Sharing the Meal: Food Consumption and Family Identity

Benedetta CappelliniRoyal Holloway, University of London

Elizabeth ParsonsUniversity of Keele, UK

Cappellini, B and Parsons, E (2012), ‘Sharing the Meal: FoodConsumption and Family Identity’, in R. W. Belk, S. Askegaard,L. Scott (ed.) Research in Consumer Behavior, Volume 14, Emerald GroupPublishing Limited, pp.109-128

Contacts:

Benedetta Cappellini: Royal Holloway University, School of

Management, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX,

benedetta.cappellini@rhul.ac.uk

Abstract:

Purpose: In this paper we seek to explore the collective

responsibilities undertaken by the family as a whole in

maintaining familial bonds through meal consumption. We draw

on work which examines the role of gift giving (Ruskola,

2005), sharing (Belk, 2010) and sacrifice (Miller, 1998) in

consumption. We take an original approach which does not look

at the family meal in isolation but rather focuses on the

patterning of meals and the relationships between them.

Methodology: The ethnographic study draws on interviews with

18 families and follow up mealtime observations with 15

families.

Findings: The analysis reveals a mealtime patterning involving

collective participation in saving (in the form of consuming

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ordinary and thrifty meals during the week) and spending (in

consuming extraordinary meals at weekends). Even if in the

women and mothers in the household tend to sacrifice

themselves more than other family members, the consumption of

thrifty or ordinary meals implies a process of sacrifice

involving the entire family. In viewing the meal as gift we

also observe a process of reciprocity in operation with family

members obliged to both share in, and contribute to, the meals

that have been cooked for them.

Social implication: Our analysis reveals discordances between

the aspirations of family members (which are arguably largely

based on cultural ideals), and their everyday experiences of

family mealtimes.

Originality/Value: The paper show how these micro experiences

of family mealtimes have implications for a macro

understanding of the idealised and culturally-loaded construct

of the family meal.

Key words: family meals, family identity, sharing, gift

giving, ordinary meals, extraordinary meals.

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Introduction

Interpretive consumer research looking at domestic consumption

practices emphasises how such practices are not driven by

self-satisfaction, rather by love for other family members

(Miller, 1998; Thompson, 1996). Love is not understood as ‘an

element of romanticism’ rather as a ‘simply devotional duty’

(Miller, 1998: 117), which is expressed through the striving

of parents and partners to satisfy their loved ones’ desires

through shopping (Miller, 1998) and through other domestic

consumption practices (De Vault, 1991).

These studies also show how such a devotional duty is a

prerogative of mothers and wives who materialise their love

through everyday shopping (Miller, 1998), cooking (Bugge and

Almås, 2006), and all the other practices surrounding the work

of feeding the family (De Vault, 1991). Largely described as

women’s everyday work, we know little about what and how other

family members say, do and make in their everyday family food

consumption practices. Because these studies are focused on

the perspective of being a wife or a mother, we know very

little about how the family, as a collective entity,

materialises its identity of ‘being a family’ through its food

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consumption practices. As Epp and Price (2008) remind us, we

cannot fully understand family consumption practices if we

simply look at individual identities within the family (such

as being a mother or being a wife) without considering

collective family identity and relational units. There is a

need to understand how collective family identity is forged

and perpetuated through consumption. Belk (2010) suggests that

one key approach would be to investigate family consumption

practices based on sharing, such as sharing a meal.

In response to these research gaps this study aims to elicit

family food consumption meanings and their implications for

family relations and identity. It seeks to understand how

individuals in the family, and the family unit as a whole,

materialise their devotional love for their family through

sharing a meal. Drawing on analysis from an ethnographic study

looking at the consumption of ordinary and extraordinary meals

in 18 middleclass British families, this article shows that

sharing meals require not simply a devotional mother, but

rather a devotional family, which saves resources during

ordinary meals and spends such resources in extraordinary

meals. Even if in the household women tend to sacrifice

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themselves more than others, the alternation of ordinary and

extraordinary meals implies a process of sharing (Belk, 2007;

2010) involving the entire family. All members are called to

save “something” in the course of the week and to invest what

has been saved for special occasions, family celebrations, and

the more recurrent Sunday lunch. In viewing the meal as gift

we also observe a process of reciprocity in operation with

family members obliged to both share in, and contribute to,

the meals that have been cooked for them. Finally these

analysed micro experiences of family mealtimes have

implications for a macro understanding of the idealised and

culturally-loaded construct of the family meal. Indeed our

analysis reveals discordances between the aspirations of

family members (which are arguably largely based on cultural

ideals), and their everyday experiences of family mealtimes.

