Chapter 4.

Sharing a meal

Unconsciousness is one of the most surprising things about everyday life. We don’t mean that people
are asleep or drugged, but that they do amazingly complex things without being aware of it. And even
more remarkably, they watch other people do things quite differently without really thinking about it.
Every day we take part in an elaborate choreography, as intricate as the plot of any novel, where we
coordinate our actions with other people who are acting differently, without ever having to figure out
what we are doing and why. Humans spend a large amount of their time on “automatic pilot” letting
their unconscious mind drive their routine actions, while their conscious mind is free for the “important”
stuff, which usually means our conversations with other people, our immediate emotions like worries,
fears, or satisfaction, or the gadgets that entertain us like books, cell phones, or the TV.

Think about the act of driving a car. We have to spend at least a small part of our conscious mind to
traffic, finding our way, and keeping an eye out for the unexpected. But most of the really complicated
stuff, like keeping track of cars behind us, keeping the right speed, and operating gears and turn signals,
is mostly automatic. This frees up our mind for talking, listening to music, thinking about work or play, or
even more complex tasks like listening to an audiobook, a language lesson, or reading (hopefully not
sending!) text messages. Some people are better at ‘multitasking’ but most everyone does it as a
completely routine part of human living.

There are some situations that make us conscious of the things that are usually taken for granted,
invisible and automatic. If we go and live in another culture, we might find ourselves not even sure how
to walk in public places or greet people. Studies have shown that in big cities, pedestrians master an
intricate ballet that allows them to move on crowded streets without constantly bumping into others.
Hang a camera pointing downwards over the entrance to a New York department store, for example,
and you will see people literally dancing with each other, to keep the doors from hitting people, and
regulating the flow of people in and out without people every having to talk to one another or even
pause their conversations. And they never have to even pause or think about what they are doing. But
take a person to a foreign city, and they may find themselves frustrating or upset. They might find
themselves stuck in place holding a door open, or constantly bumping into people because they are
moving left to walk past someone (as in the USA), instead of to the right (as in the UK).

When I first visited Sweden, I often felt strangely exposed when walking in urban areas, not exactly in
danger, but definitely uncomfortable. After a few days the feeling faded, but on my second visit it came
back and I started to pay attention to how Swedes acted in public places, trying to find out what they
might be doing differently from people in the North American cities that I was used to. Once I really
started to pay attention, I realized that Swedes were following different rules about gaze – what to look
at and for how long. In the USA we are strict gaze-averters, meaning that within a range where you can
clearly see another person’s face, if that person looks at you, then you are supposed to immediately
look away. Americans are so good at doing this, we can often look away from the other person a few
milliseconds before they look at us, so even if we were staring at a person, they will never actually see
us do it. Nobody ever taught us how to do this, but most people become experts well before they
become adults, with no more prompting than our parents telling us “it is not polite to stare” when we
are children. The real rule is that it is OK to look right at someone if they are far away from you – you
only have to pretend you are not looking at them when they get closer.
But in Sweden they do things very slightly differently. They still avert their gaze, but the ‘critical distance’
is shorter than it is in the USA. This means you can get closer to someone in Sweden and still look at
them, without having to look away if they look back at you. I have not been out measuring distances,
but it seems to no more than two or three meters of difference in the way the rule applies, perhaps the
difference between 18 and 20 meters. What this means is that if you are from the USA walking on the
street in Stockholm, and looking at people, there will always be a few people who look right back at you,
instead of looking away, as you expect them to do based on your idea of proper distance. And even
though you have never thought about ‘gaze rules,’ you may find yourself uncomfortable, and feeling like
the crowd around you is a bit threatening or intrusive.

This example brings out another regular and predictable quality of everyday life – that it has mostly
been ignored by scientists despite the fact that this kind of behaviour is common, and that it exerts
strong effects on our emotions. So it is doubly invisible. It is so much a part of our abilities to function in
social life that we cannot see it, like the air we breathe. Everyday life seems to be equally invisible to the
social scientists who are trying to understand human capabilities and social life.

