reading

Foreword

Introduction to the Second Edition

Introduction

1. Behaving

The Artificial Cannibal

Ritual

Feasting and Sacrifice

2. Learning to Behave

Bringing Children Up

Inhibitions

Aspirations

3. The Pleasure of Your Company

Company

Hosts and Guests

Invitations

Coming Right In

Taking Our Places

4. Dinner is Served

The First Bite

Taking Note of Our Surroundings

The Prospect Before Us

Fingers

Chopsticks

Knives, Forks, Spoons

Sequence

Helpings

Carving

The Red, the White, and the Gold

Table Talk

Feeding, Feasts, and Females

All Gone

5. No Offence

Pollution

The Rules and Regulations of the Mouth

The Proprieties of Posture and Demeanour

Postscript: How Rude Are We?

References

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

Foreword

If you are new to this book, I envy you. Reading Margaret Visser for the first time is like biting into a sharp delicious fruit with an uncommon flavour and mind-expanding effects. I’m trying to remember how different – how dull – table manners can seem when you haven’t read The Rituals of Dinner. Maybe you think table manners are something for other people. Faraway people. Not for us those stodgy Downton Abbey rules about fish knives and how to fold a napkin. We do not bother to pause for grace or after-dinner port. There is in modern times, notes Margaret Visser, a ‘shying away from elaboration, a preference for the bare bones of everything’. Since The Rituals of Dinner was first published in 1991, diners have become still more casual. ‘Bowl food’ is a new phenomenon. Increasing numbers of people would now rather spoon up a comforting bowl of something like rice and avocado than bother with the demanding business of a knife and fork. But we are deluding ourselves if we think we eat without ritual. It is just that our rituals constantly change, as Margaret Visser so deftly shows.

This sharply wise book, one of the most important ever written about food, outlines the manifold ways that humans complicate the act of eating. Take McDonald’s. Its diners may not eat off damask tablecloths (indeed, when two British teenagers brought their own cloth, cutlery, plates and candles to a branch of McDonald’s in 2013, they were asked to leave). Yet a fast-food hamburger still comes with ‘carefully observed rituals’, notes Visser, from the ‘fierce regularity’ of the meat patty itself to the rules governing décor and ambiance: ‘The staff wear distinctive garments; menus are always the same, and even placed in the same spot in every outlet in the chain; prices are low and predictable; and the theme of cleanliness is proclaimed and tirelessly reiterated. The company attempts also to play the role of a lovable host, kind and concerned, even parental: it knows that blunt and direct confrontation with a huge faceless corporation makes us suspicious … So it stresses its love of children, its nostalgia for cosy warmth and for the past (cottagy roofs, warm earth tones), or its clean, brisk modernity (glass walls, smooth surfaces, red trim).’

The brilliance of Margaret Visser is to make the everyday exotic and the strange familiar. Visser thinks like an anthropologist – for eighteen years, she taught Classics at York University in Canada – but she writes as directly as a radio broadcaster, which she was. Her thinking about food first came out of her appearances in the 1980s on a Canadian radio show called Morningside, where she would talk about the cultural significance of everyday things like oranges, potatoes and sugar. She originally got invited on the show by telling the producer, ‘You know nothing about Toronto society in the 1980s if you know nothing about Greek mythology.’

Visser’s working assumption in The Rituals of Dinner is that we know nothing about our own strange behaviour at table – our diets and taboos, even our attitude to airline food – if we are ignorant of the ‘systems and codes’ that came before. She shows that many current rituals that we think of as blandly normal are freighted with hidden meaning. Be warned. This book may give you quandaries, such as whether to bring a bottle of wine when invited to dinner. I’d thought it was a nice simple gift – for someone who drinks – but Visser made me see that the wine could be interpreted as ‘lacking in civility’ because it is ‘part-payment for the hospitality about to be given’. In this light, the more generous thing might be to bring nothing and submit wholeheartedly to being a guest. The laws of hospitality, Visser observes, were designed for dealing with strangers entering the home and a guest must never ‘usurp the host’s role’.