Being a family in consumer studies

In her seminal work on family food consumption, De Vault

highlights how family as collective identity is “constructed

from day to day activities like eating together” (1991:39).

The responsibility and the work behind these everyday

activities of feeding the family is perceived by her female

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participants as an essential and “natural” abnegation embedded

in their gendered roles of being good mothers and wives.

Miller (1998) highlights that the restless work women donate

to their families is an unbalanced and non-reciprocal gift

exchange, which has analogies with religious sacrifice. For

Miller, as well as others scholars (De Vault, 1991; Cappellini

and Parsons, forthcoming), a modern form of sacrifice is

largely practiced by mothers and wives who, through their

everyday domestic work (from shopping to dealing with

leftovers) donate the best resources of the household to their

objects of devotion (children, husbands).

Although the mother’s perspective is dominant in studies

looking at family consumption, recently scholars have

emphasised the importance of looking at other individual

identities in order to understand household consumption

(Chitakunye and Maclaran, 2008). These studies emphasise that

fathers and children are not simply passive objects of

devotion for mothers and wives. Some husbands actively

contribute to the work of feeding the family (Valentine, 1999)

and children influence, and sometimes control, family food

decisions such as what and how to eat (Chitakunye and

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Maclaran, 2008). Although these studies offer new insights

into family consumption by highlighting the active roles of

the other identities, they are still concentrated on single

identities and thus they ‘lack consideration of truly

collective enterprises’ (Epp and Price, 2008:51) and hence we

know very little about how a collective identity of ‘being a

family’ is created and perpetuated through everyday food

consumption.

The few studies looking at collective family identity

emphasise that family builds its notion of collective identity

in relation to kinship and ideology (Cinotto, 2006; Daly 2001;

Gillis, 1996; Wilk 2010). Bennett et al. (1988; 212) describe

family identity as the ‘subjective sense of its own continuity

over time, its present situation, and its character. It is the

gestalt of qualities and attributes that make it a particular

family and that differentiate it from other families.’ More

recently Epp and Price describe family not simply as ‘as a

construct that resides in the minds of individuals but as co-

constructed in action… family identity is contingent upon

shared interactions among relational bundles within the family

that engage in both complementary and competing consumption

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practices’ (2008: 52). Thus family identity is built,

manifested and reinforced ‘in communicative practices, such as

symbolic consumption activities, as constitutive of collective

identity’ (Epp and Price, 2008: 52).

The family meal has been considered to be one of these

activities reinforcing family identity, but also an activity

wherein macro issues such as gender relations, family ideology

and parenting take place around the table (Daly, 2001; Wilk,

2010). In his historical analysis of American family meals

Cinotto (2006) shows how the powerful ideal of the family

meal, consisting of a nuclear family eating at the table and

sharing homemade food, is a very recent myth which emerged

only after the Second World War. Although this way of

consuming food was promoted at the beginning of the twentieth

century through moralising medical and political campaigns, it

established itself as a dominant practice only fifty years

later. Thanks to the prosperity of the American economy and

the birth of consumer society family meals become a powerful

and aspirational ideal for families in America as well as in

other countries. Despite this particular mode of eating being

only a relatively recent construct, the enduring ideological

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power of the family meal (consisting of a freshly homemade

meals prepared by mothers and shared with the rest of the

family around the table) has been demonstrated in a range of

studies.

In this study we draw inspiration from Consumer Culture Theory

studies which highlight the centrality and vitality of the

family meal as a family practice (Warde et al., 2007). In

particular we build on work which explores how sharing norms

and conventions (Wallendorf and Arnould, 1991), as well as

routine (Marshall, 2005), forge and perpetuate the sense of

‘being a family’ as a collective identity rather than an ensemble

of individual identities. Looking at family collective identity

shifts the focus of the analysis from devotional mothers and

their sacrifice (based on unbalanced gift giving) to a “we”

identity based on sharing norms, values, rituals and objects.

