The social significance of dining out

A study of continuity and change

Alan Warde, Jessica Paddock, Jennifer Whillans

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526134776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Geografía humana

Dining out used to be considered exceptional; however, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. Based on a major mixed-methods research project on dining out in England, this book offers a unique comparison of the social differences between London, Bristol and Preston from 1995 to 2015, charting the dynamic relationship between eating in and eating out. Addressing topics such as the changing domestic divisions of labour around food preparation, the variety of culinary experience for different sections of the population, and class differences in taste and the pleasures and satisfactions associated with dining out, the authors explore how the practice has evolved across the three cities.

Part I

Introduction

1

Dining out

Eating away from home used to be considered exceptional. Normality meant eating at home, with other family and household members. Scholarly and popular literature about the social aspects of eating begins from meals at home and their supposed capacity to enhance family relationships (Murcott, 1983; Douglas, 1984; DeVault, 1991; Mennell, 1992; Valentine, 1999; Sobal, 2000; Bugge and Almås, 2006; Fischler, 2011; Phull et al., 2015; Yates and Warde, 2018). Probably the majority of meals in the last 100 years have been consumed within the household. However, much eating takes place away from home. Dining out, or eating a main meal away from home, is now a symbolically significant popular activity which provides a complementary source of food and companionship. This book examines dining out both as customers in commercial venues and as guests of friends and non-resident kin.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA, 2014) reported that one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain in 2014, an estimate covering all types of eating events away from home, including breakfasts, light lunches during working hours, and other small occasions, as well as the consumption of main meals. Various studies indicate that considerable amounts of money and time are devoted to eating out (Warde, 2004; Cheng et al., 2007; Warde et al., 2007; Lhuissier, 2014). There are many options, including a meal at work, fish and chips on the street corner, a picnic, a school dinner, a snack in a roadside diner or sandwiches taken to work, as well as a substantial meal in a restaurant (Finkelstein, 1989; Warde and Martens, 2000; Jacobs and Scholliers, 2003; Finkelstein, 2013). The alternative sites conjure up images of different events and occasions, some fleeting, others special. Burnett (2004: 320), in the pre-eminent historical account of England, contends that, despite popular impressions to the contrary, the number of events may not be much different now from what it was in the late nineteenth century. Then, having employment at a distance from home was the main contributory cause; people who most frequently purchased cooked food away from home in the nineteenth century were the labouring poor, such as farm labourers and manual workers in the city (Murcott, 2018: 59–60). However, as Burnett (2004: 320) acknowledges, the form of eating out changed significantly in the second half of the twentieth century. Previously being primarily a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out became, for the majority of the population, a positive preference as a recreational activity offering pleasure as well as refreshment. Eating out is a popular and heterogeneous activity.

Research on food concentrates more on its production and sale than on its final consumption. Within the domain of consumption more attention is devoted to hunger, poverty and nutritional deficiency than to the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of eating. Nevertheless, scholars in food studies, building on work in anthropology, sociology and mass communications, have increasingly documented the symbolic significance of eating (Albala et al., 2017). Such endeavours include investigation of various aspects of eating away from home. Situations of commercial provision where the buyer has maximum discretion attract the most attention, among which, street food, the burger bar, cafes and restaurants provide the most inspiration because they appear most emphatically to express personal and individual taste. Yet many alternative sources of provision exist. A very large industrial and institutional sector of the catering trade delivers meals in hospitals, schools, prisons and factories. Domestic hospitality is a source of meals for guests who live under a different roof (Julier, 2013a). Charities are also, sadly, providing an increasing number of meals, and their constituent ingredients for home consumption, for the needy and the destitute, as another form of communal provision (Garthwaite, 2016; Lambie-Mumford, 2017). Nevertheless, the retail commercial sector is the most eye-catching feature of provision of food away from home in the early twenty-first century as much for its cultural and symbolic significance as for the sustenance it provides.

Restaurants, and other equivalents such as cafes, pubs and hotel dining rooms which offer table service, attract most attention. They typically deliver substantial meals and define ritual procedures, where culinary content and social contexts are of considerable symbolic significance. Upmarket places which serve elaborate dinners are subject to research on their personnel, increasingly the chef, their social setting and their gastronomic features (Mennell, 1985; Ferguson, 2004; Warde, 2009; Lane, 2014; Pearlman, 2013; Leschziner, 2015; Lane, 2018). The picnic, the hotel breakfast, the dinner party, the barbecue and the street bench are studied much less. Places serving foreign or ‘ethnic’ cuisine have attracted perhaps even more attention because of what they say about changing tastes and migrant populations (Driver, 1983; Heldke, 2003; Buettner, 2008; Panayi, 2008; Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Ray, 2016; Oleschuk, 2017; Warde et al., 2019).

