The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  What we call a couple’s “living together” can be expressed as much by food as by sex and common shelter. Here for example are some lines of a love song from Papua New Guinea:

  You told me, “I’ll cook your food in my oven,”

  You told me, “I’ll cook your food on my fire.”

  But I haven’t eaten

  Any of this food yet.

  I’m in my men’s house, far away.

  Girl Wakle, up in the place of Mbiltik

  With skin like that of a ripe banana,

  Let me take you off to Kendipi Rapu.

  It follows in such cases that if a woman decides to stop cooking for her man, or if he refuses to be fed by her or insists on cooking for himself, the breakdown is an outward signal of a serious failure in their relationship; such an action is often the beginning of a divorce. In Assam, south of Tibet, if a family member is furious enough to refrain from eating with the household for a whole twenty-four hours, the dissension is extremely grave. If he then decides to cook separately, he is taking an irreversible step; it must be followed by his building a new house and by a splitting up of lands and property. There is a terrible rite of rejection called “the throwing away of the cooking pots,” which is so deadly and final that, though it is often threatened in the heat of anger, it is rarely actually carried out. It constitutes the symbolic death, as far as the household is concerned, of the offending member of the family.

  It is a pattern widely found in Africa that adult men and women almost never eat together, even in the family living quarters. A woman cooks the food and brings it to her husband or to the men eating apart as a group, then leaves to join the other women and the children. In polygamous African families, the children of any one mother often eat with her, in a separate group from others fathered by the same man. The African anthropologist L. C. Okere describes dinner-time among the Igbo of Nigeria: “The division of the fufuu meal or porridge each evening is an impressive sight.… In front of the hearth, children start to bring around some small earthenware and enamel plates. From the steaming pot on the fire, the women scoop out soup and lump after lump of porridge into the eating containers. A ring of younger girls and children watch the spoon intently as it hovers a moment above each receptacle.” When all are served, the three or four children of each mother go and sit with her and eat from a single soup dish and from the same plate of fufuu or from one gourd-shell. This communal habit expresses a particular closeness of kinship; it produces solidarity for life. Father himself eats alone; it is a sign of prestige, the respect due to him. He may request the company of one of his children—typically the youngest toddler. In some African societies, he may expect to receive a dish of food from each wife—and how much he eats is an important index of his sentiments about the provider, and of his opinion of her prowess in that essential female skill, cooking. His avoiding the food in any particular wife’s dish is a deep insult, ritually suggesting that he suspects her of trying to poison him.

  In our own society the dining-room table, in houses and apartments large and affluent enough to have one, traditionally stands in a room separate from both the kitchen and the fireplace. It has for centuries been the locus of the typical household’s daily meals, and represents, as no other piece of furniture can, the family as a whole. If any member of the family should be absent, the empty place at table is a mute reminder of the missing person; when the children have all grown up and left home, the parents, left behind, face each other across the expanse of table, which after twenty years and more (and even if several tables have succeeded each other over the years) is haunted by memories of the dramas that have certainly taken place round this symbol of the family itself.

  A traditional dining-room table is often heavy, dark, and assiduously polished, as befits the embodiment not only of togetherness but of continuity and solid worth. Even modern dining-room tables, created out of light woods in order to reduce costs, are often stained or provided with veneers in dark colours, and weighted and glossed to produce a solid, heavy, “long-lasting” image. But many families now eat in the kitchen—where the table need not even pretend to be made of precious wood. Where a special dining room exists, it takes on a new and important role as a space set aside for large dinners and special occasions. In such a dining room stands the sideboard or dresser, containing china and silver brought out only for guests.

  The move towards having everyday meals in the kitchen began as a labour-saving measure, as servants disappeared and women went out to work. In large old apartments in Paris (these are often the most desirable and most expensive lodgings) the kitchen has been carefully placed a long way from the living and dining rooms. When these apartments were built, cooking smells were thought to be suggestive both of food in its purely nutritive function and of the intimate background workings of the household; the smell of food was therefore considered to be an imposition upon the guests. (“The one thing every hostess tries to avoid is the risk of the smell of cooking,” wrote Emily Post as late as 1950; the meal she is describing is centred on steak and broccoli.) Servants were also to be contained in their own separate quarters until they issued forth to serve. Nowadays, a long passage from kitchen to dining room is merely a nuisance for the toiling hostess. And now that good home cooking has taken on the allure, and the costliness in terms of time and skill, of couture clothing as compared with something bought off the hook, guests are delighted to be greeted on arrival by delicious smells of food being prepared, by their hosts in person, especially for them.

