Evolution of Social Ties around New Food Practices

– OK, so in fact when people come here it’s just to have a good time, but eating together is incidental because you have to eat?

– Exactly (Sabrina).

On the other hand, in other cases, eating together allows friends and family to get together, but the food is central. Thus, the experience of being together sometimes begins even before the meal (guests come to cook):

The last time we had a Mexican night, so we made fajitas and stuff, the other night we spent three hours making sushi, everyone with their own thing [laughs], so yeah, it’s not bad, it’s true that we cook a lot with our friends too, it’s great (Camille).

In these types of practices, the esthetics and content of the meal are central.

Based on these findings, the remainder of this chapter offers an analysis, in the form of a discussion, of the conditions for the emergence of eating together practices. This analysis is conducted in light of Shove et al .’s (2012) framework of practice theories, described above.

Eating together may seem like a harmless and simple practice for many people. For others, however, there are many reasons why this practice does not emerge or continue. The purpose of this section is to shed light from practice theories (and in particular from the theoretical framework of Shove et al . (2012)) on the question of the feasibility of eating together , with a view, in particular, to opening up avenues for facilitating eating together in everyday life.

Meeting around a meal, whether in a daily family setting or for more exceptional and/or convivial meals with people from outside the household, depends on the “material” feasibility of this meeting: having sufficient and suitable space, and being able to organize the physical meeting. Thus, there are material elements on several scales: on a more microscale, tangible elements are used to implement the practice: for example, having tables and chairs, plates and cutlery for the guests:

Personally, I eat standing up at home in the corner of the kitchen, which is very bad, but as soon as I am in Montpellier [at my girlfriend’s house], I absolutely have to take my tray, my plate and sit down at the table, it is a sine qua non condition, but otherwise she does not accept that we eat standing up near the corner of the fridge (Maurice).

Beyond the question, on a microscale, of the material needed to eat together , there is the question of the logistical feasibility of the meeting. This is a broader scale of the material environment, corresponding rather to the infrastructure. Everyday life is arranged in a given time and space, in which consumers carry out their practices. In this respect, eating together depends on the possibilities offered by the location of the place where people live, by the time it takes to travel from home to work, by the location of friends’ homes, by the time it takes to travel between the place where they do their evening activities (gym, music lessons, etc.) and their homes, etc. These arrangements offer more or less the same opportunities for the consumer to do their daily activities, but varying degrees of opportunity for individuals to share meals with members of their own household or with friends/family from outside the household. It is interesting to note that this logistical feasibility of eating together is tending to evolve, particularly with the emergence of practices such as remote commensality : the fact of sharing a meal through a video call, made possible by new technologies and mobile applications: “I often call a friend, I know that he is eating alone so we call each other and eat together [laughs]” (Camille). Note that Camille’s comments predate the Covid-19 pandemic. These practices, which do not limit eating together to physical encounters, probably flourished during (and perhaps since) the lockdowns that took place in France from March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In any case, it is essential to note that eating together depends largely on the material conditions that allow individuals to meet and organize the meal.

In addition to the tangible material elements that underlie eating together , skills are also involved in implementing practices of eating together . Having the skills to choose, buy, store and prepare products is a first set of skills, which are broader than just cooking a meal. More broadly, cooking products that are adapted to the people with whom we are eating to make sharing possible between the commensals can be an issue. This sharing supposes that individuals can be gathered around a dish that will be accepted and appreciated by all. This essentially refers to the knowledge and skills of the person in charge of the organization and preparation of the meal, which consists of the management of the event itself, as well as of the food preferences and particularities of the guests, as well as the management of the products:

From Monday to Saturday we eat together every evening, knowing that on Saturday there are two meals: at noon and in the evening, on Sunday at noon we eat with my grandmother, so there will be three of us at the table, and I will also adapt all the shopping etc. to Sunday, because my grandmother no longer has the same taste as we do, so she can’t stand certain foods, whereas we love them, well, I adapt to what she likes because she has to eat, and she is the one who needs to eat the most (Noémie).

Similarly, beyond a question of taste, skills are needed to take into account considerations related to the household economy, so that the products consumed when eating together are in line with the household budget, which must be able to “afford it”.

A second set of skills refers more to the skills and behaviors involved in eating. Respecting codes of good behavior during meals is culture-specific (e.g. eating with cutlery, waiting for commensals to finish the dish before moving on to dessert, etc.), and this set of skills is closely related to meanings, which is the third element that helps explain the emergence and maintenance of a practice according to Shove et al .’s (2012) theoretical framework.

Meanings can be thought of as the values necessary for a practice to emerge or be sustained. Thus, regarding eating together , we can assume that meanings are found in two aspects: 1) it is necessary for eating together to be part of the values of the individuals involved and 2) it is necessary for the values of the commensals to be reconcilable during a meal.

The first aspect assumes that mealtimes are maintained by individuals if they attribute a value to shared meals (or even a symbolism that can lead to ritualization). Without being exceptional or festive, daily family meals can have a central value in the life of a household, contributing to the maintenance of the practice of eating together :

I noticed that when [my boyfriend] wasn’t there, we weren’t together for a week or two, I ate less, so I think that there is a social side to it, we like to have a meal together in the evening, you know, so I think that this brings a bit of a rhythm in the sense that we will try to agree to eat together, if we can, we don’t do… it’s not independently each of us on their own and we eat together, we organize ourselves a bit to have a meal together… (Paola).

The second aspect related to meanings more specifically concerns the time of the meal, its feasibility and its good progress. Indeed, the good progress of a meal with several people is not defined by all individuals in the same way, and the feasibility of eating together depends on this agreement: for some, eating together begins in the kitchen: