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ETIQUETTE AND EATING HABITS. No society can survive or flourish unless its members accept rules governing food sharing and consumption. Mealtime manners, which govern the way food is eaten in the company of others, provide for giving and receiving small, vital, and constantly reiterated signs that these rules are in working order. Without them food would be hogged by the physically powerful, violence would frequently erupt during meals, civility in general would decline, and eventually society would break down altogether. Furthermore, the specific fashion in which a culture manages eating helps to express, identify, and dramatize that society's ideals and aesthetic style.

Civilized and considerate people the world over demand that meals shall be eaten with respect, not only for the food and the effort and good fortune it represents but also for the people in whose company it is eaten. Human beings normally eat in the company of others. The word "company" is derived from Latin, meaning "bread with," and therefore "those who share food." The act of sharing a meal becomes a symbol of every kind of relationship and of the acceptance of cultural values that may seem to have little to do with consuming nutrients. Since eating normally happens more than once a day, human beings turn meals into opportunities to learn and to practice "culture." Politeness at meals provides daily exercise in making socially desirable norms "second nature."

However, mealtime etiquette is not morality. It is convention, an agreement to behave, in the particular circumstances of mealtimes, as if one were virtuous. Like any convention it is liable to degenerate into a facade, which can be used as a barrier to protect power and class distinction.

Taboo

Eating rules exist mainly to ensure that meals shall be shared peacefully, the reason being that such an outcome is far from inevitable. People have killed, chopped, and submitted to fire what they are eating together; they are often armed with knives and certainly with teeth, primary human weapons. They are hungry, each looking out for his or her own interests, and they are sitting at close quarters. They might also be consuming alcohol, which lowers inhibitions. Mealtime rules provide not only the safety but also the predictability that allows eaters to relax.

Different societies have different ways of keeping violence out of the sacred eating space. In European and American cultures knives are on the table. Their blades are given rounded ends unless they are exceptionally competent "steak" knives. Rules insist on no pointing with knives, forks, or spoons. Diners should not impale their food on their knives to carry it to their mouths, or hold their knives in their fists (that is, too competently and therefore aggressively). They should direct their knives toward their plates with their forefingers, and they should lay down their knives with blades facing inward, not toward neighbors. Attempting to reduce the actual use of the knife, diners, when in doubt and if possible, use a fork or a spoon instead. North Americans traditionally cut their food then put aside their knives, blades facing in, and eat with their forks. Carving up a whole joint or a bird in front of the assembled company would be, in many societies, an unthinkably barbarous act. The Chinese and Japanese, for example, have banned knives from the table altogether. They cut up everything in advance, far away and out of sight. The eating implements provided are blunt wooden sticks.

Mealtime manners usually work by keeping any thought of violence from occurring. Many myths, however, reveal the roots of the conventions by including a murder that is especially appalling because of its mealtime setting. The drama resides in the horror of that which good behavior while eating so successfully prevents. (An example is Homer's Odyssey 11: 409–420.) And because mealtime manners are a mild form of taboo, hearing about infractions, such as people flinging food about, wiping their mouths on the tablecloth, or grabbing food with their hands (especially where knives, forks, and spoons or chopsticks are the rule), causes shock or laughter.

During meals all mammals are extrasensitive to the possibility of enemies stealing their food or otherwise taking advantage of their concentration on eating. They are alert to tiny signs and abnormalities in the environment that otherwise they might let pass. For human beings, who normally eat in a previously prepared and protected area, this heightened attention is applied to the behavior of their eating companions. Strange table manners or an affront to a visitor's culturally formed expectations are often the subject of dramatic travelers' tales. Westerners, for example, might note with surprise and then find unforgettable the Arab custom of pouring tea into a glass until it overflows into the saucer beneath it. This is a sign in Arab cultures of magnanimity, but foreigners can misinterpret it as sloppy and incompetent behavior. On the continent of Europe, propriety enjoins diners to sit with both hands in full view of the company; most correctly, unused hands should rest on the table's edge, being visible only from the wrists. The Anglo-Saxon custom of permitting guests to sit with one hand hidden seems, to Continentals, at best a sad sign of naivete. Since mealtime etiquette is drummed into people so early and so thoroughly, its obedient practitioners rarely find it a matter for comment; they take it for granted. It is outsiders usually who report on the idiosyncrasies of a society's manners at meals.

Consideration for the Company

Other themes expressed by systems of mealtime manners worldwide include who dines with whom and when, and the solidarity of the dining group; consideration for the needs, fears, and sensitivities of the other people present; and cleanliness, which may have as much to do with purity and all its connotations as with health. These themes may be articulated in mealtime rituals that are common to many cultures, or behavior may be highly idiosyncratic yet witness to widely held meanings. Mealtime rules simultaneously express preferences that are culture specific.

