The Sociology of Eating Out

 

When human beings eat, something more than a biological and physical process is occurring. Americans, like other cultures, satisfy a hunger for human contact and interaction as well as a physical hunger when they consume meals. “Eating not only fulfills our physical hunger, but our human hungers as well—the need for love, security, and comfort” (Scapp 119). We manipulate food and its consumption and transform it into a metaphor for intimacy and connection.

Communal eating is held in such high esteem that deviations from the culinary norm are regarded with suspicion and distrust. One Italian proverb warns that a person who eats alone will die alone (Scapp 116). Eating alone is often equated with a lack of social skills and inability to relate to people around you. Studies have demonstrated that people change their eating patterns and behaviors when they dine alone (Scapp 115).

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Not only do they take less time to eat, but they change what they eat. Anorexics and bulimics hide behind more than baggy clothes and bathroom doors; people with eating disorders eat alone to avoid the scrutiny of their communities. Finally, when people do eat alone, a variety of activities are acquired to conceal one’s solitude from the self and others: reading a newspaper, going over work, and eating on the “go.”

Conversely, eating with others demonstrates compatibility and effective communication of the senses. “In the sharing of food, the sense of community is continually defined and maintained….How food is consumed is a powerful method of further defining a community. ”Eating together implies membership into and ownership of a particular sector of society and culture. “We make choices which are cultural statements, and our eating patterns are reflections of contemporary social formations.”

Dining out emphasizes and accentuates these feelings and behaviors within a community. When a community dines in the public sphere, the idea of nourishing the body is hardly regarded. Instead, it is crucial for the customer to demonstrate to the others their civility and distinction. Says author ___________________,

Given all the effort of acquiring food, eating it should be the easiest part but we cloak the proceedings with a system of rules about places and times to eat, specific equipment, decoration, sequence, limitations of movement, bodily propriety which are not a biological necessity but a carefully cultured phenomenon. We have moved from a situation where food is not a topic of conversation because we eat food appropriate to status and respectability to a context where food is always a topic of conversation as we seek to select that which displays taste, respectability, knowledge, and a search for marginal differentiation.

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 Scholars have hypothesized that the concept of eating out was introduced after the French Revolution; France’s restauranteurs made the secret lifestyles of the upper classes visible and accessible to the masses (Beardsworth 107). The English adopted these sociological characteristics and brought them across the ocean to America. During Industrialization, however, the limited services of taverns and boarding houses were no longer sufficient because they restricted food service to specific hours of the day, which was inconvenient for many laborers, and refused admittance to women and children. Street vendors and ‘diners’ (wagons where customers could sit and dine) supplied the public with flexibility and affordability.
“From the 1870’s onwards, demand was met by ‘new restaurants for a factory age’ which included lunchrooms, cafeterias and diners, often supplied with quality foodstuffs by the fast and efficient railways.”Street vendors and ‘diners’ (wagons where customers could sit and dine) supplied the public with flexibility and affordability" (Beardsworth 110).
Diners emerged primarily in urban areas that were characteristically ethnic or blue-collar. With the advent of the swing shift and factories that operated on 24-hour clocks, male workers needed a place to go after work to unwind and eat before going home. Since immigrants accounted for a large percentage of laborers, and ethnic groups tended to live together in neighborhoods, diners often assumed a ________. “Old immigrant groups…used restaurants as sites to mediate their hostility toward more recent or rivaling interlopers, learning to order and enjoy spaghetti and dago red while ordering dagos around” (Scapp 247). In mediating hostility, however, a miniature community of regulars and visitors was created within the restaurants. Workers went to diners to share in the camaraderie of their peers and eat quick, filling, familiar foods.
As manual laborers were creating demand for better food services, so were women. In the late 19th century, women began to leave their homes outside the company of men to shop in new department stores, work in factories, and in search of entertainment. These somewhat autonomous women demanded smaller, cheaper, and healthier meals in a non-threatening, light atmosphere. As a result, workers and women changed tavern and restaurant menus from expensive French cuisine to American “soul food.” “Nouvelle cuisine is the fish and chips, hamburger, pizza, and pancake of the middle-classes.
It may become an integral part of the culinary scene but it will always be on the periphery of ‘serious’ food and eating, remaining far more interesting for its sociological, rather than gastronomic, significance” (Beardsworth 109).
Around the turn of the century, diners and the postcards experienced immense levels of popularity due to the marriage of the two. Through World War II, diners and other restaurants used postcards in advertising gimmicks. Restaurants provided customers with free postcards that usually pictured the physical building or a typical meal from the restaurant; the customer wrote a note to a friend on it and the restaurant stamped and mailed it. This practice remained popular until postage prices increased and dining out became so routine that is was no longer worth mentioning (Scapp 244).

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Diners today are in decline because Americans are less communally oriented than they were 50 years ago. Sociologist William Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, uses the example of bowling to explain that while Americans are still bowling, they are not doing so in leagues or groups anymore. Americans are bowling alone. The same is true of Americans' eating habits; Americans today are dining alone in record numbers. Even in the private sphere of the home, families do not assemble for meals because of hectic schedules, conflicts, and other distractions. Community does not mean what it used to, and diners are lost in the process.
Additionally, it has already been established that eating and eating out are elements of self-_expression. Diners no longer represent American identities. First, industrial labor is not as prevalent as it was in the early 20th century because of the rise of white collar professions and the overseas relocation of factory jobs. Secondly, Americans no longer want to be associated with belonging to or having an affinity with the lower and working classes; Manual labor is not fashionable. Finally, America's obsession with healthy food, good diets, and various "ethnic foods" violently clash with the beloved mainstays of meatloaf, biscuits and gravy, and fried chicken on diner menus.
The compounding elements of solitude and "high-class" consumption will ultimately doom diners to a a trend of "yesteryear." Only in a nostalgia for the 1950's local food grind and hyperreal memory of community will Americans remember the diner.

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