In one of very few studies of gaze, published by two sociologists in 1965, says that couples of the
opposite sex are more likely to avert their gaze, and tend to send shorter glances in each other’s
direction (Argyle and Dean 1965). Age and social standing – signalled perhaps by dress or posture –
probably make a difference too. Applying these rules is part of the art of living; some people refine their
practice and become experts and adepts who can use and manipulate the rules in performances that are
as deep and artistic as anything you will see on the stage. The real artists work out the rules for
themselves, and recognize that a real virtuoso can improvise within the rules, bend them and shape
them in way that is really closer to playing than it is to working. Here is some advice for the foreigner
who wants to flirt with someone in the Paris Metro (subway), part of a longer blog entry on the
“unspoken rules of Paris”:

If ever the eye contact is initiated by the other person e.g. that cute one in the metro,
then you are given a laissez-passer. You get to look back once. After this, it gets tricky.
You don’t want to seem stalkerly by sitting next to the person or even worse, getting off
at the same station. What comes next is a mixture of chance and fast social skills.

Since this is a game of turns and you have made the last move, all you can do is hope
that the other person chooses to exit the train by the door nearest you. You also have to
hope that he or she is getting off before you. If not, it wasn’t meant to be. Once close to
the door wait for eye contact once more but don’t make it too obvious. Look around
you and make it seem like your eyes casually passed by his/hers. If this happens then it
is your turn again! Ask a question concerning the metro or the next station. You don’t
want it to be too obvious because one never wants to appear a Tourist. At the same
time, it has to be something that is not answered by a simple yes or no. Be discreet, and
gauging by the reaction, strike up a conversation or say merci and sit back down.1

It is much easier to find all kinds of advice about how to avoid eye contact with the wrong people,
beggars and muggers for example. It turns out that you can get in a lot of trouble if you do not know the
subtle rules and the hidden normality of everyday life. So we are programmed from early in our life to
learn those rules, and figure out how to fit in. This is yet another common property of everyday life –
even though it is often invisible, it can be very dangerous to your well-being if you cannot or will not
learn the code quickly. In most cities, gazing to hard or long at the wrong person in the wrong part of
town can get you killed.

I can testify from my own experience that keeping all these unconscious rules and behaviors going is a
lot of work. We rarely appreciate how much work is required though, because we do it so automatically.
But a few years ago, as part of a treatment for sustained migraine headaches, I spent several days in a
hospital being treated with some powerful drugs. When I came out, I found that I had lost the memory
all of my automatic routines. It took me about ten minutes to brush my teeth, because I had to break it
down into steps and think through each one. What do I do now? Find the toothpaste. How much
toothpaste? Where should I squeeze the tube? Should I start on top or bottom? Front or back? Getting
out of bed and dressed to go out took me hours. Fortunately the effects faded in a few days, but while
they lasted I started to get a glimmer of understanding of what it must be like to have a brain
impairment like some of the people the neurologist Oliver Sachs writes about.

Family meals

One of the first sets of rules we start learning from birth, even before we learn to control our bowels, is
how to eat, a task of almost endless complexity and diversity. By the time we are five, we have learned
the names of hundreds of foods and dishes, we have developed a set of likes and dislikes, and we have
been told which foods are good for us, and which are ‘bad,’ though we might already have our own
ideas about those values. We know something about how to eat with others (don’t grab food from your
brother’s plate!”) and what kinds of foods come first and last in a meal (don’t eat that until you finish
your broccoli!”). What is truly amazing about all this learning is that we are learning more than rules,
we are learning moral values, and not just about how we should treat our family members. The values
we learn eating with our family include basic things like generosity and sharing, discipline and respect
for authority, and more abstract things like religion and politics.

The family table is where we learn to recognize these moral values, and see how they are supposed to
work. But at the same meal we also learn that there is a huge distance between the way things are
supposed to be and the way things really happen. So for example, we may learn that we are supposed
to love and help our younger sister, but we may also feel like she is a greedy little brat who needs to be
kicked under the table when she eats with her mouth open and makes slobbering noises.

Everyone has the common experience of sharing meals with family and friends. This chapter invites
students to look more closely at the power relations and gender roles that often give daily meals a ritual
nature. How do two parents from different family backgrounds arrive at a common set of dining
customs? How does the family reconcile cultural, class, and personal differences during special meals
like Christmas and Thanksgiving? The chapter discusses the thin boundary between the real and the
ideal, and the subtle ways that conflict can be concealed and channelled, creating ‘zones of avoidance’
and ‘taboo topics’ as danger zones that must be navigated.

