Food's grammar and graces

Solecisms are typically either social or grammatical.  It is not done to go up to total strangers and ask "how much do you earn?" any more than it is to say "if I was you" instead of "if I were you".  These two apparently disparate manifestations have an interesting nexus in the meal, which with both a grammar and an etiquette, admits of breaches in both. 

Although food occupies us for considerable parts of our waking day, and - as the explosion in the number of restaurants attests - increasingly represents a favoured activity, we remain blithely unaware of the hidden structures it contains; we prefer instead to concentrate on superficial details such as the constituents of the sauce, or the aesthetics of the decor.  And yet implicitly every meal is both an instance of food's formal grammar and a statement about class dynamics. 

The social dimension is more manifest.  Meals occur at myriad levels, from the fast food takeaway to the formal eight-course banquet, all of which have their corresponding social index.  Between the extremes there are a number of well-established modes, including, in ascending order of formality: the sandwich; the ploughman's lunch; the Sunday roast followed by pudding; the canapé and buffet; the standard three-course restaurant meal, and its later avatars which add progressively a soup course, a fish course, cheese and so on.
 
Attached to each meal is an etiquette that becomes more stringent with increasingly formality.  Breaches occur in two ways: mixing etiquettes by ordering a burger in a three-star restaurant is the most blatant; more subtle is the misappropriation of the meal's associated machinery in the form of cutlery, glasses, bread and condiments - all of which have their own mythologies and rites that must be strictly adhered to for the meal to be correctly executed.
 
Perhaps more intriguing than such essentially snobbish concerns is the underlying grammar of a meal.  Not surprisingly, this is culturally specific; indeed, one of the best ways of alerting yourself to your own society's assumptions at the table is to eat abroad.
 
Meals clearly have a syntax, expressed in terms of the order of courses.  Equally clearly, that order is largely historical - there is no imperative reason why soup should be served before the so-called main course, or why sweets should not occur at any point in the meal.  And yet in Western society we have been brought up to expect a certain progression of foodstuffs, a characteristic eating rhythm.  Beyond this basic syntax there are also rules about what foods go with each other, how they should be prepared - though in a novelty-hungry society many of the unspoken taboos are being breached - and how it should be presented on the plate.  Other peripheral elements include what cutlery is to be used - witness the array of differentiated knives and spoons that must be dealt with - how the table is set and even basics such as when certain types of meals can be taken.  Given the astonishing complexity and cultural burden borne by such a basic human need as eating, it is no wonder that it has come to be one of the solecism's primary sites.

(10.12.89)

Index