Table Talk

Building Democracy One Meal at a Time

Janet A. Flammang

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252098550
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

The civic virtues of a seat at the table

Etiquette books insist that we never discuss politics during a meal. In Table Talk, Janet A. Flammang offers a polite rebuttal, presenting vivid firsthand accounts of people's lives at the table to show how mealtimes can teach us the conversational give-and-take foundational to democracy. Delving into the ground rules about listening, sharing, and respect that we obey when we break bread, Flammang shows how conversations and table activities represent occasions for developing our civil selves. If there are cultural differences over practices--who should speak, what behavior is acceptable, what topics are off limits, how to resolve conflict--our exposure to the making, enforcement, and breaking of these rules offers a daily dose of political awareness and growth. Political table talk provides a forum to practice the conversational skills upon which civil society depends. It also ignites the feelings of respect, trust, and empathy that undergird the idea of a common good that is fundamental to the democratic process.

Chapter One

Setting the Table

Table Reservations

We begin with some words of caution about how to interpret what goes on at tables. The first caution is about jumping to conclusions. In recent years, many commentators have waxed effusively about the seemingly miraculous effects of family meals in reducing teens’ at-risk behavior, promoting healthy eating, and fostering children's cognitive and emotional development. In interpreting surveys, we must be mindful of potential problems in sampling, question wording, and inferring causation when it is not warranted. People also have a tendency to tell researchers whatever makes them look good, rather than what really is the case, for example, exaggerating how frequently they vote or have family meals. As one anthropologist observes, “In ethnographic interviews in the United States, when I ask people to describe ‘real’ family meals, most can immediately recite some variation of the normative ideal of family commensality. Only later in the interview, when we are sharing personal family stories, are they willing to talk about the daily reality of their personal experiences, which rarely live up to the ideal.”¹ As we shall see, others have found the same discrepancy.

A second caution is about the image that comes to mind when we say “family meal.” It can mean anything from sitting together at a table at the same time with no electronic distractions to each family member microwaving his or her own meal and retreating to different rooms to watch TV and read email. It might be shared by extended kin, blended families, and homosexual couples. Anthropologists have a long history of studying “commensality,” a term that means the sharing of meals, derived from the Latin com “with” + mensa “table.” Although eating appears to be a universal form of social life, the nuclear family is not the typical unit of commensality. Around the world, most people eat together in age groups, in gender-segregated nonfamily groups, and in family groups both smaller and larger than nuclear families. Married couples frequently live in different households and eat separately. “Even when they live together, men and women may regularly eat with other groups. Children do not always eat with two or even one parent. And in many cultures the numerical majority of meals are eaten in nonfamily groups, causally on the street, in crowds, while working, or in multifamily groups. More people eat on the ground than at a table, and meals are often casual and utilitarian rather than formal, elaborate, or ceremonial.”² The image of a heterosexual middle-class couple with two children sitting at a dining-room table with pleasant conversation is only one incarnation of a family meal. We will hear stories of many kinds of family meals and focus on those that include tables, mindful that this is not a universal practice.

A third caution is to remember that commensality is an opportunity for, not a guarantee of, conversation, civility, and beneficial effects on children. What matters is not so much the frequency of family meals but rather what happens during them. We want to know the extent to which commensality is a training ground for democracy, an occasion where the voiceless are given a voice. We will give particular attention to children at the table because the process of giving them a voice at the home table is very similar to the processes that give adolescents and adults a political voice as well. Many studies about the frequency and nature of family meals have concluded that family meals have a beneficial effect on children and adolescents. But given hectic schedules and conflicting routines, it is difficult for respondents to recall the exact nature of mealtime experiences. “The categories usually given on surveys about family meals are so broad and ambiguous that they can be interpreted many ways by respondents. On a survey form, a meal where everyone shares jokes and tells stories is the same as one where everyone stares at their plate bolting food silently under the glare of an angry father.”³