Personal experiences of family meals are a good place to start, especially because students can
discover a great deal of variety and differences among their classmates and friends, teaching them a
great deal about how the façade of normality conceals so much diversity. Students are guided to think
about variation at different levels of analysis, and to think about the stages of creating a meal, from
cooking, through serving and eating, and to disposal and cleanup. At a higher level meals can be ways of
understanding larger cultural themes like formality and informality, authority and power, and the way
ideas about morality and order are both made and violated in daily life. This brings class, politics and
gender into the discussion of everyday life.

One of the most difficult things in teaching cultural analysis is to get students to see the cultural
order in the daily and mundane details of daily life. To make this step, students will be invited to
compare their own findings with descriptions of meals from classic ethnographies, for example You Just
Don’t Understand (Tannen, USA), Cultural Misunderstandings (Carroll, France) and First Fieldwork
(Andersen, Denmark). Meals also present an opportunity for students to think more deeply about
cultural reproduction. What exactly do children learn from their early experiences of meals, and how
does this lead to both change and continuity in culture? How can there be so much diversity in actual
practices among families, within a culture that is imagined as homogenous unit?

My interest in this topic was sparked by preliminary research on middle class parents' struggles with
their 'picky eater' children over getting them to eat. Besides narrating the way the dinner table became
battleground with their own children, many parents also recalled their own childhood family meals. I
was truly unprepared and shocked at the waves of angst and pain which emerged from peoples
narratives. From this very narrow focus on family struggles, I expand the discussion to the larger
question of why people in developed countries are eating fewer home-cooked meals, dining together
less often, and eating more ready-cooked and fast food. This is a response to Sidney Mintz’ recent
challenge to food scholars to think seriously about why industrial food has had such a broad historical
appeal, despite its dire health consequences and poor gustatory quality. I suggest that various kinds of
convenience foods have the potential to solve social problems at the dinner table and prevent food
fighting. Meals are not always happy. People may know quite well that the food they are eating is
unhealthy and relatively tasteless, but for many that is a price they willingly pay, faced with the
alternatives

Almost everyone has some kind of happy memory of a family meal. In our mind’s eye we can see the
family passing food, smiling, exchanging news about their day, and sharing in one of life’s most basic
comforts. Yet I recently interviewed a young man who described his dysfunctional family by talking
about how horrible it was to eat with his divorced father and stepmother. He said his father watched his
every move, and criticized his posture, his table manners, and the way he chewed his food. He had to
stay at the table, listening to his father’s endless bragging until he was excused, and then he had to
clean up the kitchen and do the dishes by himself, as a lesson to him, a retaliation for bad grades at
school which his father saw as a sign of laziness.

At the family dinner table, the gap between the real and the imagined is an invitation for an
anthropologist of everyday life. Family dining is charged with moral meaning, laden with family history
and the complexity of all human relationships. Every home is an arena where different moral
sensibilities clash. The family meal is a good place to start looking at the relationship between micro-
and macro- scales of culture, a place to demonstrate how we can move from seemingly trivial or unique
events to important cultural, economic and political issues. Beneath the shared experiences of family
meals we can find endless complexity, variation, and significance.

The Clash of Two Traditions

When two people come together to share a meal, they carry entire sets of expectations about behavior,
unconscious rules about space, time and order. All families have their histories, lore and traditions, and
every generation has conflicts over class, cultural difference, and family roles that get worked out at the
dinner table. How do you start the meal? Do you wait for everyone to sit down and fill a plate, or do you
‘dig in’ as soon as you have something on your plate? Should you cut up your food with a knife before
you start to eat, or cut it as you go? When can you use your hands? What kinds of topics should you
avoid talking about at the table? Because each family has its own expectations, when people from
different families share a dinner table, they are likely to have many misunderstandings.

My wife Anne is a fourth-generation Texan whose grandfather was a roustabout in the oil fields. I am a
Jewish Yankee son of a writer and an artist. When the two of us met in a mosquito-infested swamp in
Belize, we were both 35, old enough to have developed our own ideas about how to run a household.
Our first years of marriage were full of collisions between her way and my way. Both of us are stubborn
and used to being in charge. Anne manages a crew of 35 students and archaeologists in a jungle camp
every year, so she knows how to give orders. Still, over the years we have usually blended things
together to make “our way” of keeping house. Except when it comes to serving meals.