For example, in modern Europe and America meals are eaten around a table, which expresses the oneness of the group. Solidarity established, the separateness and self-sufficiency of each individual is stressed. The cutlery is laid out like a fence surrounding every "place." Everyone sits on his or her own upright chair. Portions are divided out before people begin eating and are served on separate dishes. Any crossing of the boundaries represented by the enclosed "place" is either a transgression (a "transgression," derived from Latin, means a "stepping over") or demonstrates great intimacy between people allowed to break this rule and transfer "tastes" from one plate to another. In this same culture it used to be thought polite and benevolent, therefore "good manners," repeatedly to pass food to one's companions. People are exhorted not to lean into someone else's space; not to reach across the table, let alone across a neighbor's plate; not to share the cutlery. Such insistence on the boundaries between the diners is different from the etiquette of people who eat from a common spread, taking from it with their hands, often sitting on the ground to do so.

Equality, Hierarchy, and Reciprocity

When equality is the overriding theme of a meal, meat is likely to be prechopped or minced and perhaps formed into cakes of equal sizes, or all the ingredients might be mixed in one dish so everybody eats the same thing (Watson, 1988). But hierarchy frequently cuts across commensal equality. It matters, for example, who gets served first. Where a whole bird, representing the oneness of the group, is carved up before the diners, the proceeding ensures that differences are expressed. No portion is exactly like any other, and differing values might be assigned to each piece. Carving, in the Western tradition, was once called "doing the honors."

The allocation of sitting spaces at a banquet is exceedingly important in many cultures and subject to specific rules. Often women, who usually have prepared the food, are not allowed to join the men in eating it. Written records of feasts in the European past frequently describe the seating of the guests while not bothering to say what it was they actually ate.

Hospitality, or accepting nonfamily members into one's house, has always been thought a difficult or dangerous proceeding, and for this reason is often the subject of rules and constraints. Hosts have to make guests "feel at home," yet guests must refrain from demanding different food, ordering the host's children about, or otherwise overstepping their essentially passive role. Hosts are at home, giving, while guests are away, receiving, and these roles are underlined in different ways, for instance, in some of the rules for seating.

Meals eaten with friends and acquaintances are widely thought of as helping to bind a society's members together, especially in cultures where familial solidarity is strong enough to create the potential isolation of people into family groups (Ortner, 1978). Such meals normally demand a repetition of the exercise at a later date, when the present guest will become the host. The imbalance created between hosts and guests demands to be righted and produces the highly desirable social virtue of peaceful reciprocity (Lévi-Strauss, 1969; Pitt-Rivers, 1977).

Teaching Children to Behave

In all cultures children have to be taught mealtime manners, which deliberately complicate the actions of taking and eating. They learn gradually not to grab, splash, or shout at meals. They practice giving and receiving in the manner acceptable to the culture, and they find they must ask for rather than demand what they want. Children may also become familiar with social hierarchies or elaborate kinship patterns in their rule-bound expressions at meals, that is, how and when to keep quiet, how to hear and apply admonitions, how to wait and to share (Raum, 1940; Read, 1959; Richards, 1932, 1939). Mealtimes, with clear needs, swift rewards, and adult examples on view, are perfect occasions for children to learn to talk. It is understood that little children, if they are allowed to join the commensal group, have not yet learned to "behave." They may be permitted to run around, beg for tidbits from adults, and otherwise break the rules. Their eventual admission to adult status at meals is a kind of initiation and a proof that they now are capable of self-control.

Noise

Different attitudes toward food are expressed by two types of mealtime manners as they relate to sound. For some groups the polite response to a meal is gratitude to the cook or the host for providing it and pleasure, which should be clearly dramatized. People are expected to express their delight verbally or to provide physical signs of it, like slurping their noodles and sighing with satisfaction. Contentedly burping after the meal may show a kindly abandon to the generosity of the host, who might be hurt if guests remain cool, detached, and apparently either unsatisfied or unimpressed by what has been offered them.

In other cultures people feel they should not be unduly interested in the food; they should at least appear to revel mainly in the company of the other people present. They refrain from exclaiming about the food, although a polite murmur of appreciation might be permitted. They must not look too enthusiastic for fear of seeming greedy. People are expected instead to concentrate on the conversation.

