Eating together : food, friendship, and inequality /

Julier, a sociologist who directs the food studies program at Chatham University, addresses the prosaic details of everyday entertaining in this engaging and readable monograph. Through participant observation and many interviews, the author crafts a textured portrait of the meals and manners of middle-class dinner parties and potluck suppers, primary events in American social life. Despite their insistence on "informality," Julier's informants reveal rules of taste, social roles, and customs that have their roots in the etiquette of the Emily Post era. Julier's analysis reveals both how notions of hospitality have changed, and the degree to which women are still charged with much of the labor of caring and sharing. The account does seem weighted toward the positive social aspects of meals rather than their potential for discord and conflict, something the author's informants were probably unwilling to talk about. The book is a welcome update to Marjorie DeVault's Feeding the Family (1991), though it is less incisive. An important addition to a surprisingly limited literature on food in everyday, middle-class life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All undergraduates and above. R. R. Wilk Indiana University