We have arguments whenever we invite people over for dinner, and by the time people arrive we are
often furious with each other. I get mad because I want Anne to focus on the menu, the ingredients,
and the recipes, but she is more concerned with how the house looks, how the table is set, and with
putting out unreasonable amounts of drinks and snacks. From her point of view, I don’t care about the
most important aspect of a meal - how it is presented. The table should be beautifully set with a
tablecloth, place setting, wine and water glasses, candles and flowers. And there should be bowls and
platters heaped with generous amounts of food. I am much more concerned with what we are cooking,
with the menu and the raw materials. I want to present something unusual or fancy for a main course,
with some familiar side dishes, and I want to use fresh local ingredients as much as possible. As a frugal
chef, I don’t like to waste anything, and I want to compost anything I cannot use.

So why can’t we just work together in our own domains, and have peace and harmony at the table? In
our first years of marriage we sometimes got to angry with each other that we could barely sit down and
eat when guests finally arrived. It took us a long time to recognize that our clashes were caused by our
different expectations, by the different ways we had been brought up, with very different kinds of
meanings attached to meals. We had very different ideas about the way people should care for each
other, about the moral meanings of food.

When I was growing up, my father often set the table, while my mother dominated the kitchen. When
the meal was ready, she stood over the stove, and the family trooped in carrying their plates, holding
them out to be filled. You could ask for a little more or less of something, but it took a good argument to
refuse one of her dishes. If you wanted seconds, you went to get it yourself, though there might not be
anything left in the pan. Sometimes she kept cooking right through dinner, especially something like
potato pancakes that should be served freshly cooked. Then she would bring the pan into the dining
room to serve directly onto our plates; serving us and being in control were her interpretation of how to
be a good Jewish mother, something she had learned from her own mother and grandmother.

Anne was never very comfortable eating with my family and my mother could be manipulative and
ungenerous with her children’s spouses, at the same time she doted on her grandchildren. Even when
my mother served a big holiday meal, and put platters of food out on the table, Anne was
uncomfortable with the way people grabbed things or asked people to pass them in a kind of random
assault on the food, which we all ate too quickly.

The way my family ate always seemed perfectly normal to me, but after Anne complained a few times I
began to see how the way my mother served food was rarely fair. She would sometimes save you your
favorite piece of chicken, or she might give you the back and neck. Sometimes her in-laws got less food
than her children. There could be all kinds of messages in each ambiguous portion. Did she give you a
small piece of meat because she thinks you’re too fat? Is she waiting for you to ask for more so she can
criticize you later? My mother’s way of serving is a lesson in the power of food in the family.

My mother’s cooking sent other messages too. As an active artist and businesswoman, she was no
housewife, so she did not make a lot of elaborate or complicated dishes. At the same time she was a
well-traveled gourmet who attended cooking school in Paris in her youth, so she liked to experiment
with ethnic food. Her cooking said she loved cultural diversity and quality, but not ostentatious luxury.
Her parents had escaped grinding poverty in the slums of New York, and this rise from hunger gave food
some very complicated and conflicted meanings for her generation. Jews who lived through World War
II are especially aware of how easy it is to lose everything and fall back into poverty, or worse. The
lesson I learned from her table was that food is precious, and never to be wasted, especially while there
are still so many poor people in the world. We may be well-off but we remember our roots, so we don’t
waste.

It has taken me a lifetime of reflection to get this far in understanding how food was served in my
parents’ house, and those memories are all tinged with sadness now that both parents are gone. I don’t
think any of this would have occurred to me if things were not so different in Anne’s family. She learned
to eat at a table surrounded by abundance. Instead of helping plates in the kitchen, her mother put all
the food out on the table on platters and boards, in bowls, gravy dishes and saucers, before calling
people in to eat. The first part of the meal was devoted to an elaborate round of passing and helping,
made more complicated by a forest of pitchers, utensils, and condiments. The meal was constantly
interrupted by requests to pass this and that, and occasional trips back to the kitchen to refill even half-
empty serving dishes.

There were always abundant leftovers. During an extended holiday or family visit the refrigerator and
freezer got so full of Tupperware, bowls, jars and bags that it threatened to topple out when the door
was opened. Serving and storing the meal required an enormous supply of cutlery and dishware, some
of it family heirlooms that had to be hand washed and dried instead of going into the dishwasher.

