The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  Fast-food chains know that they are ordinary. They want to be ordinary, and for people to think of them as almost inseparable from the idea of everyday food consumed outside the home. They are happy to allow their customers time off for feasts—on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and so on—to which they do not cater. Even those comparatively rare holiday times, however, are turned to a profit, because the companies know that their favourite customers—law-abiding families—are at home together then, watching television, where carefully placed commercials will spread the word concerning new fast-food products, and reimprint the image of the various chain stores for later, when the long stretches of ordinary times return.

  Families are the customers the fast-food chains want: solid citizens in groups of several at a time, the adults hovering over their children, teaching them the goodness of hamburgers, anxious to bring them up to behave typically and correctly. Customers usually maintain a clean, restrained, considerate, and competent demeanour as they swiftly, gratefully, and informally eat. Fast-food operators have recently faced the alarming realization that crack addicts, craving salt and fat, have spread the word among their number that French fries deliver these substances easily, ubiquitously, cheaply, and at all hours. Dope addicts at family “ordinaries”! The unacceptability of such a thought was neatly captured by a news story in The Economist (1990) that spelled out the words a fast-foods proprietor can least afford to hear from his faithful customers, the participants in his polite and practiced rituals: the title of the story was “Come on Mabel, let’s leave.” The plan to counter this threat included increasing the intensity of the lighting in fast-food establishments—drug addicts, apparently, prefer to eat in the dark.

  The formality of eating at a restaurant belonging to a fast-food chain depends upon the fierce regularity of its product, its simple but carefully observed rituals, and its environment. Supplying a hamburger that adheres to perfect standards of shape, weight, temperature, and consistency, together with selections from a pre-set list of trimmings, to a customer with fiendishly precise expectations is an enormously complex feat. The technology involved in performing it has been learned through the expenditure of huge sums on research, and after decades of experience—not to mention the vast political and economic ramifications involved in maintaining the supplies of cheap beef and cheap buns. But these costs and complexities are, with tremendous care, hidden from view. We know of course that, say, a Big Mac is a cultural construct: the careful control expended upon it is one of the things we are buying. But McDonald’s manages—it must do so if it is to succeed in being ordinary—to provide a “casual” eating experience. Convenient, innocent simplicity is what the technology, the ruthless politics, and the elaborate organization serve to the customer.

  Many of “the proprieties” have, in our day, met their most implacable end in becoming merely inappropriate; they are perceived as being, at best, inconvenient complexities. “Proper” means “fitting”: observing the proprieties means fitting in with the demands of other people for correct, predictable, smoothly acceptable behaviour. We might not share the experience of two American sociologists who claim—with approval—that nowadays “physical trespasses, such as slapping another on the back and relating sexual jokes that comment on one’s intimate behavior, become recognized signs of friendship.” But it would still be a brave man or woman who really did flout the convention that all of us must pretend to be relaxed when it comes to “the proprieties.” A woman who will never leave the house, even on a bright warm day, without first finding and putting on a pair of gloves (a rule whose observance was a sign of excellent upbringing only thirty years ago) would now be thought obsessive; people who have never known the rule (anyone under thirty) might regard her with concern. A man who draws out a chair for a woman, then introduces it gently under her as she sits down, might well make her feel the object of rather unusual attention. Waiters can get away with this sort of thing, but then at smart restaurants we pay in part to experience elegance and formal manners, and to get away from low decorum. (In any case, it has often been customary for staff who have been hired to perform personal services to dress and behave as though they belonged to an era that has recently ended.)

  But when instances of good manners—such as tipping hats or wearing kid gloves to dinner but taking them off before beginning to eat—vanish from the social scene, they always give way, in time, to new ones. Polite behaviour does not simply go away; it receives orders to fit in with different exigencies. Three such constraints, each of them influencing our attitude towards etiquette, are the disappearance of personal servants and of the constraint upon women to play a serving role in the modern world, our compulsion to race against time, and our obsession with being clean.

  In 1922, Emily Post could write beneath a photograph of a table laid for a formal dinner the following caption: “The perfect example of a formal dinner table of wealth, luxury and taste, which involves no effort on the part of the hostess of a great house beyond deciding upon the date and the principal guests who are to form the nucleus of the party.” The hostess would merely have her secretary bring her the guests’ cards, we are told later, and she would place these round a plan of her table, “very much as though playing solitaire.” Other than this task of deciding who would come and where they would sit, “she sends word to her cook that there will be twenty-four on the 10th; the menu will be submitted to her later, which she will probably glance at and send back. She never sees or thinks about her table, which is the butler’s province.” Invitations having been written out, her staff either sent them by mail or delivered them by hand. On the date of the dinner party they would lay the table with place cards correctly distributed, cook the food, serve the meal, clear the table, wash the dishes, and tidy the house when the guests had departed.