Without abandoning the concept of gift giving, we try to look

at family meals through the practice of sharing. In doing so

we build on Belk’s concept of sharing, which he defines as

‘the act and process of distributing what is ours to others

for their use and/or the act and process of receiving or

taking something from others for our use’ (2007: 126).

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Following Belk, sharing is not based on reciprocity and hence

people do not track the flux of giving and receiving, rather

they have access to joint possessions whose ownership is

defined as ‘our’. Sharing is also based on the common

responsibility of taking care of shared possessions. Because

of these characteristics sharing is mostly practised within

the family whose collective identity is forged by the everyday

sharing of resources in the household (Belk, 2010). Studies

looking at sharing family meals have mostly concentrated on

extraordinary food consumption, such as Christmas,

Thanksgiving and other family celebrations (Wallendorf and

Arnould, 1991). They observe the way in which sharing

extraordinary meals reinforces familial bonds and perpetuates

familial roles and norms. However, to our knowledge very

little has been said about the effect sharing ordinary meals

has on family identity (although see Marshall, 2005) and the

links between sharing ordinary and extraordinary meal is

overlooked by consumer researchers. Further, very little has

been said about the spacing and rhythm of family meals and the

relationship between ordinary and extraordinary meals.

Research methods

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This study adopts the interpretivist paradigm and follows the

tradition of consumer culture research using ‘a more in depth

analysis of the life stories expressed by a relatively small

number of participants’ (Thompson, 1996: 392). This article is

based on an ethnographic study of domestic food consumption in

18 middle class families, living in a medium size industrial

town in the Midlands, UK. Participants were recruited through

a purposive sampling accompanied by a snowball sampling

technique (Silverman, 2000). The majority of the families

consist of two parents living with two children, but in three

cases the household consists of two adults without children

and in one case a single mother living with two sons. Our

informants might be described as solidly middle class1, were

educated to a degree level or above, and aged between 35 to 50

years old. In the majority of cases both partners were full

time workers in professional occupations, but in two cases one

of the parents took care of the children and the house.

The study adopts a multi-method design which combines a series

of 18 in-depth interviews with observations of participants

1 It should be noted that social class has an important bearing on household mealtime rituals and their attendant meanings. More research is certainly needed that explores mealtime practices across household from a range of socio-economic backgrounds.

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during meal times. In the first phase of the research

interviews were conducted with the person most often

responsible for feeding the family in each household.

Interviews covered themes such as the organisation of everyday

meals, practices surrounding the process of having a meal

(from shopping to washing up), the division of work in the

household, but also the ideas, emotions and life goals

associated with domestic food consumption. The second phase of

the research involved observing a family dinner from the

planning to the disposal of the meal. Combining interviews

with observations helped us to understand how the family, and

not simply mothers, materialise their ideas, know-how and

emotions, and how they describe and perform their mealtime

practices while a guest (the first author) is present. Also

observations and interviews offered us a rich source of data

for understanding what and how people eat a meal on both

ordinary and extraordinary occasions. During the process of

data analysis and interpretation a continuing interaction

between the different sources of data (interviews’ transcripts

and observation notes) and the theoretical framework was

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privileged as a crucial part of the hermeneutical process of

understanding in interpretive studies (Silverman, 2000).

Devotional mothers and families: between gift giving and

sharing

During the fieldwork we met many devotional mothers who could

have sprung directly from the pages of DeVault’s (1991) book

Feeding the family. For devotional mothers (Cappellini and Parsons

forthcoming 2012) the meal they plan, make and serve ‘cannot

just be any food, but must be food that will satisfy them [the

family]’ (DeVault, 1991: 40). Our interviews confirm what the

literature reports elsewhere about the sacrifices made by

mothers (and a few fathers) in preparing the meal as a gift

for other family members. However, our observations reveal

another story about how this gift requires at least some level

of reciprocation by other family members. All members of the

family in fact contribute, although to different degrees, to

sharing the responsibility of the meal. In a few cases the

children and the parent who was not cooking, were involved in

the preparation and/or the disposal of the meal. For example

15 minutes before dinner was ready, Tracey’s children stopped

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watching TV and went into the kitchen to set the table for the

family. When we finished eating the apple tart, her oldest

child cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. When asking

Tracey about her children’s help she commented:

They do it every night, maybe tonight they are particularly efficient because you are

here (laughing). […] I am not sure how we introduced this, but I am glad we did.