My mother-in-law had nothing like my mother’s constant control and supervision over the meal, but
there was still an elaborate and subtle politics to serving food from platter to plate. You didn’t want to
seem greedy, so it was best to take less than you want and leave large or choice pieces for someone
else. You had to take at least a little bit of everything to show your appreciation, and you don’t want it
to look like you don’t like the food. Then there was always a mock argument between cook and guest.
The cook would say something like “I knew you would like the potatoes! They’re my special recipe. Have
some more.” The diner might say something like “Oh they were wonderful, but I am absolutely stuffed.”
The cook could continue to press potatoes again, while the diner either gives in or says something like “I
am saving myself for your wonderful pie.”

It’s taken me a long time to figure out exactly what this dance is about. At first I found it oppressive; as if
I couldn’t decide for myself how much I wanted to eat. I felt pressured to eat more than I wanted, as if I
wasn’t fat enough already. Or is the cook fishing for compliments, forcing people to say they liked the
food, even when they barely gagged it down? It seemed like just another form of the same control I felt
at my own mother’s table.

Unexpectedly, my experience as a cultural anthropologist living in small Mayan villages in Central

America helped me deal with my unease at my mother-in-laws table. The ritual of offering and refusing
of food is a lot like the way the villagers choose a leader. The elders meet to pick someone, and then
they go to his house. They ask him to take the job, and he refuses, saying things like he’s not worthy, the
burden of the job is too great, and he has to take care of his sick daughter. The elders beg, and he
continues to protest. A few days later they come back and ask again, longer and louder, but again he
makes excuses and refuses. He only gives in on the third visit, after at least an hour of saying no. Only a
very determined man can say no a third time, forcing the elders to find someone else.

Even though it looks like a formality, this elaborate conversation does some very important things. It
reminds the candidate that being chosen Mayor is an important gift that carries a burden. His sincere
refusals reassure the village that they are not giving this gift to someone who is greedy for power. At the
same time, if he really wants to be Mayor, the process helps make it look like he is really doing everyone
a favor by giving in.

My mother-in-law’s pressure to eat another spoonful of green-bean casserole works exactly the same
way. Politeness covers the possibilities of greed, envy and distaste like a blanket. This is the essence of
‘southern hospitality,” which northerners so often feel is cloying, false, or pushy. You can’t just say “no
thanks” and end it there. But now I see that it is motivated by a real generosity; it’s an effort to make
everyone comfortable by making sure nobody looks greedy or hateful, even if they are. It expresses love
by gracefully concealing other less laudable emotions.

Understanding has helped me relax and accept Anne’s way of serving meals, but wasting food still
bothers me, even though I know it’s a class issue. Unlike my folks, the children of the generation
escaping poverty, Anne’s parents were born poor and reached the middle class through hard work and
education. Her dad was a college professor, the first person in his family ever to go to college. In the
hard times of his childhood in the great depression, there wasn’t always a lot on the table, so a groaning
board of plates piled high with steaks, greens and potatoes really meant something.
Their choice of what food to put on the table also tells a lot about their family histories. Abundance had
a special meaning for the hearty German and English protestant settlers of East Texas, who mostly came
from poor peasant families. Fine and fancy dishes are treated with some suspicion. This democratic
streak drives a lot of criticism of people who might appear to be getting above themselves and putting
on airs. Anne’s parents always had to prove that while they were doing well, they didn’t consider
themselves superior, and that can be a tricky business. Putting lots of plain food on the table is one way
to solve the problem, but a big family meal can still be tense.

I don’t think anyone who lived through the depression in poverty ever really forgets. That’s one reason
why we can’t throw away all the mountains of food left over after a big meal at my mother-in-law’s
house. Most of it ends up rotting and thrown away, but first it has to be carefully stored for a few weeks
and gradually forgotten in the back of the fridge. She has a hard time throwing away old jars and
containers too. She has a nice house, and we frequently give her new things that are uniform, easy to
clean, and designed for storage. But every time we come back to visit, a new collection of old jars and
plastic dishes has piled up in every shelf and cupboard. I don’t think this habit is simply about the fear of
losing everything again. Instead, the things you save are little tokens of virtue. In a world where just
about everything is now temporary and disposable, building these careful stacks is a kind of protest,
standing in the path of unwelcome progress by blocking the flow, one mason jar at a time.