At the heart of all table manners, Visser shows, is a fear of violence. ‘We do not get the guests mixed up with the dishes,’ as she puts it. The way we use cutlery – which might seem like a staid and antiquarian question – is ripe with jeopardy. The person who sits next to us holding a knife could stab us at any moment. And so we create elaborate rules to make everyone at the table feel safer. In China, the knife-work is done out of view, in the kitchen, and the food is brought to the table already bite-sized and ready to be eaten with chopsticks. In the West, we dealt with the same problem by inventing the table knife, a utensil which deliberately does a worse job of slicing than other knives. To further lessen our risk of being murdered, we follow taboos on how this hopelessly ineffective knife may be used, such as never using it to cut bread rolls (a French rule) or to cut potatoes (a German one). We must never point a knife at someone else’s face, or put it in our own mouth, lest we create the impression that we are about to spill blood. ‘For this is the theme that underlies all table manners: we may be slicing and chewing; we may have killed or sacrificed to supply our feast; we may be attending to the most “animal” of our needs; but we do so with control, order and regularity, and with a clear understanding of who is who and what is what.’

In one of the most astonishing sections of the book – the first – Visser shows that even cannibals have a sense of ritual and rules about eating in company. If we allow ourselves to think about cannibalism at all, we associate it with brutal anarchy. Yet, Visser writes, ‘as social beings … cannibals must inevitably have manners’. She introduces us to the ancient Fijians, who ate normal meals with their hands, but brought out a special wooden fork with which to eat human flesh (like the fancy dinner plates reserved for our Christmases or Thanksgivings).

Every time I turn to The Rituals of Dinner – and it is one of the most re-readable books on my shelves – I am struck by some fresh detail. You quickly realize you are in the hands of someone with a vast range of reference and, more important, the cool intelligence to make sense of it all. Visser can see the connection between the Chaga tribe, where children are expected to leave a handful of food on their plates for their mothers to share, and North American schoolchildren, forging alliances over swapping treats from their lunchbags (your raisins for my pretzels). Children have been observed in the playground trading one identical cookie for another – a gesture as symbolic as any Aztec feast.

Sometimes, we despair that table manners are a thing of the past. We live in a culture, as Visser sees, that is uniquely obsessed with eating in a hurry. This is a world of microwaves and TV dinners and forkless snacks wolfed down in the car. It’s useful to be reminded by Visser that when eating, ‘we do in fact have standards, which are invisible to us most of the time’. Unlike Victorian ladies, we may not feel that dinner requires off-the-shoulder dresses. But we still – sandwich in hand – make concerted efforts not to spit or dribble or drop crumbs. The fact that middle-class families now eat without servants is itself, Visser maintains, ‘a demanding form of civility’, because it stems from the ideal that we try not to impose ourselves too much on others. Even if we could afford it, few would now feel comfortable about paying others to make the family dinner. Admittedly, we still impose on the farmers who grow our green beans halfway across the world and the chickens who died to make our chicken korma – but this, as Visser says, is ‘another story’. Her genius is to show that table manners are never just about other faraway people; they are about us.

Bee Wilson, February 2017

Introduction to the Second Edition

Table manners maintain and protect taboos and assumptions that seem self-evident within the culture that embraces them. They are rarely discussed, therefore, or even thought about much – until somebody breaks the rules: eats with her mouth open, points at somebody (even at herself) with a knife, spits, grabs other people’s food, or is unacceptably guilty of spills. Then the reactions of eating companions are immediate and strong – either outrage ending in hostility, or disgust, which means withdrawal from and rejection of the offender.