It gives them the idea that they are doing their part for something that is a family

thing. We all do our bits, so they do their little things here and there and it makes

them understand that you need to do your part in the family.

For Tracey being part of the family implies ‘doing your bit’

and thus sharing some of the responsibilities for the

preparation and the disposal of the meal. These everyday

practices are part of a “family thing” which is not mine or

yours, but ours and thus something that everybody has to

contribute to. This confirms Belk’s (2010) point that sharing

reinforces and perpetuates affiliation and membership to a

group and our roles within this group.

Findings also show that once the meal is prepared it becomes a

family gift; such a gift cannot be easily refused, but needs

to be reciprocated with appreciation (see also Wilk, 2010).

Frequent are discussions between parents and children about

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the ‘right’ quantity of vegetables to be eaten and the non-

negotiable importance of finishing all the food that has been

put on their plates. Knowing that her son John didn’t like the

meal she was cooking for the family, and in order to avoid

arguments, Tracey cooked a separate meal of pasta for him.

During the meal she reminded him that he had to finish all of

this meal because it had been especially cooked for him. Other

participants adopt different strategies. Tim, for example,

refuses to cook a different dish for his children but he gave

them a special chocolate once they finished all the risotto

that he put on their plates. Similarly Catherine observed that

when her children were young “they couldn’t choose. I cooked it and I

put on the table and they had to eat it”

Sharing a meal, which makes everyone “happy” is not simply the

responsibility of the cook (often mother) as s/he tries to

accommodate the different tastes of family members. Rather it

is more than the sum of the parts, it is a collective

manifestation of being a family wherein each member of the

family has to take part playing a specific role, or “doing

their bit” as Tracy says.

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Sharing ordinary and extraordinary meals

Interviews and observations revealed that participants adopted

different ways of sharing their meals and ‘doing their bit’

depending on the occasions surrounding the meals. We

identified two different patterns of meal sharing in the

family (see table 1). Ordinary meals are everyday meals often

consumed during the working week and only include immediate

family members, whereas extraordinary meals include meals with

a guest, but also family celebrations.

Take in table 1

Everyday sharing: thrifty meals and thrifty tables

Findings show that participants tend to cook what is perceived

as convenient food for their ordinary meals. Similarly to

other studies looking at time perception amongst middleclass

mothers (Thompson, 1996) our participants describe their

everyday life as a constant time pressure in juggling between

work, parenting and housework. Participants considered their

everyday meal as thrifty meals, which are consumed in order to

save time, effort and money in the kitchen. While it is

questionable how people evaluate a meal as thrifty or not, and

it is also questionable that such an evaluation is based on

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common standards, participants emphasise how their making the

meal is driven by saving resources in all practices

surrounding the meal, including its disposal. As Tina points

out:

Spaghetti Bolognese is an easy and a quick meal. It is just so quick and easy…

potatoes you have to peel them as well as boil…but pasta absorbs all kinds of taste

into it… and it is fast food, isn’t it? Even if you make your own sauce, it hardly takes

you…that’s the reason I got into it so much…I can make mince meat, garlic and

tomatoes… so fast and I don’t even look at the recipe. […]You get a tin of tomatoes,

and chop a onion and few herbs and it is quite simple, an awful lot cheaper and

actually you can put in whatever you have [...] I think we are making spaghetti

Bolognese because it is far less washing up

Findings reveal a link between the effort, money and time

invested in making a dinner and the effort and time spent in

sharing a meal. In fact a thrifty dish becomes a thrifty meal

wherein food is displayed, served and eaten in a thrifty way,

saving time and effort for all the family members.

Participants’ tables were usually set in informal ways usually

without serving plates, bottles of wine or jugs of water, but

with individual plates, glasses, and cutlery. In some cases

people ate their dinner on the sofa in front of the

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television. Whether eaten in front of the television or at the

table, the way the food was served was very similar. Usually

food was divided and served on individual plates in the

kitchen by the cook. This mode of serving generates much less

waste than putting out bowls of food for diners to help

themselves from. In addition this individual way of serving

food on plates implies an intimate knowledge of the diners.

