At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

Preface

This book is designed to showcase the dinner table and what it looks like in countries spanning the globe, both visually in a snapshot photograph and in an accompanying richly descriptive text. Each entry illustrates various features of the eating event from start to finish, including who does the shopping, who cooks, who sits at the table and how they eat, what customs or rituals they observe, how the food itself is cooked and served, and even who cleans up in the end. Recipes are also included. The ultimate purpose is both ethnographic and to provide a base for broad comparison across cultures, religions, and social settings. Some accounts stem from the contributors’ personal lives and some are more fly-on-the-wall accounts of objective observers, but all are based on direct experience with the culture covered.

Eating habits are said to be in flux given the changing nature of the family itself, owing to shifting work schedules and the advent of convenience foods and takeout. For many people the breakdown of the family dinner table is seen as directly connected to the demise of the fabric of society. This book is designed to see if this perception of radical change is true and see how, despite so many challenges, people manage to hold on to the family dinner. In some cases they do not. In some cases a family may be construed quite differently than we might expect, and in many cultures there is no table at all. What might be considered proper table manners in one place hardly passes muster in another, and, of course, utensils vary widely from place to place; fingers often work perfectly fine. This is the beautiful diversity of our experience in eating.

Other variables considered include the time of dinner, where people physically eat (in a dining room, in the kitchen, in front of the TV), and whether everyone eats the same food. Dieting, allergies, aversions, and preferences according to age sometimes make serving a common meal an extraordinary challenge for the person in charge, which nowadays is not necessarily the mother of the family. The dynamics of dinnertime conversation are equally as fascinating: some families discuss how their day went, others bicker and fight, and some eat as quickly as possible so they can attend to other things. The purpose here is to examine why these dynamics differ so widely from place to place and what it reveals about each culture.

The examples are in no way meant to be representative of each country, as if that were even possible. Rather, they are simply snapshots of unique, sometimes quirky ways people eat dinner. Nor could we cover every place on the globe. Some stories are located in prosperous cities, some in rural settings. There is a broad range of socioeconomic circumstances featured across the entries, and there are even two contrasting examples from one country precisely for the purpose of detailed comparison. Regarding the culinary landscape, the intent is not to highlight exemplary fine dining and certainly not to stereotype any particular set of customs or eating habits or even feature so-called typical dishes. Rather, the intent is to celebrate the panoply of human experience. The same goes for the structure of the family itself, and the majority of examples here are anything but the perceived norm of a heterosexual couple with 2.5 children. Families are made up of a wide array of relatives, friends, and even solitary individuals. And we must not forget that pets are also often an integral part of the family, even if not fed directly from the table.

At the center of all controversy over dinner is cooking itself. There is a widespread perception that people in the past few generations have lost basic cooking skills and have succumbed to the enticements of mass-produced convenience food that promises to be quick and easy but offers little in terms of gastronomic pleasure or sound nutrition. Moreover, food specifically marketed toward children is thought to be corrupting their palates toward nuggetized, overly salted, and sweet mass-produced food that steers them away from ever appreciating fresh fruits and vegetables and simply prepared dishes made from fresh whole ingredients. Modern industrial food has little respect for culinary traditions, which many see as in danger of being lost. This is thought to be a process begun in the more prosperous nations that has begun to affect the entire globe. We shall see if this perception is true. People may indeed cook differently than in the past, but by and large they are still cooking. One also has to wonder if our perception of a golden past where mom did the cooking from scratch and everyone sat down every night to a quintessential family dinner has more to do with our hopes of what should be rather than what ever really was the norm. The entries that follow provide some evidence that our perceptions are rarely borne out by actual experience. Naturally these accounts offer a tiny statistical sample, but they do show that we should resist making quick judgments about general trends in eating habits and that while the evolution of dinner is inevitable, it is not always so negative.

Another feature that is particularly interesting is how the cooking is done and what technologies are employed. Do families increasingly rely on frozen or canned foods, or is everything fresh and prepared from scratch? Is food purchased once a week and stored in a refrigerator, or is shopping a daily affair? Even the physical layout of the kitchen can be very revealing. Expensive trophy kitchens may rarely be used, while some people seem to manage fine with a tiny burner, a few pots, and a minuscule workspace. It is also amazing that while in one part of the world life seems inconceivable without plastic wrap, tin foil, and plastic containers for leftovers; in other places there aren’t even refrigerators. We tend to forget that modern modes of eating are not even a century old, and in some places on Earth they are still unheard of.

On the other hand, one feature of home cooking around the world that might be surprising is the extent to which it has become internationalized. Although people may be straying from traditional recipes and ways of eating, they are increasingly experimenting with new ingredients and flavors. The popularity of Asian food, cooked from scratch, appears to be almost universal. Who could have guessed that curry is enjoyed in the far-flung corners of the world? So too, unsurprisingly, we find pizza, hamburgers, macaroni and cheese, and other dishes, many of which have ceased being associated with their country of origin. There is no doubt that as the world becomes increasingly connected via trade and media, peoples’ palates expand and their willingness to try new techniques at home increases. Even more interesting is the way local ingredients and techniques are used to make “foreign” dishes, adapting them to local preferences. I think that this should not be seen as adulteration or bastardization but rather as a natural process that has always been involved in the evolution of cuisine.

Many of the entries also seem to suggest that the dominant mode of shopping for almost exactly the past century may be waning: the supermarket. People seem to have a distaste for shopping, so farmers’ markets, delivered community-supported agriculture boxes, and increasingly home delivery of groceries, especially in cities, seem to be proliferating. One can imagine that someday all our groceries will simply be ordered online, which makes sense if retail space is at a premium; they can just be shipped directly from a warehouse. Why make the customer wait on interminable lines at the bulk grocery outlet or shopping club when they can order and have a truck drop everything off?

In gathering together and editing this volume I have incurred many debts, foremost to the authors themselves. Many are dear old friends whom I know from previous projects, from the Oxford Symposium, or from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. Apparently these people simply wanted to work with me again. Some are people I have never met but who proposed outstanding entries that fit in perfectly. Many signed on from the very start, while others signed on at the 11th hour, as happens with every project of this nature. Regardless, the entries fit together beautifully, and the end product is exactly what I had hoped it would be when it was first envisioned. Also, as I look back on over a dozen years editing projects of this type, first for Greenwood Press, which later merged with ABC-CLIO, I realize that this work is not only the culmination of 20 or so books in the Food Culture Around the World series and the Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia I edited but is also the collaborative work of all the marvelous people at ABC-CLIO, foremost Kaitlin Ciarmiello. This project was really her idea, though I might claim that I thought of it one night years ago at a bar in Boston when we two spun book ideas for several hours.

Ken Albala