My earlier book, Much Depends on Dinner, is about the history of what we eat and the meanings we ascribe to specific foods. Interest in those and related subjects has expanded with the years; huge numbers of books and articles about food continue to be published. The Rituals of Dinner is about how we eat our meals once we have assured ourselves of a regular food supply. Apart from the usual guides to etiquette (the equivalent, for the topic of manners, of cookbooks for the subject of food), there has been no corresponding outpouring of literature on the subject. This is probably because table manners are easily ignored, or dismissed as merely trivial and boring. We might recall, however, that one of the characteristics of a safely operating taboo is that it remains invisible, beneath discussion, taken for granted.

Yet table manners have a great deal to recommend them as a subject for analysis. To begin with, since they are each culture’s own way to encourage and manage the sharing of food, they are essential for the foundation and survival of every human society without exception. Once we recognize this fact, we may agree that explaining eating rituals is a serious and desirable enterprise. At the same time, the subject of table manners can be inherently entertaining, even hilarious, and for this there are three main reasons.

First, table manners prevent violence from erupting during meals. Since The Rituals of Dinner was published, readers have occasionally objected that they have never even thought of violence at the table, let alone encountered it. Their protestations merely confirm in my mind the omnipresence of the taboo. Hearing about (rather than undergoing) infractions of table manners causes laughter partly because a taboo has been threatened but not actually dismantled: no death, no total breakdown of order has taken place. Second, accounts of punctiliousness about status and battles for it at the dinner table are always comic to some degree. And third, we are frequently surprised and amused by the lengths to which people are prepared to go in pursuit of the dramatic or the proper.

There was no need, when I wrote this book, to cast about for variety or for striking instances: human inventiveness has provided those in abundance. But in an age when millions of facts are available to anyone with access to a computer, what is often missing is the sense that underlies it all. The subject of The Rituals of Dinner is the decision-making that undergirds systems of manners at table: what in each case is underlined, what is precluded, and why. There is a lot in this book about style and art, aspirations and inhibitions, our attitudes towards our bodies, and our cultural differences. For when it comes to eating, the way we do it is not, for many other peoples, ‘the way it’s done’. The eating customs and manners of others, because they reveal taboos that are not our own, are easily found to be interesting in themselves. They also help to make us aware of the taboos that govern our own eating behaviour.

As I did in Much Depends on Dinner, I take the reader of this book through a single meal in the modern European and American tradition; the central portion of the text is thereby given a ‘plot’. The object this time is to explain the ‘staging’ of this dinner and to compare it with dinners in other places and times. I concentrate on its rules and conventions, how it dramatizes the gathering, and the meanings of the performance. Every dinner is different, of course, not only because of varying menus, but also because the food unites around it different people, each with a particular presence and status, and each (in our culture, which is distinctive in its insistence on everybody speaking during meals) helping to create the conversation, the dialogue of the ‘play’. My subject, however, is the rules – the certifiably conventional, the framework so easily discounted and ignored – that allow dinner companions to improvise creatively without enraging others or putting them off their food. It was the history of these rules, together with their strategies and intentions, that I was after.

Table manners exist to maintain and reassure; they are by nature conservative, and themselves change rarely and then only with difficulty. Indeed, the smallest alteration in mealtime conventions is a symptom of significant change in the culture itself. For example, if societies in our day for whom chopsticks are the norm, or where eating with one’s hands is perfectly polite, should start to demand knives and forks, momentous changes will almost certainly have already occurred in their diet and cooking methods. (For instance, meat served in large pieces requires knives, and hot food discourages eating with one’s fingers.) Pressures to ‘modernize’ and globalize would most probably have intervened as well. Further consequences would necessarily ensue – the requirement of a plate for every diner, for instance, with the limiting and separating effects these objects impose upon social interaction. And that would be only the beginning.

In our own culture since this book was first written, individualism has been further reinforced by advances in technology. At the same time, technology, often adopted wholesale and without reflection, has altered and continues to alter our behaviour, forcing our customs to conform to it. Will we all, even in groups, eat increasingly alone then, with each one plugged into his own listening device or conversing on a cellphone with absent others? Will separate portions bought pre-prepared severely reduce mealtime sharing? And what will such behaviour, if it becomes customary, portend? We can see a few looming outlines, but we cannot make out the details; there are certainly no precedents for either scenario. But the speed of technological change should not distract us from thinking about consequences, or from keeping in conscious contact with what is going on at a deep level within ourselves and our society.