When the cook serves the food on the plate she/he does not

divide the food in the same way for everyone, rather she/he

“adjusts” the “right” quantity of the food for each person. It

is not surprising that this way of serving food is adopted by

parents. As Christina explains:

When I prepare the plate for my daughter I think of the right quantity for her and I

make sure she has more potatoes and less cabbage, she doesn’t like cabbage.

As Wilk (2010) points out, serving food and arranging the

“right” portion is also a power game involving gender and

parenting relations. When Christina arranges the plates she

thinks both about what she would like to let her daughter have

for dinner (“right” quantity) and what her daughter would like

to have on her plate (potatoes instead of cabbage). Christina

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can arrange the food on the kitchen surfaces without her

daughter because she knows what her daughter likes (image 1).

In this way she can have control over her daughter’s meal

which will be more problematic (and may generate an argument)

if her food is portioned at the table. Once the portions were

arranged on the plates, usually the cook called people to eat

and gave them their individual plates (image 2).

Take in picture 1 Take in picture 2

Figure 1: Christina portions out the food for her family.

Figure 2: Ian’s kitchen. Once he prepares the meal he calls his wife

Caroline to collect her plate

Margaret describes this routinized way of serving the meal in

these terms:

I do like the idea of eating at the table and switching off the telly, but there are

times when the kids are watching something or they are at the computer or chatting

…and they just take the dinner and go. It all depends on who is there and how much

effort you put into the dinner. If it is something out of the freezer like a chicken

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portion out of the freezer, something that you throw together and make a dinner; it

is not so much effort so I may not be so strict about it…

As Margaret explains her thrifty gift is reciprocated in a

thrifty way. Having spent little effort in preparing the meal

she does not expect her children to “make an effort” and

suspend their own activity in order to eat their meal.

Margaret observes that she prefers them to turn the television

off and sit at the table together to eat, but, as she says, it

doesn’t happen every day. Others express disappointment in

their inability to adhere to such ideals of the family meal.

For example Sarah talks in dissatisfied terms about her

present mode of sharing a meal with her partner, but she notes

that in an idyllic and more perfect future when she has a

family, things will be different. Her comments remind us that

families fashion narratives for themselves in the present (see

Gillis, 1996) but also that these narratives encompass future

aspirations (see Daly, 2001).

I am not happy about that [eating on the sofa in front of the television], but this is

what we do. We use the table only when we have guests.[…] We want to have a

family and with the children you need to eat at the table and without TV…children

need these things.[…] When we start a family we need to eat at the table.

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Sarah and Margaret are examples of how extraordinarily

powerful the ideal of the family meal is. Our participants

referred to this ideal as a relaxed event involving the family

sitting around the table sharing wholesome homemade food,

talking happily and giving each other their full attention.

What takes place in their homes at dinner time is very often

different from this ideal. As Wilk (2010: 428) observes, ‘In

family meals the normative and the performative are very far

apart’. Some, but not all, of our participants expressed

frustration and dissatisfaction at the gap between the ideal

and actuality of their everyday family mealtimes. Participants

attributed their perceived failure to match up at mealtimes to

their continual juggling lifestyle. Given that ordinary meals

are thrifty meals not conforming to the ideal of family meals,

it is not surprising that they do not usually include guests.

When we have guests I usually make an effort […] so I make something special,

special things that I do not make everyday.

This thrifty way of sharing convenient and intimate food

reaffirms family membership, as only family members perform

everyday saving of resources. Therefore thrifty meals are also

intimate meals wherein only family members are admitted.

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Extraordinary sharing: rich food and rich tables

If in the middle of the week people tend to cook food

perceived as convenient, at the weekend people often prepare

more extravagant meals. Dishes like beans on toast or

spaghetti Bolognese seem to disappear and also ingredients

like pasta seem to be absent from people’s weekend tables.

