Abstract
In Eating Together, Alice P. Julier shares findings from interviews of over 100 participants and 35 households of varying socioeconomic status to examine how the social uses of food both helps build relationships and contributes toward inequality. She discusses an array of topics from the history of hosting in America to the use of dinner parties to form fictive kinships and from entertaining as a tool to perform race, class, and gender, to whether potlucks are more practical and egalitarian than the formal dinner party. While the text is well done, the brevity of this review boils down my focus to only a few areas.
Julier’s description of how hosting evolved in the United States provides insight into why and how we entertain and which public figures have been most influential in shaping these practices. She introduces the reader to Emily Post, the early twentieth-century author of Etiquette, and media mogul Martha Stewart, both of whom were referenced most frequently by interviewees regarding ideas on domestic hospitality. Post’s Etiquette presented a “purchasable” form of class, race, and gender revolving around social interactions with food, with guidelines that emphasized exclusive female hosting responsibilities requiring hired help, preparation of food away from guests, avoidance of ethnic dishes, and adherence to a highly structured, six-course meal.
Julier explores how Martha Stewart and African American domestic expert B. Smith helped transform the formal dinner party into an event that encourages self-expression and diversity in menu planning. Despite this perceived shift in acceptability, Julier refers to Stewart’s incorporation of ethnic foods into her menus as “another party tool,” based on a white middle-class model that “appropriates what is useful from other cultural contexts and reconfigures them into the standard mold” (p. 52). She refers to this process as “conspicuous competence” (p. 88) or a display of socioeconomic status through one’s knowledge of, and ability to prepare, ethnic and “exotic” dishes. While conspicuous competence was consistently observable among white, married, heterosexual couples (particularly men) who she interviewed, African American interviewees either abstained from this practice or incorporated southern food from their upbringing into their personal versions of conspicuous competence.
Julier recognizes Stewart as instrumental in helping to transform the kitchen into an acceptable venue for cooking and socializing, a shift that proved useful for some transplanted middle-class interviewees who use kitchen entertaining as a way of making their guests feel more comfortable—fostering both intimacy and fictive kinship ties. Whether entertaining in the kitchen truly builds intimacy or familial bonds is questionable, as Julier notes that “what guests see is a highly staged version of the work, one where the cook is well-organized and knows that his or her activities are on display” (p. 71).
I found Julier’s exploration of gender and racial differences in cooking and hosting to be most interesting. She devotes portions to exploring how food-related social events are used as performances of gender, noting that men use dinner parties “as a stage for their gender performance as skilled cooks” (p. 91). Women gain less attention through cooking at food-related functions, as such duties are expected of them rather than celebrated. Among the heterosexual couples, dinner parties depended on “the labor of women, whose job it is to make the whole process appear seamless and invisible” (p. 63): performing housekeeping tasks before and after the event, creating and maintaining friendships, coordinating invitations based on shared interests, accounting for dietary preferences, and ensuring a congenial atmosphere.
Julier also found that men and women rarely interfere with each other’s gender performance in their shared production of hospitality. Nonetheless, a greater degree of equality was attainable for affluent couples who were able to “buy out” of domestic labor through increased reliance on commercial goods and services. Likewise, professional women with greater socioeconomic resources felt secure to challenge traditional gender roles by designating certain hosting tasks for guests and choosing less labor-intensive events such as buffets and potlucks over formal dinner parties.
I enjoyed Eating Together as a student of dietetics and as someone interested in hosting and attending food-related functions. Julier carefully investigates various aspects of social dining, providing numerous ethnographic examples to aid in exploring each topic. My sole critique of Eating Together is that the incorporation of a more ethnically and racially diverse selection of participants would have provided a more comprehensive picture of American food culture. Nonetheless, the text is a valuable resource for students and scholars of the social sciences, nutritional sciences, and various other disciplines. Because food plays a vital role in all of our lives, I recommend this book for anyone wishing to stew in the knowledge of how we use food as a tool for self-expression, class performance, and kinship building.