The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  We also provide “children’s food,” which we ourselves rarely eat; children may be allowed to eat substances like peanut butter (now almost forbidden to adults for slimming reasons) whenever they feel like it. In precisely the same way, an African tribe, otherwise quite fierce in matters of child discipline, decided that adults do not much like ripe bananas. Bunches of them would be kept under the eaves of the houses, so that children could help themselves whenever they felt like it. The tactic reminds us of the way in which milk has in most human societies been always for children, and not “grown-ups’” food.

  Children take years and years to train; for a long time they simply cannot be expected to “behave” like adults. The Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has remarked that children in his culture are treated “like gods”—in that they cannot be expected to follow human rules; they have, like beasts, gods, and prophets, “no manners.” They, like the gods, eat before everybody else does. Serious attention has to be paid to their tastes. The food they leave on their plates is not degraded or polluted as left-overs generally are in Hindu religion: like the food which is offered to the gods but “left over” by them and distributed to the worshippers, children’s left-over food is edible, especially by their mothers.

  Until children can “behave,” they may have to eat away from the adults, who have learned not to be able to bear watching someone spill food down their front, splash in their drink, or suddenly yell with delight. It is in our society still a common punishment for bad behaviour to be sent away from the table, to eat alone elsewhere. Mothers, whose job it mostly remains to teach children their manners, often feed the children early in the evening—children “need” to eat early—and have them in bed and out of the way so that parents can eat together later, in peace. Parties, in upper-class western European and North American practice, are now either for children only, or they are wholly adults’ night-time affairs, at which alcoholic drinks are served, and spicy, “original” food which is officially unsuitable for children. Other people, for example, the English working class, give parties which are largely for the family, and the children are welcome. The sociologists N. Charles and M. Kerr speculate that this may be because non-professional people are less likely to move away from home because of their jobs. They keep in much closer contact with family and old friends while they are having their children, and in any case their dinner parties tend to be given more for family than for friends. Food is served which is not exotic, not “too strong,” “too spicy,” or “indigestible.” Everybody, without regard to “generation gaps,” can come to the party. What is being celebrated here is the clan, which includes the children; whereas the “Young Urban Professional” kind of party strongly accentuates the difference between adults and children.

  It is very often rude to take food without asking first. The anthropologist Bambi Schieffelin tells us that this rule is especially carefully instilled among Kaluli children in Papua New Guinea, in a society with a strong cultural preference for explicit verbal communication. If people stare at food, it means they want some—and very small Kaluli children are taught not to annoy others by “asking with the eyes.” A right to the food requires that one ask for it; if one has no right, one does not look. Staring at somebody else’s plate during dinner is very effectively discouraged in our own culture; for us it forms part of our insistence on spatial boundaries, which are observed at every meal as they are in many other areas of our lives.

  African children at dinner must watch their elders serve themselves first; important adults might take whole spoonfuls of relish from the central dish, while the children themselves are only allowed a little—perhaps merely to dip their porridge (the staple of the meal) into the pot. From medieval times in Europe, children have been warned, “Ask not for any thing, but tarry till it be offered thee.” “Not asking” might be part of a further rule, enjoining silence upon children: even if social rules permit adult conversation at dinner, all good children should be “seen and not heard.” These are, of course, children old enough to “behave,” and therefore old enough to be silenced: license might be given to the youngest child (“as to a god”) to talk, run around, or ask for food from adults’ plates. But it is important that children, though “not heard,” should nevertheless be “seen”: they must be scrutinized by grown-ups as they learn to behave. Surveillance and control is part of the reason for their admittance to the group of their elders. “Every meal,” goes a proverb popular with the Victorians, “is a lesson learned.” Reaching adulthood often means a relaxation of regulations, rather than a tightening, and old people may be allowed special privileges at dinner.

  It is clear from European paintings of family meals, and from injunctions such as the following, that children often stood to eat their food when at the table with adults.

  Look thou be courteous standing at meat

  And that men giveth thee, take and eat,

  And look thou neither cry nor crave,

  Saying, “That and that would I have!”

  But stand thou still before the board

  And look thou speak no loud word.

  This was partly a function of their size—a standing child could reach the top of the table more easily, and not everyone possessed small chairs or high ones for the use of children only. (Children in seventeenth-century Britain seem sometimes to have sat apart from the table for meals, using stools for tables and footstools for seats.) But standing, in the language of European etiquette, also quite certainly signified lower status. There may also have been a “health” reason invoked. It was believed that eating food while upright facilitated digestion: to this day Scots like eating their porridge standing up. In other cultures, children have been expected to remain outside the circle of adults, either sitting on the floor or standing behind the seated group; they would then either wait to be fed until the adults were finished, or be passed food as and when their parents felt it was appropriate.

  Rules of this sort (there are many variations), ancient and still common as they are, sound strange to many in our own culture today. In a tiny modern family it seems absurd to expect any members of the group to keep quiet. Children, especially those from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, are deliberately encouraged to talk at table, to ask questions—even to ask why they should follow any of the rules of etiquette. Parents who are so busy that they are coming to wonder whether they should go on “staging” family meals at all often continue the tradition almost entirely because they feel that children need these meals: they must learn how to converse. Our cultural tradition expects us to bring up children to ask why; and where people’s lives are lived so separately, dinner-table conversation becomes a unique opportunity for the family to find out what all its members are thinking and doing.

  Many of the rules of etiquette which children absorb at mealtimes will be important throughout their lives, and in spheres beyond that of the dinner table. In European culture, saying “thank you” is one of the first lessons children learn. British English provides a special word (“ta”) to serve as both “please” and “thank you,” because the lesson is expected to be learned as children first find out about giving and taking—that is, when they are just beginning to learn to talk, and before they can even pronounce “thank you.” Thanking people properly is still one of the most important rules of etiquette; in the English study by Charles and Kerr, in which mothers were asked to rate the importance of what children learn at table, saying “please” and “thank you” was at the top of the list. Following it came the correct use of utensils, not bringing books and toys to table, not making a noise while at table, and asking permission before leaving.

  An African child may have to become accustomed to using both hands when receiving anything. What more appropriate place to learn this essential gesture than when sharing a family meal, with all the solemn “serving” that goes on? In many cultures, accepting in both hands means appreciation of the generosity of the donor: the idea is that one hand wou
ld not be sufficient to hold the symbolic value of the gift. Stretching out only one hand to receive shows lack of gratitude, and might be interpreted as contemptuous behaviour. (A Malawian riddle gives us an idea of the shock experienced when white people would accept proffered objects in one hand. Question: “Even the European respects this. What is it?” Answer: “A peanut: even they always hold it in both hands”—that is, in order to shell or peel it.) If food is given to a child by a relative, however, the giver may not expect to be thanked: thanking in its fullest, or its verbal, expression may be regarded as due only in transactions with strangers, people who have no obligations to each other. The anthropologist Audrey Richards reports the explanation given her of a child’s apparently ungrateful behaviour: “He doesn’t thank because they are his own people. If it had been an outsider, he would have said, ‘Thank you, Sir,’ because it would have been from pity they gave to him. To one’s own people one does not thank, not at all!”

  Children learn when eating with their elders all the status and kinship patterns of their family as they watch how adults treat each other and discover their own “place.” An Indian child, for instance, soon knows as many as twenty-four castes, in their correct hierarchical patterns, and how they relate to each other—through food rules, and watching who can eat what from the hand of whom. An African boy, asked who the “fathers” were in the complex kinship structure of his tribe, could reply, “The men I kneel to when I bring them water to drink.” Traditional families in Europe and America which sat down to a dining-room table with Father at the head, and Mother, who had prepared everything to his liking, seated at a “lower” place at table to signify her subordination, soon taught the children who, officially at least, wielded the real power in the group.

  Every society has its store of traditional exhortations, cries of warning, proverbs, verses, and sing-song phrases which are produced whenever children’s manners threaten to lapse; indeed, eating and its vital interest for the child is an important locus for language learning. Tiny babies hear words of comfort and encouragement when being urged to “bubble up” after nursing (later they will have to relearn: belching becomes taboo once solid food is normally eaten). Messy eaters soon discover the culture’s sounds of disgust and disapproval. A “distinctive pharyngeo-velar friction,” linguists such as John Widdowson tell us, is extremely common—and effectively memorable for the child. Praise and smiling greets the child who shows it is eating with appetite. Downing a meal is encouraged by pretending the food is a wasp and the child’s mouth a cave, or the spoon an aeroplane zooming in to land; and when the plate is empty, triumphant cries like “All gone!” are given “the typical intonation of a sign-off, greatly exaggerated in pitch pattern.”

  In cultures rich in proverbs, riddles, and oral mnemonics, the child may be taught simultaneously its manners and how to interpret and apply quite complicated parables. In Malawi, for example, according to Margaret Read, a proverb might suddenly, in the middle of dinner, be dropped “like a stone into a pond”—“I hear the guns of the Tyandla people booming.” Conversation ceases; everyone stops eating and looks at the child who has been slurping his food. The child begins “to wonder to himself: ‘Can that be for me? No? Yes? It is me. I am ashamed.’” Nothing further is said, but the lesson is learned—presumably unforgettably. The child is taught as well to interpret his culture’s way of uttering veiled rebukes, how to understand and accept their application to him- or herself, and also exactly how, and how much, to suffer social pressure.