  The hostess prided herself on the hard work that perfection represented; and we can only assume that Emily Post’s readers—those who were not “hostesses of great houses”—were impressed. The silver, for instance, had to be handled with reverent care, never being picked up by a servant “except with a rouged chamois.” “No piece of silver is ever allowed by the slightest chance to touch another piece … The footman who gathers two or three forks in a bunch will never do it a second time, and keep his place. If the ring of a guest should happen to scratch a knife handle or a fork, the silver-polisher may have to spend an entire day using his thumb or a silver buffer, and rub and rub until no vestige of a scratch remains.”

  Service at table was swift and silent. There should be one footman for each lady at table, so that chairs may be held out for them and slid back in under them as they sat down. The butler stood throughout the meal behind the hostess, “except when ordering another servant or pouring wine. He never leaves the room or handles a dish.” Service à la russe meant that servants carved all the dishes, handed them round, and returned them to the side table. Enormous care was taken not only of the cutlery but of the plates: “a smear or thumb-mark on the edge of a dish is like a spot on the front of a dress!”

  But already the writing was on the wall. It was in the 1920s that the institution of live-in household servants began seriously to die out in North America; the process had begun earlier in Europe. The reasons for this social change are closely tied to industrialization and new opportunities for paid work, especially for women: as soon as household staff were given the choice, they left domestic service in droves. The disappearance of servants, in turn, finally secured the arrival in the home of technical aids to housework. In 1928, Emily Post added to her work a chapter called “On the Servantless House”; by 1931, platinum-finished silver cutlery had become a regrettable but understandable alternative to pure silver; its quality of not tarnishing “perhaps outweighs its handicap” where there are few or no servants. In 1945, Post found it necessary to emphasize to her readers that the maid or butler should not be introduced to the guests; to do so was “as out of place as introducing the bus driver to the passengers.”


  A good many of the opportunities for non-domestic employment which were siphoning off the supply of servants were in fact boring, stultifying, even dangerous jobs. The reasons why men and women preferred to work in factories, even where the pay was less than that offered to servants, have to do with personal relationships and social ranking—the very stuff of manners. Despite the advantages of domestic work (the possibility of good personal relations on the job and comfortable living quarters, and perhaps relative freedom from timetables and supervision), servants increasingly resented their social disabilities. They were dependent on the good will and courtesy of their employers, yet powerless to demand them; subject to a family not their own (they put up, in other words, with all the fear and insecurity of being a guest and received none of the power, the social rewards, or the honour); they worked long, ill-defined hours, and were allowed hardly any private life. Nowadays, most paid household work is done on an hourly or daily, live-out basis, where those who can afford it employ a “cleaning lady” to come in and do housework several times a month. None but the very rich keep maids, footmen, chefs, butlers—the servants who once waited at every middle-class table. We have, instead, lowered our normal expectations of dinner-time ceremony.

  Women are no longer automatically expected to remain dedicated to the house and devoted to the maintenance of family polish. I have, of necessity, not addressed myself to the enormous implications of women’s liberation from having to assume an exclusively housewifely role. This revolution’s many consequences for manners in general are similar to those resulting from the disappearance of servants: the two changes are aspects of the same shift in the social system. The extent to which women are treated decently has been for many centuries one of the most telling tests of civility. This standard has now been raised higher than ever before; it has, moreover, come to be demanded and not merely hoped for. Constantly remembering to monitor our attitudes towards women, to weed preconceptions out of our own minds, is a difficult and attention-demanding exercise. The moral choice has been irrevocably made. We are for the most part still parvenus, however, in need of polishing our manners.

  Behaving “properly” towards women in the modern world impinges, as “good manners” always do, upon our most personal behaviour. For instance, I myself have had to wage perpetual war on the prejudice of pronouns as I wrote this account. In my last book, published only a few years ago, I was far more “relaxed” on this point. It has become, in the interval, socially unacceptable to refer to people in general as “man,” “men,” or even “mankind”: polite people say “humankind.” Women host dinners as often as men do: do I call them “hostesses”? If I speak of hosts in the abstract, as performers of a role, do I then go on to speak of a host as “he,” as “she,” or as “he or she”? Do I dare to call him or her “them”? (I reject “s/he.”) All writers will recognize the problems I have faced; it is a puzzlement none of us can avoid. Men wear hats much less commonly than they used to. I must forego, then, their lifting them on meeting me, forgive those who still wear hats for failing to do so, and perhaps positively wish they would not. But I can and must expect men not to refer to me as “he.” Our table manners, apart from matters of seating and precedence, have in recent times concerned sexual discrimination comparatively rarely; but anyone who regrets a fall in levels of punctiliousness at table must take into account the very genuine and newly compulsory efforts being expended elsewhere.

  Our society has worked hard to stop putting a whole class of people into the position of having personally to serve members of another class, whether the serving class be professional servants or women in general. This is not to say that modern Western society refrains from forcing people, more and more of them people living in countries other than our own, to work and produce goods cheaply so that we can maintain what we call “our standard of living.” The fact remains, however, that the vast majority of us do have to shift for ourselves at home. We cannot get away with making other people devote their lives to servicing our personal needs continually and face to face. This means a reduction in levels of elegance and formality, certainly, but expecting nobody (including one’s wife) to be one’s servant requires formidable competence, as well as adherence to the intensely civilized ideal that we ought not to impose on other people. Doing without servants, in other words, like giving women a chance to pursue whatever career they like, is not only necessary because of the social system, but is also in itself a demanding form of civility.