A fourth caution is that even when family meals have a positive effect, it may be short-lived, and, furthermore, family meals may be a proxy for other features of the family environment that might be the real cause. In their summary of academic studies, two sociologists write that adolescents who shared meals with their parents scored better on a range of “well-being indicators” concerning mental health, substance abuse, and delinquency. However, family dinners’ associations with these indicators did not persist into adulthood. “Eating together may protect children from depression and risky behaviors by providing a regular and comforting context to check in with parents about their day-to-day activities and to connect with them emotionally. The ability to manage a regular family dinner, however, may also be facilitated by family resources, such as time and money, or it may simply be a proxy for other, more affective, dimensions of the family environment. Indeed, we found more frequent family dinners among families with both biological parents present, a nonemployed mother, and higher income.”⁴ The positive effects of family meals may change with maturation and have many causes.

Of course, academic researchers are not the only ones to weigh in on the beneficial effects of family meals. Many best-selling works on this topic resonate with the public. One of the most influential is Laurie David's The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids One Meal at a Time. She is a writer and climate-change activist who produced the Academy Award–winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. She was motivated to write her book because she thinks that family meals are important, even though her childhood experiences of them were disastrous. Her case illustrates that accurately telling a researcher that one sits down for a home-cooked meal five nights a week might conceal an inconvenient truth.

Honestly, my childhood family dinner experiences didn't serve as very good role models for success. We had a five-night-a-week home-cooked sit-down meal, but I barely remember a family dinner that didn't end with someone crying. Usually it was my older sister or my mother. Occasionally it was me. I dreaded many of those meals. They were something to be gotten through quickly, with the least amount of emotional bruising. As an adolescent, my prevailing thought was always, Who is going to go down tonight? followed by, How fast can I get excused from the table, out the door, and back on my bicycle? That was not history worth repeating in my own home.⁵

Laurie David was able to put family meals on her table thanks to the assistance of her cook. When we talk about tables and food, a fifth caution is to be aware of the often-hidden labor involved. While the relationship between David and her cook appears to be one of mutual respect and affection, throughout our history, creating civilized meals frequently entailed uncivil treatment of servants and slaves. As one African American cook recounted,

It was different when company was there. That's when I was really treated as a servant. Mrs. Rawlings wanted everything to be just right and would sometimes bark orders at me throughout such a visit. I remember once I was slow (so she thought) bringing hot biscuits to the table. Mrs. Rawlings yelled for me in front of the guests. Then, as I was coming through the swinging door, she jumped up from her seat and snatched the biscuits out of my hands. “Why the hell didn't you hurry up with the food?” she hollered. She wouldn't have done that if she hadn't had company, I believe.⁶

Caution 6: the kitchen table is not always a rosy place to talk about one's day and expect a respectful response. Many African American cooks survived by “becoming two persons” and not speaking out. “Managing the relationship with her employer was a means by which a domestic worker gained some control over her work. One way that African American women mastered the situation was by cultivating dissemblance, a careful concealment of what she actually thought and felt.” One cook put it this way: “They may keep you from speaking out, but they can't keep you from thinking. It's something on the inside. And you learn how to be two persons to live through it all.”⁷

For a seventh caution, table conflict results not only from class and race tensions but also from cultural stereotypes and prejudice. At one Christmas dinner, food writer Kim Severson was pleased that her parents had finally come to accept their children's gay and lesbian identities, but cultural and religious differences made for a tense evening. Her mother liked to have a lot of people around the table; she just wanted everyone to be together. Severson brought her Jewish girlfriend, Katia, and her brother brought his Muslim boyfriend. After two martinis, her father turned to his son's boyfriend and asked, “So, why are your people flying planes into buildings?” Severson felt like the snow had suddenly stopped falling, a chill had settled over the table, and the candles had gone out. Her mother asked him not to talk about that because it was Christmas. Her brother's boyfriend said it was fine and launched into “a long, historical lecture that begins with a deconstruction of Christianity and ends, essentially, with an argument that makes it all the Jews’ fault.” Katia got visibly upset and left the table to wash the dishes. Her mother remarked, “Well, all of that happened a long time ago. Besides, it's Christmas.” Severson eventually married Katia and had a daughter, and her brother broke up with his boyfriend and became her daughter's special protector. Her father never did grasp the finer points of Middle East politics, and her mother continued to put out the Spode china every Christmas.⁸