The Rituals of Dinner is, in effect, volume two of a single work on the subject of eating – although it can be read quite independently of its companion, Much Depends on Dinner. This second volume, even more specifically than the first, looks at ourselves in the light of our relationship to our food. Its purpose is to help readers understand how table manners work, and to appreciate both their importance and their ability to reveal the underlying assumptions of our – or any other – culture. The need for such knowledge has, if anything, grown since I wrote it.

Introduction

This book is a commentary on the manifold meanings of the rituals of dinner; it is about how we eat, and why we eat as we do. Human beings work hard to supply themselves with food: first we have to find it, cultivate it, hunt it, make long-term plans to transport and store it, and keep struggling to secure regular supplies of it. Next we buy it, carry it home, and keep it until we are ready. Then we prepare it, clean it, skin, chop, cook, and dish it up. Now comes the climax of all our efforts, the easiest part: eating it. And immediately we start to cloak the proceedings with a system of rules. We insist on special places and times for eating, on specific equipment, on stylized decoration, on predictable sequence among the foods eaten, on limitation of movement, and on bodily propriety. In other words, we turn the consumption of food, a biological necessity, into a carefully cultured phenomenon. We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community.

Table manners have a history, ancient and complex: each society has gradually evolved its system, altering its ways sometimes to suit circumstance, but also vigilantly maintaining its customs in order to support its ideals and its aesthetic style, and to buttress its identity. Our own society has made choices in order to arrive at the table manners we now observe. Other people, in other parts of the world today, have rules that are different from ours, and it is important to try to comprehend the reasoning that lies behind what they do if we are to understand what we do and why.

For in spite of the differences, table manners, all things considered, are remarkably similar both historically and the world over. There is a very strong tendency everywhere to prefer cleanliness or consideration for others or the solidarity of the dining group. Ritual emphases on such matters are occasionally highly idiosyncratic. But most rituals with these meanings have a good deal in common, and when people do things differently they usually do them for reasons that are easy to understand and appreciate. Sometimes, for example, festive diners are expected to eat a lot. Feasts are exceptional occasions, and a great deal of work has gone into them: the least a guest can do is show enjoyment. Fasting beforehand may very well be necessary, and exclaiming with pleasure, smacking one’s lips, and so on might be thought both polite and benevolent. Other cultures prefer to stress that food is not everything, and guzzling is disgusting: restraint before the plenty offered is admired, and signifying enjoyment by word or deed is frowned upon. Sometimes it is correct to be silent while eating: food deserves respect and concentration. In other cases one must at all costs talk: we have met not merely to feed, but to commune with fellow human beings. Even though we come down on one side or the other, we can sympathize with the concerns that lie behind the alternative choice of action.

The book is organized neither chronologically nor by culture and geography. I have elected rather to ‘travel’, both in space and in time – to choose examples of behaviour from other places and periods of history wherever they throw light, whether by similarity or by difference, upon our own attitudes, traditions, and peculiarities of behaviour. My aim has been to enrich anyone’s experience of a meal in the European and American tradition, to heighten our awareness and interest on the occasions when we might be invited to share meals in other cultures, and to give the reader some idea of the great range of tradition, significance, and social sophistication which is inherent in the actions performed during the simplest dinner eaten with family or friends.

The two opening chapters deal with basic principles. The first of these considers why it is that every human society without exception obeys eating rules; what ritual is and why we need it at dinner (cannibalism, for instance, is found to conform to strict laws and controls); and the meaning of feasting and sacrifice. The second chapter is about how people the world over teach children table manners, and how our own culture evolved its dinner-time etiquette. We have insisted more and more strictly on bodily control; and we have often used table manners to serve class systems and snobbery.