  “Manners” govern relationships with other people primarily in situations of close personal contact; they do not constitute virtue, but they do set out to imitate virtue’s outward appearance; they are an admission of an ideal. It has become disgusting and ridiculous, proof positive that one has neither manners nor taste, openly to treat another human being as though she or he were intrinsically inferior; we cannot be caught doing so to any person’s face, at any rate, and remain “respectable” ourselves. How we behave towards people we never actually meet—and the modern world places us in a complex symbiosis with people we never personally meet—is another story.

  It is also said that the revolution in women’s roles in our society is causing another shift in behaviour. Increasingly, North American and European householders—young people, in the affluent sectors of society—are hiring more and more personal servants. These are of course people poorer than themselves, imported, many of them, from other countries because few in our own society would want these jobs. Immigrants, on the other hand, might gratify us—even convince us that we are being civil—by feeling lucky that we consent to hire them.

  Our perception that we have “no time” is one of the distinctive marks of modern Western culture. It cannot be attributed solely to our servantless state, or to the determination of large numbers of women to work outside the home. Our attitude towards time is as much a precondition of our social system as it is a result of it. Its effect upon manners is almost invariably to simplify them—except that it has, of course, become unprecedentedly rude to be perceived as wasting anybody’s time. “No time” is used as an excuse and also as a spur: it both goads us and constrains us, as a concept such as “honour” did for the ancient Greeks. Abstract, quantitative, and amoral, unarguable, exerting pressure on each person as an individual, the feeling that we have no time escapes explanation and censure by claiming to be a condition created entirely out of our good fortune. We have “no time” apparently because modern life offers so many pleasures, so many choices, that we cannot resist trying enough of them to “use up” all the time we have been allotted.

  “No time” is ingeniously bound up with our apparent conquest of space, by means of mobility. Never have things been done faster or been available from further away. (But then we need the speed, mostly because we have no time.) Travelling quickly, using machines to do the work, spending as little time as possible eating, or resting, or being otherwise unproductive—nothing seems to relieve the pressure. The freedom granted by speed is, in other words, more than balanced by the stress of being in a constant and unavoidable hurry. Powerful people love impressing upon those needing their services that they have trouble finding time “to fit them in”: making others wait because one’s own time is more precious than theirs is one of the great hallmarks of desirability and success.

  Feeling rushed is also an important component of our economy; it causes people to buy more, pay more, try more things and more means to compensate for the stress, or at least to alleviate the anxiety. It also makes us work harder and longer—and therefore leave ourselves less time. It is not so much that we buy too many things and they use up our time, as that having no time forces us to buy more things. We eat out or buy ready-prepared food to eat at home in order to save time, but also—and more insidiously—because we feel we have no time to do otherwise. Many of us never really learn to cook, and therefore cooking remains not only time-consuming but unrewarding. We prefer to spend more money and less time on meals; we therefore
tend obligingly to persuade ourselves that what we get for our money is pleasant eating.

  Because casual manners are “relaxed,” they are all we feel we can manage in our rushed and exhausted state. Eating a homemade meal with invited guests, or even with one’s family, cannot be entirely “casual,” at least in the accidental aspect of the word, because preparations and forethought are necessary, and all those present have had to turn down competing events and commit themselves in advance to appearing on a certain date. They have to sit down, face each other, and not get up and leave before everyone else is ready to do so. In comparison with acting out a sudden whim to consume a microwaved mug of soup within the next five minutes, eating together with friends can come to seem a formal, implacably structured and time-consuming event—even for those who do not have to cook. We are conditioned to think that even a low level of formality is a constraint just because it entails participation with other people, whereas being in one’s own personal hurry must be free and preferable. It is an attitude that certainly suits the marketers of mass-produced individual portions of ready-prepared fast food.

  Food is “fast” when it is immediately ready to be eaten, and can also be downed quickly. There must be either a puritanical renunciation of the pleasure to be found in savouring food, or a jadedness arising from too many competing calls for our attention—or both—for us to prefer eating fast; we have to want to settle for less. There was a time when having to eat food fast was considered to be a misfortune; the ideal state for a diner was that in which speed and food never had to coincide, except in the serving of it. Nowadays, “fast food” is a phrase that has become so common that a good deal of the disapproval it used to express has disappeared; another paradoxical expression, “junk food,” was invented, but even it has acquired intimations of pleasurable naughtiness—of daring the unhealthy for the sake of speed and the assuaging of an addiction. An addiction is not a sharing matter; and speed is almost invariably impeded by the presence of other people. But the bodily proprieties observed while eating—no dribbles and smears, no loud chewing, no grabbing, staring, crumbling, slurping—are part of the socially enforced formalities of behaviour while consuming fast food, as they are for dining in any context. We may eat fast food anywhere—even while walking in the street—provided these basic manners are maintained. If they are not, no one is likely actually to complain; but the politest response we can hope to encounter if we let everyone down in this manner is to be ritually ignored.