  Being asked to eat in the kitchen was for a long time, in houses and apartments large enough to possess dining rooms, the ultimate gesture of intimacy, extended in principle only to close family. It has become entirely normal these days to hold dinner parties in the kitchen. Most European kitchens, in this still transitional period, remain functional, non-celebratory rooms. The Scandinavians, however, have for some time been leading the way in turning the kitchen into a large and splendid room, gleaming with technology but also comfortable, attractive, and hospitable. The dining table has been moved, and has in many instances changed its size, its weight, and its colour. But it is still the same table that gave us the word “commensality,” meaning “togetherness arising out of the fact that we eat at one table.” Eating round a table is an ethnocentric way for us to express a bonding mechanism which is common to every human society: that of mealtime sharing.

  COMPANY

  “Dinner-parties rank first among all entertainments,” wrote an anonymous “Member of the Aristocracy” in an English manners book dated 1879. An invitation to dinner, he or she goes on, “conveys a greater mark of esteem” than being asked to any other gathering could do; and most importantly, “It is also a civility that can be readily interchanged, which in itself gives it an advantage over all other invitations.” Just because everybody must eat every day, offering dinner to people outside the family circle, eating with them in their houses, or in designated places for socializing over meals, becomes an essential means of binding families to one another and knitting society in general together. Food is not normally too expensive to share, even if you are quite poor; the fact that it does not last encourages reciprocation and repetition of the act of sharing. Food is also immensely malleable, so that there are endless possibilities for ringing the changes on the single theme of dinner. The necessity of eating, terrible as it is when there is not enough to feed us, also provides, in times of peace and plenty, the certainty of appetites reviving in time for every dinner engagement.

  Reciprocation is an essential part of this social system. Accepting a dinner invitation usually means promising to ask your hosts to a meal sometime later; eating together with members of a group proves loyalty to that group, and signifies a willingness to serve its interests in future. Every society pressures guests to become hosts in their turn. Resistance may result in unpopularity, ostracism, even withdrawal of aid when times become hard. “Hospitality begets hospitality” is an Igbo proverb. A p
opular modern Igbo song goes, Erigbuo ya konye ozo erigbuo—“Eat it up, because it’s someone else’s!”—and a traditional song asks pointedly,

  (Oh) drinker of other people’s liquor,

  When shall we drink yours?

  Group meals often involve the contribution of food by the guests themselves: the banqueters are in these cases both hosts and guests. The phrase “pot luck” was originally used when inviting someone to a very informal family dinner, on the spur of the moment. The visitor was to expect nothing specially prepared, but only what the family would have eaten in any case that day. The guest’s “luck” lay in what day he or she happened to arrive, and what meal had been prepared for the family. The phrase has changed its meaning with the increasing popularity of meals or parties where the guests come with contributions of food: the “luck” now lies in the uncertainty about what everyone will bring. The host can suggest what might be needed, but cannot control the quality of the offering.

  “Pot luck” dinners in this sense have an ancient history, and exist in some form in most societies on earth. They usually celebrate the intimacy of the guests, or at least the hope that they have a great deal in common. The host’s authority is considerably reduced by means of the arrangement, but the fact remains that the party has to be held somewhere, and the host or hosts remain responsible for the venue, the guest list, even for the possibility of gate-crashers. The success or failure of the party still depends mostly on the “givers” of it. Being expected both to sustain loss of authority, and to retain responsibility, is a peculiarly modern predicament. But the informality gained is so important to us that we are prepared to pay the price; and enough honour still attaches to having the premises, being able to pay for a party (even if the guests help and must accept the blame for the food provided), and to knowing the “right” people to ask, that hosts continue to shoulder the burden and the risk of inviting people for “pot luck.”

  Many societies have knitted themselves together by throwing city, town, or tribal feasts; here those responsible are the inhabitants of the town or the whole host group, and the honour risked is the reputation of the collectivity. Regular attendance at city feasts could be part of one’s obligations as a citizen in ancient Greece. A city, tribe, or club holding a feast might often of course be stating not only its internal solidarity but also its distinctiveness from other such groups. The Wamirans of Papua New Guinea hold two main kinds of feast: “incorporation,” communal dinners, where no meat is eaten; and “transaction,” distributions of raw pork as well as taro, where the food is cooked and eaten in separate groups or taken home to be consumed. The first type stresses solidarity, the second difference and potential conflict.

  In south-western France, there has been a recent resurgence of annual village banqueting. Everyone in town ought to go and eat at the long trestle-tables which are set out every year on the town’s patronal saint’s day, in the main square, which becomes the hosts’ “premises.” Absentees are noted with displeasure. People from other towns attend as well, and everybody compares notes: it matters a good deal who gave the best feast this year. The dinners are called moungetades, after the traditional white beans with pork and sausage which are the climax of the meal. These beans were in recent memory the staple food of everybody in this area of France. Today, they have become “fancy” food, a regional spécialité in restaurants, or nostalgia-producing festal food, expressive of tradition, solidarity, and a hard but valued past.

  Coming together once a year “to eat the beans” is, for the local inhabitants, an act of pride in their own home town; it is consciously intended to create community, where modern threats to group loyalty and personal contact are felt as a real danger. Everybody contributes something: food-provisioning and cooking expertise, time, organization, singing in the church choir in the morning, skill at playing boules and other traditional games in the afternoon, while the feast is tended by the designated cooks in huge vats over fires in the middle of an open field. All pay an equal fee for the dinner, and all participate in the lusty singing and the raucous jokes as course after course is served under strings of fairy lights in the open air; dancing goes on in the square, to deafening amplified music, till dawn. Moungetades have appeared in southwestern France, apparently quite spontaneously, within the past fifteen years or so; the new “tradition” has grown to the point that any village that cannot “get it together” to mount one every year scarcely counts as a living community at all.

  Eating together helps people get over fights. Since friends and families share food, the action of eating together can ritually express what is held, shared, and enjoyed, after all, in common; it therefore signifies the dropping of hostilities. The Gogo of Tanzania reconcile people after a bitter quarrel, as when a father curses and disowns his son, by first slaughtering a goat and removing its liver. Each of the parties bites on the goat’s liver; the priest then cuts it in two. When each has eaten his half of the meat, peace is officially restored. Only food—all-necessary, visible, divisible, an external object which becomes internal, and which then turns into the very substance of the eater—could give rise to such a clear yet mysterious and effective ritual.

  Eating when we are hungry is a relief; eating with others is also fun, and conducive to eating more. Modern would-be slimmers are commonly and coldly advised that the quickest way of cutting down on food is to avoid seeing friends for meals: leave out the social element, and it will quickly become easier to cut down on eating as well. Chinese meals are, on the other hand, an example of how eating in common can be encouraged by making it advantageous in terms of the actual food served: the larger the commensal number, the greater the variety of dishes which all can share. A single person or a mere couple in a Chinese restaurant suffers the melancholy fate of having to make a meal of only one or two foods, whereas a crowd ensures variety. Visitors and annual food “events” are everywhere an excuse to eat a lot. When guests visit, even if they have not been expected, they must usually be fed on their arrival. The food given them is shared: it would be an insult to guests to let them eat alone, just because eating together expresses friendship—even if what is offered is just “a nice cup of tea,” or a drink with a dish of salted pieces to take with the fingers.

  In many cultures, two people do not feel they can talk in a friendly way with each other unless they have first eaten together: it is an equivalent of being “properly introduced.” A corresponding attitude is that which makes it impossible for a desert Arab who has once eaten salt with a man ever to treat him thereafter as an enemy. It is as though reconciliation must never be needed, because it has taken place already; enmity has been overcome in advance. The personal “guest-friendship” of Homeric Greece meant that, because a man had once been entertained in the house of another, not only the host and the guest but their descendants for generations remained joined by bonds resembling those of kinship. Two “paternal guest-friends” could meet for the first time on the battlefield, on opposite sides of the combat, and refuse to fight each other.

  Such kinship through hospitality is achieved in imitation of marriage, the social mechanism by which women, “given away” to families other than their own, bind their “natal” and their “procreative” families together. Marriage ceremonies the world over include the sharing of food and drink among the two families and their friends; often the bride’s and groom’s consuming of food and drink together is the wedding itself, as ours is the slipping on of binding rings and the saying of vows. A fairly recent addition to North American wedding festivities (it is an ancient idea which has resurfaced, probably through the agency of various immigrant groups) is the sharing of the first slice of the wedding cake by the bride and groom.

  One society, the Tibetan Buddhist Sherpas of the Himalayas, is described as imposing on every one of its members an extremely individualistic, self-sufficient attitude. There is a religious bias towards “anti-relationalism”: sanctity often requires some kind of isolation, at least from time to
time. This is temporarily achieved in rituals which include fasting (not sharing food) and silence (no conversation). There is a strong secular preference for the family to maintain itself and need no help from outsiders. People dislike lending, or even selling, anything; their goal in life is to be as autonomous as possible. Yet they regularly attend large parties. A host is good enough to supply the occasion, and the people who come are filled with exhilaration if the party succeeds. Sherry Ortner believes that the “host” is only a nominal figure at these celebrations: the real host is the group itself. She explains that the Sherpas know that they need these parties, to break down their own normal resistances to giving and receiving. People agree to “lose the struggle” now and then, and become, for a ritually organized and limited time, a close-knit community.

  “We invite each other not to eat and drink, but to eat and drink together,” Plutarch remarked. The point is that the people at the party are more important than the food; but the secondary meaning is that eating together implies selectivity. Hosts of parties, especially if they are large and “pot luck,” cannot impose strict control over the number and identity of the guests; and if people pay a fee to come, anybody who behaves must be welcome. But only a certain number of people can sit down to dinner together; it is one of the necessities imposed—and advantages gained—by seating diners at a table. The host chooses the guests, and takes care that they already have a good deal in common.