Although not all participants report having rich meals every

weekend, such as Sunday roast dinner, most of them emphasise

that they tend to have some form of extraordinary food at the

weekend. While these weekend meals are very much part of the

weekly routine, they differs quite markedly from weekday meals

and thus represent an interruption of, or inversion of,

weekday mealtime practices. There is an investment of more

resources such as time, money and effort in the kitchen in

cooking the meal. While participants typically justified the

adoption of expeditious meals during the week by saying “I

don’t have time”, they seem happy to make time at the weekend.

As Nigel observes:

during the week we tend to have basic commodities but at the weekend we tend to

say “Right I am going to make this for this weekend” and cook something like a

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casserole or more complex like a pheasant so we plan it and take more time for the

cooking

Although participants do not often talk about the financial

resources invested in their meals, weekend meals seem to be

more expensive than everyday meals. Dessert appears at the

table, as well as a bottle of wine, and maybe some chocolate

mints. Therefore at the weekend participants seem to invest

not simply more time in their kitchen but also more effort in

cooking more complex and more expensive dishes. More effort is

also used to display and serve the food, which in the case of

a Sunday roast requires a particular use of serving plates and

bowls displayed at the centre of the dining table.

If I make some traditional English roast, every different bit, and a part of the meat

that I will cut on the side, is out, in the bowls. […] A part of the meat everything else

is just stuck out and people can help themselves. (Robert)

In the case of Sunday roast dinner food it is not served on

individual plates, but as a gift for the entire family, the

meal is displayed in common plates arranged in the centre of

the table. Thus there is no “my” or “your” plate with my or

your portion decided by the cook; rather “our” food. Given the

use of the table but also common plates and bowls, this way of

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sharing the meal is usually reserved for special occasions.

This mode of serving the food is also more extravagant because

choice and abundance seem to be an important feature, larger

quantities of food are cooked to make sure that there is

enough for everyone and this usually results in leftovers2.

Although some participants describe this pattern of eating as

their usual one, the majority of participants describe it as

“too much fuss”, and as such it is reserved for extraordinary

occasions, such as Sunday roast dinner or family celebrations.

Even if not all participants use serving plates and bowls to

display weekend food, all of them share their weekend meals at

the table with the rest of the family. Given this investment

of extra resources it is not surprising to hear participants

affirming that Sunday lunch is an important family

appointment. Here the close correspondence between

extraordinary meals and family time (Daly, 2001) is very

clear:

We try to have dinner at the table, but we are always in a rush and sometimes the

children want to eat in front of the television [...] It is important eating together

2 It is likely that the extraordinary meal is celebrated in different ways by household of different social classes. As Wilk (2006) observes, the excess involved in serving food for diners to help themselves from may wellseem wasteful to households from poorer backgrounds.

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[...] we are always in a rush, but at the weekend we can do things with more time

and we have nice food and we sit and chat...it’s nice, I think the children like it as

well! (Tim)

Tim’s comment highlights that it is not only the parents which

benefit from and enjoy family time. Margaret similarly

emphasises how the Sunday meal “makes the family close”. As

she says:

I do like on Sunday to invite them [her son and her daughter who have

left home] and make something, when I have got time and I know that they will

come around and sit around the table…I think this makes the family close...it’s

important to make the family close.

On Sunday Margaret often shares a meal with all her children.

Although in describing her routine she emphasises the problem

of not having enough space in the house to eat at the table

every night, at the weekend she suddenly finds the space to do

so. As has been illustrated previously Margaret allows her

teenage sons to eat in front of the television during the

week, but at the weekend she expects her children to eat at

the table and “talk”.

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We…living in a quite small house and we don’t tend to eat at the table we try to eat

at the table. […]. If you put effort into the dinner, let’s say for Sunday lunch, you

have to sit down and talk …

Both Tim and Margaret observe that ‘chat’ and ‘talk’ at the

table are an integral part of these mealtimes. Margaret

observes that given the effort she has spent on the meal, her

children are called to reciprocate by doing their part, in

this case talking together3 during the meal. Having spent more

resources preparing a richer meal, Margaret expects a richer

thanks in return. Her children are expected to celebrate the

special gift that Margaret donates to and shares with her

family. In return for such a special gift, Margaret’s sons

have to share not simply richer food, rather they have to

reciprocate with a specific performance (sitting down and

talking).