Chapter Three starts to take us through a meal eaten in company with others: the etiquette of invitations, the laws governing hosts and guests, behaviour on arriving at somebody’s house for dinner, and the seating arrangements. The dinner we are about to share is a sit-down meal with friends, some of them intimate and some only slight acquaintances; the party takes place in the host’s house. Such a meal invariably includes comfort, risk, and significance, complexity, plotting, setting, and dramatic structure enough to supply ample material for a book-length commentary. We necessarily leave out not only the specific menu of our meal, but also the characters and stories of individual guests, their preferences, conversation, and idiosyncrasies – everything that makes each dinner party different from every other. In this book we shall be concerned merely with conventions, where they come from, and what they signify.

‘Dinner Is Served’ in the course of the long central Chapter Four. We watch each other eat a meal, from first bite to leaving the table and then the house for home. In order to understand our manners, we must consider what they might have been and are not. Sitting on chairs round a table to eat is not necessarily ‘the way it’s done’ – why then did we decide to do it? How do people behave who do without chairs? When and why did we stop eating with our hands, what does that decision tell us about our attitude to food, and what difference has it made to our eating behaviour? How do we account for tablecloths, candles, serving spoons, wineglasses, and for ceremonials such as saying grace or toasting? Even though many people may eat formal sit-down dinners rarely or not at all, the fully deployed formal meal remains the paradigm from which other food events borrow their symbols, sequences, and categories. Picnics, airline dinners, cocktail parties, and fast-food breaks are among such variants discussed in the book. They reveal, in the very changes rung or in their choice of quotations from the original, many of our attitudes towards food rituals.

Restaurant meals are an immensely complex subject that I have had, regretfully, to treat only tangentially. For the most part, eating in a restaurant requires the same table manners as those expected at a fairly formal dinner at home. (Readers interested in pursuing the social issues raised by the topic might start with the books by J. Finkelstein, and G. Mars and M. Nicod, listed in the Bibliography.)

The reason why I chose to describe a formal meal is its fullness – it covers the broadest range of activities – and its intricacy. Informality, as the word tells us, presupposes at least some concept of a formal model, and informal behaviour is to be understood in the first place by considering the rules that it disregards, and then seeing what rules it invariably retains.

Chapter Five is a detailed treatment of bodily propriety when eating: control above all of the mouth, but of the rest of the body as well. It is at this point that pollution avoidances during meals are briefly discussed. The final postscript addresses itself to the so-called falling off of manners and ritual in modern Western society; it considers why we are so determined to be casual, and whether we are in fact ruder than we used to be.

The themes of violence and repression necessarily recur in the narrative. Table manners are social agreements; they are devised precisely because violence could so easily erupt at dinner. Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question. But intimations of greed and rage keep breaking in: many mealtime superstitions, for example, point to the imminent death of one of the guests. Eating is performed by the individual, in his or her most personal interest; eating in company, however, necessarily places the individual face to face with the group. It is the group that insists on table manners; ‘they’ will not accept a refusal to conform. The individual’s ‘personal interest’ lies therefore not only in ensuring his or her bodily survival, but also in pleasing, placating, and not frightening or disgusting the other diners. Edward Lear was extremely sensitive to the relationship between the eccentric individual and ‘them’, the unnamed others:

There was an Old Person of Buda

Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder;

Till at last, with a hammer,

They silenced his clamour,

By smashing that Person of Buda.

He was, ‘they’ will claim later, asking for it. The limerick, lighthearted as it is and hilarious in its finality, nevertheless delivers a sinister warning that is impossible to miss. Manners, and table manners in particular, are no laughing matter. Good manners help make our own lives easier because they set other people at ease. What other people consider to be bad manners – and politeness has everything to do with the perceptions of other people – never escape punishment, sooner or later, from ‘them’.

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE RITUALS OF DINNER

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Visser

THE RITUALS OF DINNER

The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction to the Second Edition

Introduction