In some cultures talking during meals may be strictly undesirable. In others only certain people present are allowed to talk, or it may be deemed essential that everybody contribute to the conversation. The etiquette of eating from a common spread versus that of eating previously apportioned food interlocks with these preferences for either talking or keeping silent. The system in which each person eats from a separate plate divides the companions, and talk provides the needed interchange among them. People who take their food from a central dish or set of dishes necessarily interact in the process, so they concentrate on eating with fairness and consideration and tend to talk little. People who use chopsticks eat quickly because cut-up food, sizzling hot, could get cold if too much time is taken in chatting rather than eating. Talking for these last two groups tends to be done before the meal or afterward.

Complication

Politeness, which overlays "nature," is usually a complication of behavior deemed by other people to be "fitting" and "proper." In the modern West, for example, where conversation is a necessary part of the formal proceedings at dinner, well-behaved people must nevertheless eat with their mouths closed. To eat and talk but never to be seen opening your mouth with food in it is far from simple. Dining "properly" and remaining relaxed while doing so (showing uneasiness at mealtimes is always distracting and annoying for the other diners) has to be learned and then honed by constant practice.

Not being mannerly, and effortlessly mannerly, can arouse irritation, unease, disgust, contempt, and finally rejection by other people. Manners, which are supposed to ease relationships, can be turned into a series of tests to sift out people who have not learned the niceties and therefore are kept outside the privileged circles of the "well bred." Here manners are no longer "for the sake of other people" but only for the complacency of some and the exclusion of others. Mealtime manners make a more draconian demand than most aspects of "proper" behavior because ignoring them can violate largely unexamined or unconscious taboos. People often use the differences between their own systems of manners and those of others to make derogatory judgments about those others. In the modern West people frequently shudder at or mock the behavior of their own ancestors, who, for example, ate with their hands.

Yet people who eat with their hands have just as many rules and elaborations as do the wielders of chopsticks or knives, forks, and spoons. People might, for example, always have to eat with their right hands (Needham, 1973) and might even have to restrict the number of fingers used on that hand. They must never reach for more food while still chewing and must never fill both cheeks or even fill one too full, which shows uncontrolled appetite. Hand washing is demanded before and after meals and sometimes during meals as well. No spilling or grabbing and no fiddling with the food is allowed, such actions being all too easy when eating with the hands. Eating gracefully, or the reverse, is defined, and rules establish how to take up a morsel and just how and how much to dip it into sauce. Restrictions govern general physical postures at meals, and the pressure is to offer delicacies to others. Rules such as these regulated eating behavior before the imposition of the set of cutlery now common in the West.

The History of Table Manners

Mealtime etiquette is a conservative force in all societies. Since it expresses culture, it resists deconstruction and alteration. Manners do change over time. But no matter how trivial it may seem, any modification in a traditional mealtime convention is likely to be a sign of a momentous shift in socially determined sensibilities.

Forks have become in the West part of every diner's eating equipment. Eating with the hands is permissible only in a restricted number of cases, such as eating artichokes, asparagus, or radishes, or on informal occasions. The difficult, unnatural, skill-demanding fork has replaced fingers at nearly all tables most of the time. It took eight centuries to accomplish this.

Before forks achieved general usage as eating implements, people had to devise flat, hard surfaces on which each individual diner could impale portions with forks and cut them with knives. Those surfaces then had to be accepted and made available to everybody. The new plates ("plate," derived from the French, means "flat") were first metal, then ceramic, making them more affordable. They gradually replaced the traditional bowls and hollows carved into the dining table and the "trenchers" or bread bases for supporting morsels of food eaten with the hands. Even after the general acceptance of the fork, polite people continued until the early twentieth century to feel free to carry their food to their mouths with their knives.

The provision of special implements for moving food from serving dish to plate also came about slowly. European manners gradually and unevenly changed from several people taking it in turns to dip the one shared spoon into the pot and to eat from it, to wiping the communal spoon carefully on a napkin before passing it on, to provision of a spoon for each person for dipping and eating, to wiping that individual spoon on a napkin after sipping from it before dipping it into the common dish again, to using a special spoon for serving and nothing else. A person must never forget and use his or her own spoon by mistake. All this purity required more and more cutlery.

The slow developments just outlined together with a growing restriction on bodily relaxation at table reflected an increasing desire for self-sufficiency and separateness in the culture. Ideally others should neither impinge nor need assistance. Such changes can be tracked in European and American history by studying surviving writings describing etiquette. These writings include pamphlets and lists of rules published from the medieval period down to the twenty-first century for people wanting to "polish" their manners, including their table manners, in order to become upwardly mobile. The sociologist Norbert Elias (1939) used these texts, especially those concerned with table manners, to show the development of Western inhibitions following the Renaissance, when Erasmus (1530) published the most accomplished and famous example and included in it a chapter on manners at meals.