Despite now being very common, dining out in a restaurant or cafe is still regarded with some suspicion. People view it positively when they themselves are engaged in the activity but may have reservations about its role in the feeding of others! What is imagined as wrong with eating out which renders it morally ambivalent? First, the kitchen door marks a separation between the backstage conditions (Whyte, 1949; Goffman, 1959; Gabriel, 1988; Fine, 1996) and frontstage display, perhaps considered disingenuous by diners worried they may be getting more than they bargained for (Crang, 1994; Murcott, 2018: 56–59). Many restaurants have been redesigned with open kitchens, possibly to demystify the backstage social world, and to heighten the sense that restaurant is theatre. A second objection might be its fundamental challenge to the ideal of the family meal, the widely held view that dinner is best eaten at home with other members of the elementary family. A moral and practical issue, which has rumbled on inconclusively since the mid-nineteenth century, it could be thought to be especially threatened by the incursion of commercial provision, replacing domestic food preparation and meals eaten together by members of the family household (Murcott, 1997; Jackson, 2009). Inevitably each meal taken away from home eliminates an opportunity to cook. Some think that cooking is good for its own sake, but many more have a morally loaded premonition that it is a matter of resorting to a convenient alternative which defaults on responsibility and is an encouragement to laziness, for it is often contended that home-made food is of better quality than any alternative. This view is bolstered by contentions that eating out has adverse effects on health. Certainly it is less easy to calculate the nutritional value of a meal prepared in a commercial kitchen than one assembled at home. Eating out is also thought to encourage people to suspend any principles of constraint over what might be consumed on a special occasion. This arouses a related suspicion that dining out is extravagant and that people enjoy themselves too much. A Protestant revulsion against hedonistic excess is not uncommon, and since dining out has long been associated with drinking alcohol, the recrimination intensifies. Undeserved pleasure, expense, and the relinquishing of responsibility and control are maybe even more reprehensible than merely avoiding hard work. There is also some general public suspicion about the intrusion of the market into everyday life. People are very used to buying items and services which they would previously have obtained in other ways but they may nevertheless feel some disquiet about it. Against most of these reservations it might be objected that eating out is relatively infrequent even in the richest of western societies such that the anticipated negative consequences are exaggerated. Nevertheless, if the trend were towards ever more events away from home then the primary role of the domestic meal might eventually be fatally compromised. Perhaps ambivalence should not be surprising given a much wider tension in the contemporary treatment of food, its being both pleasurable and a source of great anxiety. Arguably, the anxieties have excessively detained scholars, and even more so policy-makers, to the neglect of the appreciation of the satisfactions and pleasures of eating out.

The activity of eating out inspires many reasons for sociological interest. How people judge themselves and others in their everyday behaviour is a guide to shared norms, and social standing is well revealed in the study of morally ambivalent practices. The apparent disjuncture between much media representation of the activity and how it is experienced by consumers is an endless source of fascination. The mutual effects of the different forms of provision and the substitution between forms potentially reconfigure the ways in which societies eat. The pattern of domestic meals, which Grignon (1993) argued is primarily determined by the obligations of employment and the organisation of the household, is subject to the compounding effects of the greater use of alternative means of provision. Eating in restaurants means exposure in public spaces, involving personal performance and social interaction, during which observation may lead to judgement.

Increased spending on eating in commercial settings reopens questions about commodification as a master process in the development of capitalist societies. The restaurant is interesting because it could be represented as the apogee of consumer choice, a paradigm of the process of individualisation which social theorists propose is a consequence of changes in western societies after the 1960s (Bauman, 1988; Featherstone, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). It is no longer necessary to eat the same food as other people at the table, each restaurant offers many items and there are many types of restaurant. Whims and desires can be satisfied, and opportunities arise to eat unfamiliar foods as the growing availability of dishes and customs associated with foreign cuisines becomes a strongly marked option (Ascher, 2005). The parallel development of a global ‘consumer culture’ is an ongoing matter of controversy, associated with propping up the ideology of consumer sovereignty and consumer choice. Said to be Britain’s most popular leisure pursuit after watching television, the significance of dining out for life and lifestyles is considerable. As an object of enthusiasm for some, and as a common leisure pursuit, much can be gleaned about cultural practice, cultural capital and cultural priorities. What, for instance, does eating out eliminate from the diary, and indeed what does it accompany? In addition, it is open to examination as an instance of social differentiation, of inequalities between classes, men and women, young and old, the staple concern of sociology.

In sum, eating out is a very common and popular recreation, a significant contributor to diet and eating, an instance of commodification and changing modes of provision, and an activity with considerable cultural and symbolic significance. It also throws light on key debates in cultural sociology in the twenty-first century, providing a means to test and elaborate theories of globalisation, cultural omnivorousness, cultural intermediation and aestheticisation. So why would sociologists not study it?

Scholarly interest has risen in parallel with public interest which is reflected in media coverage and popular commentary. Yet eating out is still not a very popular sociological topic. The extent to which buying meals out in restaurants, hotels and cafes has become increasingly common over the last fifty years in Europe and North America has been documented (Kjaernes, 2001; Jacobs and Scholliers, 2003; Levenstein, 1993; Cheng et al., 2007; Holm et al., 2012; Díaz-Méndez and García-Espejo, 2014; Cabiedes-Miragaya, 2017; Díaz-Méndez and García-Espejo, 2017; Díaz-Méndez and Van den Broek, 2017; Gronow and Holm, 2019). In the process, commercial options have multiplied enormously, driven by forces of globalisation, commodification and aestheticisation (Warde, 2016). Venues have diversified, specialising in provision for different types of occasion and serving a wide range of foods and cuisines, rendering the market increasingly large and varied (Finkelstein, 1989; Wood, 1995; Warde et al., 1999; Warde and Martens, 2000; Scholliers, 2001; Berris and Sutton, 2007; Johnston and Baumann, 2010; Julier, 2013b; Díaz-Méndez and García-Espejo, 2014; Ray, 2016; Paddock et al., 2017). Recent studies across Europe and the US have told us about upmarket restaurants and their celebrity chefs (Rao et al., 2003; Lane, 2011; Lane, 2014; Leschziner, 2015). There is ...