for matcha among Princeton University students is socially produced rather than individually discovered, shaped by the unequal distribution of cultural capital, peer and digital platform influence, and the spatial conditions of consumption across Princeton and its surrounding metropolitan corridor, specifically New York City. Drawing on café fieldwork, interviews, survey data, and digital ethnography, findings show that matcha’s appeal operates through mutually reinforcing logics of wellness and visual aestheticization, that evaluative boundary-work reflects connoisseurship and cultural proximity to Japanese origins shaped by sociocultural backgrounds, and that access to New York City’s more extensive matcha landscape deepens cultural participation in ways Princeton’s bounded geography cannot replicate. Matcha emerges as a site where distinction, identity performance, and the negotiation of Asian American cultural visibility in mainstream consumer life are all visibly at work.