The printing press helped disseminate books of etiquette, and learning mannerly behavior began to spread outside the narrow but innovative circles of the court first to the bourgeoisie, who became stricter than the nobility was about certain kinds of correct behavior, and then to everybody else. Elias chronicled not only the growth of separating "walls of restraint," underwritten by embarrassment, in Western culture but the gradual imposition of an insistence that people control and hide bodily functions, where once people were far more tolerant about such matters. In all cultures manners must have changed in analogous ways, even if the changes have not been recorded.

Formality and Informality

Mealtime etiquette governs settings for meals, the seating of hosts and guests, dishes, decorations, lights, napkins and washing facilities, eating implements and their placement in the eating area, the sequence in which food is eaten, how food is served, the correct ways of issuing invitations to dinner, what people wear when eating, and much else besides. Each of these customs and artifacts has a specific meaning and a history. When all these things are enumerated, however, the reference is to full, formal meals, the ones with the widest range and intricacy, where hospitality is offered to guests. Such meals are likely to be "feasts" on the occasion of events important for the community. People come together to eat when they wish to celebrate, especially when they are eager to express what is held in common (Douglas and Gross, 1981).

Feasts by definition are out of the ordinary, extravagant, complicated, often pointedly traditional, highly organized, and therefore commonly formal. The food itself is typically shaped or molded and prepared in elaborate, time-consuming ways, often requiring the efforts of many people. Preparing becomes part of the sharing. Ordinary eating is simpler, less copious, and takes less time; it is informal.

This does not mean that manners are less important at everyday family meals, but it does mean that decorum at these daily events is usually and deliberately lowered. Mealtime taboos are fiercely maintained (no one at a European or American meal puts his or her feet on the table, no one spits, or causes an uproar without disapproval), but formal flourishes are dispensed with. People might feel comfortable eating in silence, handle their food casually, or not clear the entire table before laying it for a meal. Membership in a high social class frequently entails relatively high decorum at ordinary meals. A deliberate lowering of decorum gives the strongest messages when the "full," formal model is previously understood.

Formality by design increases social distance; informality brings people closer. In the modern Western world being "casual" has come to be seen as nearly always de rigueur because of modern egalitarian ideals and because modern society has more than enough devices for keeping people apart. The insistence that people shall behave casually but in the prescribed manner is in itself a mannerly social convention.

Some Factors Informing Table Etiquette in Modern Europe and North America

Formality is a lot of work—work that has traditionally been performed with regard to meals mostly by women and by servants. In the course of the first half of the twentieth century, even upper-middle-class households learned to manage without live-in servants. The immediate result was the lowering of decorum, including that at the dinner table. Being served meals by people not part of the commensal group became part of the relatively unusual experience of dining in restaurants.

With the ongoing feminist revolution, women are no longer automatically expected to remain dedicated to the house and devoted to the maintenance of "polish." Once again formality at the family dining table has diminished, even where once it ruled. However, one of the principles of manners has always been "Do not improperly impose upon others." It is possible to accept a certain lowering of decorum at the dinner table as even more mannerly than formality once was. The rules of propriety are negotiated rules. Whatever is no longer thought proper is rude or at best ridiculous. Politeness at table as elsewhere has everything to do with the accepted conventions.

Formality is among other things the taking of time; elaboration takes time. In the "developed" world time has become part of the system of social constraints. People feel they have "no time." The immediate effect upon manners of this culturally induced perception is almost invariably, again, to simplify them. Eating meals can become not a pleasure but something done purely out of necessity and as quickly as possible to get it out of the way in favor of other activities. Preparing food is often foregone entirely, and prepared food is substituted. Eating "fast food," however, still conforms to the limits set by table manners. Predictability, equality, and cleanliness, all of them the concern of mealtime manners, are also assured by the fact that the food is always exactly the same, is served in similar surroundings, and is hedged about by a lot of paper wrappings and other signs that convey "cleanliness" and "control."

Manners, including mealtime manners, are at present undergoing change and renegotiation in many human cultures worldwide; this is a sign of important transformations underway. Such modifications must take time and occur neither smoothly nor evenly. People increasingly come into contact with systems of manners different from their own. They often have to endure unpredictable and annoying behavior from others and relatively weak social mechanisms for preventing or punishing transgressions. Many complain that others have "no manners." But as long as human society continues to function, manners will exist. And among the most fundamental of these are manners governing and involving eating.

See also Meal; Table Talk; Taboo.

Margaret Visser