Anne and I have both inherited a morality of thrift from our parents, but we express it in different ways.
If she sees a jar of the right size and shape, she puts it in the dishwasher. Anne knows we don’t need
more containers, but it still feels right somehow. When I find them, I take them out and put them in the
recycling – this is my way to convert waste into virtue. By recycling things I don’t have to keep them,
but I don’t have to throw them away either. I like going to the recycling center, which is always full of
virtuous people, being thrifty in the modern way that allows us the joys of spending, wasting, and
consuming, all at the same time. In Anne’s family saving things was private, even a little furtive, a
hangover from bad days better forgotten. In mine, not wasting was a matter of pride and self control,
done very much in public to demonstrate virtue. So she saves jars in the cupboard, and I fill the car with
junk to recycle.
I am sure that Anne and I could have avoided a lot of conflict over serving dinner if we just accepted our
parents’ gender roles. Like her mother and my mother, she would run the kitchen and serve the meals,
and I would eat and then help with the cleanup, and that would be that. I never saw Anne’s father so
much as boil water, and my father wasn’t even happy at the barbeque. Because we are committed to
equality in every part of our relationship, we have had to negotiate everything from who gets up to
change the baby, to who gets to pick the next fieldwork site and who will be senior author on our next
paper together.

But while this makes us unusual in some respects, we are completely typical in others. All families have
their histories, lore and traditions, and every generation has conflicts over class, cultural difference, and
family roles that get worked out at the dinner table. None of us can escape our roots and early learning,
and later in life we have to learn to deal with the habits and expectations our parents gave us. The
drama around the table is often subtle or even hidden, but I suspect that for many people it are much
more important and sometimes more fulfilling than the food itself. For the exact same reason there are
others who hate family meals, and I am sure there are many couples who find themselves arguing over
seemingly insignificant minute details like where the fork should go, and when to toss the salad.
From Micro to Macro

Daily routines are always cultural assertions of order, barriers that we use to keep out the chaos of
having to make millions of decisions just to get through the day. Routines often divide good and bad
behavior, and thereby set moral boundaries. The task of anyone studying everyday life is to connect the
topic of research to other peoples’ work, to make it appeal to a wide audience of people who are
thinking about other things. It is your task as a researcher to connect what you find interesting with
broader issues, helping others to see how your research is relevant to what they are doing.

Ethnography and cultural analysis do two things very effectively. They can make familiar comforting
things suddenly seem strange and exotic, or turn the direction around to show how something exotic
and strange is really easy to understand. Meals provide opportunities to make both kinds of movement.
The simple routine of placing food out on the table is laden with meanings that are usually opaque to
those around the table. They normally emerge in social settings, where we are guests or partners in
preparing, consuming and cleaning up after meals. Anyone who shares a kitchen or dining space with
another person has to face different assumptions, and unconscious habits gained through a lifetime of
experience. For example, if you have friends living in student housing where they share kitchen space,
take a look in the refrigerator. If the milk and eggs have labels on them saying who they belong to, you
can be sure the roommates have not figured out how to share meals in a family-like way. The people
living there should be able to explain their differences to very clearly, since they have to deal with
conflicts every day. In functioning families those same differences may be deeply concealed and difficult
to elicit. You may have to contrast two different families, or get people to tell stories about how their
meals today are different from those of their childhood.
Another way to penetrate the appearances and habits that allow people to navigate the complexity of
everyday life is to explore the differences between the real and the ideal. In family meals these
differences are especially clear because most ideal “normative” meals are so far form the reality of
meals grabbed while driving a car, watching television, or catching up with facebook. You might get
people to contrast their real meals with the ones they have during holidays, or ask them to describe
their best and worst meals in the last few weeks. The key is to keep at least part of the focus on the
present day or the very recent past, when specific events (“dinner last Friday”) can be contrasted with
timeless and generalized ideals (“having a dinner party”). You can do a similar form of ‘unpacking’ with
many other activities in everyday life, from getting dressed in the morning to managing the use of the
TV remote control.

Connecting with Theory – The Politics of the Family Meal

The example of the family meal shows you several different strategies for finding broader relevance and
connections with major issues in social science. Everyone eats, but few people ever step back and think
seriously about their routines and expectations. By paying attention to details and variations, you can
surprise people by showing them things they never expected about their daily routines. This provides an
opening for bringing up issues of gender, class and power that are normally hidden from view, or
systematically ignored because of their disruptive potential. Here is another example of how looking at
family meals can open important social issues, with connections to government policies and programs,
and the relationship between public and private spheres under modern forms of capitalism.

