Eating Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality

6. Artfulness, Solidarity, and Intimacy

6. Artfulness, Solidarity, and Intimacy Easy at first, the language of friendship Is, as we soon discover, Very difficult to speak well, a tongue With no cognates, no resemblance To the Galamatias of nursery and bedroom, Court rhyme or shepherd’s prose, And, unless often spoken, soon goes rusty. Distance and duties divide us, But absence will not seem an evil If it make our re-meeting A real occasion. Come when you can: Your room will be ready. W. H. Auden Once upon a time, I rambled, some neighbors included me in their circle of barter. They were in the habit of exchanging eggs and driving lessons, hand-knit sweaters and computer programming, plumbing and calligraphy. I accepted the generosity of their inclusion with gratitude. At first I felt that as a lawyer, I was worthless, that I had no barterable skills and nothing to contribute. What I came to realize, however, was that my value to the group was not calculated by the physical items I brought to it. These people included me because they wanted me to be part of their circle; they valued my participation apart from the material things I could offer. So I gave of myself to them, and they gave me 186 chapter 6 fruit cakes and dandelion wine and smoked salmon and, in their giving, their goods became provisions. Cradled in this community whose currency was a relational ethic, my stock in myself soared. My value depended on the glorious intangibility, the eloquent invisibility of my just being part of the collective—and in direct response I grew spacious and happy and gentle. —Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights In the 2008 election, the Obama campaign’s use of grassroots organizing techniques combined with technology like text messaging and regular emails was a notable and rather successful feature in mobilizing voters. One technique was an old familiar one—neighborhood house parties, where people gathered to discuss issues and swing voters—but they were promoted via the internet. As I followed the campaign, I was intrigued by the possibilities in these house parties—to what extent would they be mixed in terms of race, class, and gender? Would people stick to their own neighborhoods or would they be welcoming to others? How well would this technique work in fostering more activism? And, of course, most importantly, if you hosted a house party, would you provide food and if you did, what would you serve? Inviting strangers—or others of any sort—into the domestic environs is a highly political and personal act, one that connects to citizenship, rights, individualism, and subjecthood. Domestic sociability operates through ideals of hospitality, which is generally defined as the practice of welcoming in strangers and offering them food, shelter, and companionship.1 It is, in its ideal instance, the site where people encounter the other and literally familiarize that encounter through shared meals. According to Murray (1990), hospitality should be considered a key place to understand both membership and rights, especially the right to partake of food with a group. This is because hospitality acts as an ideal instance where rights are created for nonmembers of a group (17). In 1960, Riessman, Potter, and Watson suggested that the host was a vanishing role in American culture. While their prognosis was not entirely accurate , their descriptions of the various roles and selves created at a dinner party captures a large dynamic of sociability that remains consistent. They suggest that hospitality requires a dialectic where hosts and guests attempt to balance moments of uniqueness and connectedness, which, “if well realized at the party, creates three values which these authors see in sociability—namely artfulness, solidarity, and intimacy—and links the intimate occasion of the party to other realms of social life” (Olesen, 1993, 191). In searching for these values to appear in people’s descriptions, I was also looking for changing opportunities for equality to emerge from these occasions. Artfulness, Solidarity, and Intimacy 187 Television, magazines, and the popularity of cookbooks suggest that social gatherings of the sort I describe here are culturally supported through a taken-for-granted ideology. People I interviewed shared these beliefs. Even if they did not cook or had small homes, they brought soda to potlucks, adapted their homes to accommodate a few guests, and attended a variety of sociable events. Their efforts—what we could call “artfulness”—demonstrate that this...