Parents face daily dilemmas not only about who is welcome at family tables and what topics are appropriate for discussion but also about what children should eat. They have an obligation to raise healthy children, and many use some form of forced consumption. This creates a dilemma for advocates of democratic tables. Caution 8: Children are not very likely to value tables as places for civility and democracy if they associate them with nausea and vomiting, which was found to be the case in a study of college students. Two thirds of them reported having had at least one forced consumption episode in their childhood. The most common type involved an authority figure (e.g., parent or teacher) forcing them to consume a novel, disliked, or aversive food, resulting in interpersonal conflict, negative affect, feeling a lack of control and helplessness, and an unwillingness to eat the target food today.

The three most common justifications were healthy food (“it's good for you”), variety in diet (“try something new”), and avoid wastefulness…. The most commonly used method [of coercion] was a threat, and most of these involved negative punishment (e.g. “you cannot leave the table until you finish;” “you cannot have desert until you finish your vegetable”). The second coercion technique involved making the target food more appetizing, and was usually accompanied either through the authority figure eating the food and proclaiming its appeal, or adding flavoring to the target (e.g. butter, ketchup). A third technique involved guilt-inducing efforts…. Wastefulness guilt involved either effort wastefulness (e.g. “Your father worked really hard to cook this meal for you”), financial wastefulness (e.g. “I spent good money for this meal”), or food wastefulness (e.g. “Think of all the starving children in (name of third-world country) that would love to have this meal”). Emotional guilt was related to the child's health (e.g. “We worry about your health when you do not eat”). Another means of coercing consumption involved the opportunity to earn rewards (e.g. dessert)….

[Some] respondents reported that they experienced ridicule because they would not consume the target food, most commonly in the form of being called “childish” or a “baby.” Additional forms of ridicule involved questioning one's health, masculinity, or patriotism (one respondent indicated they were called “un-American” because they would not consume a hot dog on the 4th of July.) [Forms of punishment included] staying at the table, going to bed without any dinner, spankings, [and being] deceived into eating the food, either through a lie about the true nature of the food (e.g. telling the child that the liver dinner was really chicken) or preparing the target food in another dish (e.g. cooking pieces of liver in pancakes)…. Fifty-two individuals reported that they cried, 59 reported that they experienced nausea, and 21 reported vomiting.⁹

Caution 9: assume that there will be sibling rivalry at the table. Parents have adopted various techniques for dealing with it—from minimizing it by meting out equal portions to encouraging it to prepare children for a dog-eat-dog world. George Howe Colt provides some amusing examples from his research about brothers. He grew up with three brothers, and there were nightly battles over who got the largest hamburger, the most cherries in his fruit cocktail, or the biggest slice of pie. His mother's attempts to forestall quarrels by serving identical portions were in vain. On one “pancake night” in James Joyce's household, all four brothers simultaneously dove for the last pancake on the platter, and James got there first. He ran up and down the stairs, claiming to his pursuers that he had already eaten it. Once they were convinced, he removed the pancake from his pocket and ate it up to spite them. The Marx brothers—Chico, Harpo, Groucho, and Gummo—grew up in a crowded apartment in New York City, where they shared a bed more peacefully than their meals. “‘There was generally some kind of a brawl at the dinner table over who would get what,’ said Groucho, who recalled reaching for the last roll on the plate only to see a cleaver, wielded by the normally equable Harpo, slam down within an inch of his hand.” Their father organized competition between his sons to encourage Darwinian resilience. He set out three sweet rolls each morning; “as soon as a brother had wolfed down his breakfast, he was permitted to grab a roll, leaving the slowest eater empty-handed.” There were countless fistfights between Joe Kennedy Jr. and his younger brother Jack. At one dinner, Jack grabbed Joe's slice of chocolate pie, gobbled it up, and ran outside and down the beach. Joe chased him, and Jack leapt into the bay. When he was forced to emerge, cold and dripping, the two brothers fought it out on shore. Colt observes that he and his brothers still eat as if they were in a race, but at least they no longer fight over food. “Of course this may be because for some time now, we four brothers are likely to be the ones cooking,” he comments. “Not only do we love working in the kitchen together, but this way we can also make sure there will be more than enough food for us all.”¹⁰