. The daily interaction at the family table always takes place under the shadow of normative
expectations, so that anything beyond the norm is always compared to a dominant hegemonic happy
meal of harmony and social integration. The norm might change to closer reflect reality if it was not
constantly reinforced by official organs of the state, cultural intermediaries in mass media, and religious
authorities, abetted by paid academics who produce “research” that supports the norm. An example of
the way this normative political apparatus generates expertise in the interest of the conservative ‘family
values’ agenda can be seen in the work of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at
Columbia University.

The Center’s roster of present and past directors is a collection of political royalty, including two First
Ladies (Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan), influential members of Congress (Barbara Jordan) and a Secretary
of Health, Education and Welfare (Joseph Califano). The board of directors includes actress Jamie Lee
Curtis, Columba Bush, wife of ex-Florida Governor Jeb Bush, University Presidents, distinguished MDs,
and the CEOs of many major corporations. They are funded by an alphabet soup of US Government
agencies, foundations, major corporations, media conglomerates, and rich individuals from William
Bradley through Donald Rumsfeld to John Tishman.

The Center conducts regular surveys of teen drug abuse and underage drinking, and in 1996 they first
‘detected’ a close association between the frequency of family meals with children and their likelihood
of drug abuse.

Frequent family dining is associated with lower rates of teen smoking, drinking, illegal drug use and
prescription drug abuse. Compared to teens who eat dinner frequently with their families (five or more
family dinners per week), those who have infrequent family dinners (fewer than three per week) are:
• three and a half times likelier to have abused prescription drugs,

• three and a half times likelier to have used an illegal drug other than

marijuana or prescription drugs,

• three times likelier to have used marijuana,

• more than two and a half times likelier to have used tobacco, and

• one and a half times likelier to have used alcohol. (NCASA 2007:ii)

In his accompanying letter with the report, Joseph Califano states:

The CASA survey and 15 years of my life devoted to understanding this problem lead me to this bottom
line: preventing America’s drug problems is not going to be accomplished in court rooms, legislative
hearing rooms or classrooms, by judges, politicians or teachers. It will happen in living rooms and dining
rooms and across kitchen tables--by the efforts of parents and families.(NCASA 2007:iii)

This kind of personalization and individuation of social problems, devolving social responsibility onto
individual citizens who can then make moral choices, is a consistent bedrock of conservative (neoliberal)
policymaking, extended to everything from pollution to international development (see Lakoff 1996,
Maniates 2002). Like the “anti-politics” machine identified by Ferguson in the context of impoverished
Africa (1990), this rhetoric denies the failure of policy, law, or the importance of inequality or social
discrimination, and turns problems into moral issues which are addressed through exhortation and
preaching, often glossed as ‘education.’

The surveys sponsored by NCASA are released in short briefing papers, rather than being published in
the scientific press. This allows the authors to imply that the statistical relationship between frequency
of family meals and drug use is causative, a basic statistical error which would make publication
impossible in a peer-reviewed journal. But it allows the authors to imply that if people would just have
more family meals, their children would be less likely to use drugs. Any trained social scientist would
know that the correlation may have no causal implications at all. It is probably an artifact of unmeasured
covariables, like income, household size, marital status, or location.

The methodology used in the survey – telephone calls with leading questions – would also fail to meet
any basic test of scientific rigor. But this does not stop them from being cited widely as scientific proof
that family meals are an ‘anti drug.’ Each report on family meals issued by NCASA is picked up
uncritically and approvingly by national newspapers and magazines, translated into headlines like
“Family Dinners Give Kids a Message to Chew On, Too” (Newsday 9/26/2007), and “Recipe for Drug-free
Kids: Family Dinner” (LDS Church News 9/8/2007). These popular messages, besides having very weak
empirical support, stigmatize single parents, two-earner couples, and people who do not share the
dominant Anglo-American dinner custom, not to mention single people or those who live in institutional
settings like schools, the military, or prisons. Alternative forms of family and parenting become deviant
and dangerous, conflict at meals a crime against society. Blended families, same-sex couples, multi-
generational households, homeless families – all are pushed aside into other categories, so the quality of
their dinner tables is marked as a product of their difference, in contrast with the normative center.

We suggest thinking about the mundane acts of getting dressed in the morning,

Finding parallels between different problems

Diverging from the normal track

Coming at an old problem from a new direction

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