Most of the observed dinner took place following this pattern

of sharing (see pictures 3 and 4). Sarah for example made an

occasion of being observed and she did not only unfold the

table that “has not been used for months”, but she also set up

the table in “a posh” (her words) way. Despite having asked

3 The additional function of family mealtimes in socializing children is also important here (Larson et al. 2006, Ochs and Shohet, 2006)

26

Sarah to cook and serve an ordinary meal and to eat it as her

and her family ordinarily do, she confesses that her and her

husband ware not comfortable in offering their everyday meal

to an observer. Their intimate and thrifty everyday meal on

the sofa and in front of the television was not sharable with

a stranger; rather they share the way they celebrate their

household with a guest. They did not perform their everyday

saving resources with an ordinary meal. They perform the ideal

of a family meal that Sarah of dreams for her future. A

performance similar to what take place at Margaret’ s every

Sunday: a meal with a table with homemade food and a chatting

family around it.

Take in picture 3 Take in picture 4

Figure 3: Sarah’s table

Figure 4: Tina serves her frittata

Conclusion

To conclude, our study makes a range of contributions to

understanding the collective dimensions of the family meal.

Three key contributions stand out: family intimacy and

membership; the roles of gifting and sharing in the family

unit; and the prescriptive influence of cultural ideologies of27

the family meal on individual family members. However, it is

important to note that these contributions have only come to

light because we have explored the relationships between meals.

Given that there is no widely held standard for extraordinary

meals, seeing them as relative events as opposed to

independent occasions is essential. Extraordinary meals can

only be understood in relation to ordinary meals, and their

role as gifts as opposed to more everyday sharing experiences

also requires that they be seen as ruptures or interruptions

in the wider flow of everyday meals.

Turning to family intimacy and membership we have a series of

observations. As previous studies have found (Wallendorf and

Arnould, 1991), our study highlights the importance of

extraordinary meals for reinforcing familial bonds. These

family events are very much about celebrating and displaying

family and as such guests are admitted to the table and food

is displayed in abundance (see table 1). However our study

also reveals the importance of ordinary meals for reinforcing

such a collective family identity. Here the whole family is

called to save resources in order that they may be spent in

the more extraordinary celebrations of family (see also

28

Cappellini and Parsons, 2011). This experience of saving

resources and consuming more thrifty or ordinary meals is

significant in signaling family membership and intimacy.

Guests are not invited to these everyday sharing events (see

table 1). As Douglas and Isherwood (1979: 88) remind us

‘sharing goods and being made welcome to the hospitable table

and to the marriage bed are the first, closest fields of

inclusion’. In this respect sharing the thrifty, mundane and

ordinary table, rather than the hospitable one, implies a

deeper level of inclusion: being part of the family and being

called to the everyday saving of resources. Even if the cook

is probably the person in the household most affected by the

work of making a meal, all the household is called to save

resources during the week. Therefore in addition to talking

about a devotional mother who sacrifices herself for her

family, we can talk of a devotional household wherein

resources are saved and spent together.