The image of four brothers cooking family meals raises eyebrows, hence caution 10: table activities are gendered. As we will see in greater detail later, women typically do most of the food work and the conversation work at tables in the United States. Men are increasingly pitching in, but table work is still “women's work.” An anthropological study of the “food rules” of American college students reveals how table activities are gendered. Mothers were associated with cooking, love, and nurturance. As one student said, “Another way I think of food is ‘home’ and ‘love.’ When my mom cooks something special, I know it's because she loves us and wants the best for our family.”¹¹ “Bad mothers” could not pull off a peaceful family meal after a hard day at work, and they resented ungrateful children. As one student recounted:

It started again tonight—I don't know why I expected tonight to be any different. The dinner table becomes a battleground every night around 5 pm. I'm not home very often for dinner, but when I am it's brutal. My mother is the worst. Every night at dinner we hear about how hard she works and how rotten we kids are…. Then she starts complaining how tired she is when she comes home from work and how she “puts herself out” to make dinner for us, how ungrateful we are because we don't eat it. How does she expect us to eat after she's been bitching at us through the whole meal?¹²

Men were often the arbiters of women's diets. Women repeatedly said that eating in the presence of men was intimidating. On dates, they ate sparsely lest they be judged “pigs.” Many wrote about how their boyfriends or fathers harassed them about being overweight and eating excessively. One female student reported,

Ever since 3rd grade my father and I would always argue bitterly about how much I weigh. He would always try to prevent me from eating certain things. It has always upset me that my own father could not accept me the way I was. I know he loves me but I wish he didn't feel like he had to make me change…. Even though he made an attempt to make dinner times comfortable, I still remembered how he felt about my weight and I tended to eat less in front of my father, then I would eat more in secrecy, late at night, at stores, at fast-food restaurants, or over at friends’ houses. This resulted in me gaining more weight. I resented my father putting restrictions on what I ate. Therefore, I ate more behind his back.”¹³

Given the potential for conflict at the table, some families opt out of the fray by turning on the television. Caution 11: While this is an understandable way to keep the peace, especially for exhausted parents working long hours, it means a lost opportunity to deal with conflict. “Many families watch television during meals; according to a Center for Disease Control report, 46% of families interviewed had a television in the area where they commonly ate such as a dining room or kitchen. While some parents considered having television on during mealtimes an educational opportunity (i.e., watching the news or Jeopardy), parents of young children (less than seven years) remarked that having the television on was a way to avoid conflict at the table.”¹⁴ Conflict avoidance, however understandable, is an abrogation of adult responsibility to teach children conflict-resolution skills, which are essential for civility and democracy.

Final caution: Gathering to share food can be a civil occasion, but it can also be a place for cruelty, as school children know only too well, when their food differs from the norm, or when there is a stigma attached to “poor people's food.” One study found that British children were teased, ridiculed, and bullied when they brought something other than a sandwich, such as cold cooked food, a salad, chicken and rice, or Indian or Chinese food. One Chinese boy who brought chicken legs was called “chicken boy.” Children in a school with a high percentage of free meals were embarrassed when they consumed products from a discount supermarket, known to the children for being cheap. One child dreaded trips to this store: “I have to hide if I see anyone from school. I will be screaming because I don't want to go.”¹⁵

In summary, it is important to keep in mind some words of caution about how to interpret what goes on at tables. People tend to idealize and fudge the facts about what goes on at family meals. “Families” are varied in their composition and mealtime practices. “Meals” may or may not involve sitting in the same room eating the same food with people, with diners giving one another their undivided attention. Someone has to work to get meals on the table, and their labor may be appreciated, or it may be hidden, devalued, and unappreciated. Tabl...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Setting the Table
• Chapter 2. Conversations and Narratives
• Chapter 3. Tables at Home
• Chapter 4. Tables Away from Home
• Chapter 5. Tables and Conflict
• Chapter 6. Civic Engagement and Diplomacy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author