  Our own elders are ready with a whole litany of traditional reproaches and commands to choose from and apply to rude children. “Waste not want not!” “Hunger is the best sauce!” “All uncooked joints off the table!” “Whose eyes are bigger than their stomach?” “Think of the starving children [elsewhere]!” “Eat it—it’ll make your hair curl! [if you are a girl],” or, “it’ll put hair on your chest! [if you are a boy].” There are also monsters and dire warnings, such as those popularized in Hoffmann’s horrific Struwwelpeter (1876): the “great, long, red-legged Scissor Man” who cuts off your thumbs if (having been early weaned) you won’t stop seeking comfort in sucking them; the dreadful fate of Augustus, who refused to have any soup:

  He’s like a little bit of thread,

  And, on the fifth day, he was—dead!

  and the mortification of Fidgety Philip, who falls back on the chair he will not stop balancing, and drags the tablecloth and everything on it on top of himself.

  Children are often taught when tiny not to waste food, and always to share it with others. All of a society’s manners might be summed up in the exquisitely difficult rule: Have a small appetite. The rule need not exist wholly because food is scarce. Even where there is plenty to eat, the principle of respect for food is commonly upheld; wasting it shows lack of respect for God, the earth, and each other. Children who waste food are punished, and may find their dinners given away to someone else. In a Malayan village, where children liked the expensive fish but not the inexpensive vegetables (children very quickly know which foods are prized by the community), they were firmly served very limited amounts of fish by their mothers. When they were older they could serve themselves, the reason being that “they were now of an age” to know how to hold themselves back from the expensive dishes.

  European and North American anthropologists describe with astonishment the way tiny African children learn to divide any tempting morsel, such as a single piece of fruit, with everybody present; a small Malawian child “was made to unclench his fist in which he was hiding three ground-nuts and give two of them to his fellows.” Mothers who are otherwise indulgent towards their children are, in such cultures, extremely exigent in this: sharing with others, and the giving of hospitality to strangers, are both at the top of the list of rules of good behaviour. In our own culture, special attention is paid to making the strong share with the weak: “Give some to baby!” This principle, even where there is great value given to “the rights of the elder,” always operates to some extent. Where a whole family shares its dinner by taking it piecemeal from a single pot, very sophisticated timing might be going on as the dinner progresses, with rules that the bigger ones finish sooner, so that the slower ones, including the children, are left enough to satisfy them.

  A Chaga mother who had prepared the family meal would be the only person present at dinner without a plate. She ate straight from the pot, and when there was little food would take nothing at all. Each child had then to leave a handful of food on his or her plate for the mother. To a child who did not do this, the mother would say, “Look, you haven’t given me any food. Don’t be astonished if I do the same to you next time!” Sharing is the foundation of civilized behaviour; it is what links individuals, families, villages, and tribes together. People should know how to share even when they are hungry: hard times may come for you, too, and you may then look with some rightful expectancy to another’s generosity.

  A sociological study by R. Dyson-Hudson and R. Van Dusen of middle-class North American schoolchildren in 1972 found that a whole food-sharing “culture” existed among them. It was not just that some food items were preferred, and owners of them profited from the power they achieved by sharing some with certain others. Children were seen exchanging lunchbags without looking at the contents first, and swapping identical cookies. Food linked these particular children, but in a manner which separated the meaning of the food very firmly from its objective self. The children were discovered to insist at home on being given cookies, fruit, and candy to share with others at school; they became furious if they found none of these in their lunchboxes. Mothers who gave these useful items were helping their children to hold their own in a complex, ruthless schoolyard world, much as African mothers in the Chaga tribe would secretly send food out, via a younger sibling, to boys who had just begun their lives as herdsmen with the other males, where they were supposed officially to start finding their own food by their wits alone. It was noticed in the Amer
ican study that children never shared the “central” part of their meals—their sandwiches and milk—as adults share the entree or the roast. It was always the “extras” and “luxuries”—gum, pretzels, raisins—that could be used symbolically to create or cement friendships and alliances.

  The battle waged by parents in order to teach their children manners is often itself a largely symbolic power struggle. Parents soon find out, however, that children are capable of behaving perfectly well when strangers are visiting, or when they are invited out. And this is one of the reasons why children must be taught at all costs how to behave: they soon “represent” their families to other people, especially when they are out alone; and they are capable of giving their relatives, even in our own society, a good or a bad reputation.

  In societies more family-conscious than our own, a great deal of trouble is taken to make children “behave” when away from home. One of the family secrets is liable to be how much food it has access to, or holds in store (it is rather like the amount Mom and Dad earn, in our own case). Households are very anxious that other people should not think they are doing badly, or going short. Very small children are therefore deceived about the family’s food stores, just in case they prattle. They may be discouraged from visiting other houses at mealtimes, where hospitality demands that they be fed: what might the neighbours think—that we haven’t enough at home? Children in traditional societies might be expected never to demand to eat while neighbours are visiting, or to gulp down their food when they are served; they must never pick up food in other houses and eat it. Indeed, one of the signs that a child is ready to appear at dinner parties when guests are present is its proven ability to conceal what is known. A well-behaved child never tells what it has found out about the family business; it has learned that family loyalty is prior even to commensal togetherness. (No doubt part of the reason for our own law of children’s silence before guests at the dinner table was the danger that a child might suddenly embarrass the family with its revelations.)