Eating Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality

4. Sweetening the Pot

4. Sweetening the Pot The Shifting Social Landscape of Sociable Meals Modern society has more than enough devices for keeping people apart. . . . When we meet, therefore, with the express purpose of socializing, we cannot afford to be distant. —Margaret Visser A Few Friends over for Dinner It was often difficult to categorize people’s activities, even when labels like “dinner party” and “potluck” exist. Unless the occasion clearly fit a specific template, most notably as a dinner party or a potluck, people did not use any overarching terms to describe them. Although I was relying on people’s own narratives of event, in their telling, they had trouble coming up with labels themselves. Because I was interested in letting people define terms, I generally did not push them to categorize events unless the conversation warranted it (for example, if comparing one event to another, or if they labeled one kind of party and not another). Perhaps people are not generally asked to give accounts about the form of these activities. They talked easily about the people they know, the conversations held, and what the food was like. However, it was less likely for them to describe the form of the events as well as much of the invisible work that went into creating them. This may be reflective of the way contemporary Americans rely on a discourse of friendship that considers it a “voluntary institution,” less subject to rules and definitions (Jerrome, 1984; Allan, 1979, 1989; Rawlins 1992, 2009). Given the place of such events and relationships, having friends over for food is an activity that lacks a consistent vocabulary of motives. I found that even through my own participation and observation, there were times when such events defied neat categorization. I dissect the following example to illustrate Sweetening the Pot 105 how the symbolic nature of such events and descriptions are not fixed and are often complicated.1 Not long ago, my family and I were invited to dinner at someone else’s home. Gina and Sam are a married couple with two small children. They are, by observation, middle- to upper-middle-class. One mentioned going to school for a master’s degree, the other runs a small business. We met through our children’s activities and so our talk often centered on being parents. These conversations often touched on what could be characterized as upper-middle-class cultural capital, discussing books, films, and articles in the New York Times. Both are knowledgeable about local politics, make frequent business and family trips to Boston and New York, and are, in their own words, “interested in food.”2 At one point, Gina said, “We want to have a few friends over for dinner” and mentioned that they were inviting “some other people we haven’t had over in a while,” as well as my family, who had never eaten at their house. The week of the dinner I called Gina and asked if we could be of any help or bring anything. I did this unreflectively, but later on, as I wrote notes about the event, I wondered what prompted me to offer to help. My own cumulative experience as a guest and host, aspects of what might be called my habitus, made the action almost a routine gesture. One could say that my response was shaped by some specifics of cultural capital, my own interpretations of middle-class manners from family and schooling, which decree that calling and offering to “help” was appropriate and normative. But from another observer’s perspective, indeed from Emily Post’s standards, this offer might seem presumptuous or ignorant. After all, in the cultural template of formal sociable events, the guest is never responsible for anything other than gratitude and good conversation. Perhaps my presumption was based on an implicit understanding of the event as a more informal and intimate gathering. Such an understanding would have to come from a more-than-superficial knowledge of the people organizing the event. However, if asked, I would say that I did not know Gina “well,” although during the time frame when this interaction occurred, we saw each other at least twice a week during our children’s activities. We shared bits and pieces of each other’s biographies, mostly about the transition to and experience of parenthood, but very little of the “before” stories. In fact, I read the invitation to dinner as her desire to “get to know us better” and involve my family...