![]() ![]() With an anthropologist’s eyes, Visser observes the peculiarities of our own food culture, sparing no hypocrisies. We are lying to ourselves if we think we can simply do away with ritual: everyday methods of including and excluding, of welcoming and remonstrating, are the building blocks of our communal life. But so too will the culinary relativist, the partisan of the “natural”, the casual and the informal. The reader hoping to find in this book a full-throated defence of an ideal form of “table manners” will be disappointed. ![]() Nouvelle cuisine is an expression of the ideal that the successful ought to be not only very rich but also very thin Margaret Visser When, about two and a half millennia ago, Hesiod told his readers not to cut their fingernails at the table (or, in his words, “At the abundant dinner of the gods, do not sever with bright steel the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches”), did they listen? When Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus complained about the communal dish being polluted by the snot and filth of rude fellow diners, did it result in a shift towards clean fingers and unsauced sleeves? Probably not. It’s a helpful reminder that books on manners and behaviour are usually aiming at an ideal, and not describing a reality. Alan Bennett tells a story about his first experience of Oxford college dining, in the company of public schoolboys whose behaviour failed to match up to his expectations of good table etiquette: “These boys hogged the bread, they slurped the soup and bolted whatever was put on their plates with medieval abandon.” The way the proprieties are exalted – or ignored – can be telling. In her account, the potluck supper and the picnic share space with the carefully plotted rituals of cannibal societies such as that of ancient Fiji, where hands were used to eat most foods, but a special wooden fork was reserved for when the meat consumed was human flesh. With the wry humour that enlivens this book, she remarks: “Nothing so unites us as gathering with one mind to murder someone we hate, unless it is coming together to share in a meal.” She has a gift for revealing what is strange or fraught about the behaviours and the rituals we hardly give a second thought to. “Eating,” Visser writes, “is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.” Knives and teeth are bared, and precious sustenance is divided among the diners, who need to put their fears of poisoning or infection aside if they are to eat at a common table (it was only in 1989, Visser writes, that the formal tasting of every meal eaten by the Japanese emperor was brought to an end).
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