Our second contribution relates to the framing of family meals

as gift giving and sharing events (Belk, 2010). We have found

that these concepts don’t map easily on to extraordinary and

ordinary meals as both events contain elements of both sharing

29

and gift giving. However, both concepts offer useful insights

into the formation of individual and collective identities

during mealtimes.Two of the key dimensions that characterize

gift giving as distinct from sharing are

reciprocity/obligation and ceremony (Belk, 2010). Belk

observes that sharing is generally non reciprocal whereas gift

giving has a reciprocal element. In our study we did not

observe any direct reciprocity between the cook and other

family members. The cook does not overtly measure her time

spent in the supermarket and the kitchen and translate this

into a requirement for some equivalent effort by other family

members. However we did observe that the expectations placed

on family members by the cook do differ relative to the effort

they have spent in preparing the meal (see table, 1). If a

thrifty meal can be shared on the sofa or in front of the

television, a richer meal “deserves” a different eating

practice constituting a table and diners sitting around the

table sharing food as well as conversation. This requirement

might be best thought of in terms of Sahlins’ (1972) concept

of generalized reciprocity which involves the giving of goods

and services without keeping a note of their value, but with

30

the expectation of some form of reciprocity or obligation by

individuals according to their ability. The second dimension

that distinguishes gift giving from sharing is ceremony, or to

use Bourdieu’s (1977: 126) term the “way of giving”. Belk

observes that ceremony is typically a feature of gift giving

but not of sharing. In our case ceremony was certainly

important in extraordinary mealtimes, particularly in terms of

the set up of the table and serving of the food as well as

formalities involved in eating. It might be that this

formality and ceremony is deliberately used by the cook to

frame these meals as special gifts, and thus distinguish them

from mundane sharing. However such a framing misses out on the

collective nature of these events, it is not only the cook who

re-produces the meal but the whole family unit who come

together to create the meal.

If we deliberately frame family meals as sharing events what

follows is a view of the family as a collective unit. However

seeing the family meal as an act of gift giving necessarily

requires that the partners of the exchange be viewed as

separate entities rather than as part of a whole. Therefore,

to theorise family mealtimes as a gift from a parent to the

31

rest of the family, highlights the unbalanced nature of the

family unit and renders the disproportionate sacrifice of

mothers highly visible. Perhaps then the received view of the

family meal as a shared event as opposed to a gift giving

occasion is shaped by wider cultural ideals of the family meal

which emphasise togetherness rather than individual inputs

into the event. However such framing erases the ceaseless work

that parents undertake in feeding the family. In likening the

family unit to the corporation Ruskola (2005: 334) points out

that ‘in the case of the family we seem to suffer from a

massive collective misrecognition of the material exchanges

that take place within it.’ While the mothers in our study

seemed to reflect the sacrificial mother, happy to embrace

their ‘second shift’ (Hochschild, 1989) in offering their gift

of the meal and the attendant physical and emotional labour

involved; this should not be taken as widely representative

(Sullivan, 2004).

The final contribution of this paper is to show how enduringly

powerful and yet seemingly elusive the ideal of the “family

meal” proves to be. This ideal functions in a prescriptive as

well as a descriptive manner and in it we see reflected

32

Ruskola’s (2005: 338) view of the family as involving an

‘institutionalization of altruism’. It not only sets the terms

for the type of food consumed and the manner of its

preparation and sharing, but also directs the patterning of

time in the household. While pressures on family time have

increased with changing participation in the workforce as well

as changes and fracturing of traditional family structures

beliefs about what constitutes the ideal family meal have

remained rather static (Daly, 2001). This mismatch results in

a “structural contradiction” (Daly 2001:293) between the lived

experience of family mealtimes and the powerful ideology which

continues to govern them. As Gillis (1996: xvii) observes

‘There has always been tension between the families people

live with and the families they live by’. Our analysis of

ordinary mealtimes reveals that people rarely perform a family

meal consisting of home made food shared with the all family

around the table. The accompanying sense of guilt and need to

justify their behaviours and decisions when the ideal is not

achieved reveals that standards and expectations for family

meals continue to be shaped in a powerful way by this

hegemonic idea of ‘family togetherness, positive engagement

33

and child-centeredness’(Daly 2001: 293). The power of the

ideology of the family meal is even more sobering if we

consider its effects at the macro level, as Wilk (2010)

argues, this emphasis has played a central role in shifting

responsibility from public institutions onto the individual

household. While Gillis (1996: xi) usefully entreats us to

‘examine the appropriateness of our current myths and rituals,

altering them if necessary to suit our current circumstances’

our study shows that perhaps this is much easier said than

done.

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Table 1: Ordinary and extraordinary meals

Ordinary meals: Weekday meals Extraordinary meals: Family celebrations and (some) Sunday meals

Collective saving of:TimeEffortMoney

Collective spending of:TimeEffortMoney

Convenience and Control:Meals portioned out individually by the cook in the kitchen

Display and Abundance:Food placed in the centre of the table and family members and guests help themselves

Mother’s gift to the family and family’s reciprocation:Thrifty gift, thrifty reciprocation

Mother’s gift to the family andfamily’s reciprocation:Rich gift, rich reciprocation

Admission: Only family members Admission: Family members and

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non members (guests) Wider discordance between expectations of family meals and lived experience of familymeal

Less wide discordance between expectations of family meals and lived experience of family meal

37