Rating
The Pequod Review:
Margaret Visser's The Rituals of Dinner (1991) is a witty and sometimes interesting cultural review of our modern dining habits. Visser bounces around a lot and some of her later chapters are repetitive, but she has a wry humor throughout:
Eating 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... Animals are murdered to produce meat, vegetables are torn up, peeled, and chopped; most of what we eat is treated with fire; and chewing is designed remorselessly to finish what killing and cooking began. People naturally prefer that none of this should happen to them. Behind every rule of table etiquette lurks the determination of each person present to be a diner, not a dish.
[...]
Rigid formality tends to be perceived these days (and politeness, now as ever, has everything to do with its perception by others) as an impolite and unkind expression of icy distance. It is very clear that separateness is no longer sought but regarded as an imposition, and guarding it by means of one's manner can be found offensive and even ludicrous. Official equality is what manners ritually express. Polite behavior now demands constant assurances that one is in no way superior to other people -- even if, and especially if, one is quite obviously in a position of power.
[...]
The recent fashion for nouvelle cuisine is a social expression of the modern ideal that successful people ought to contrive to be not only very rich but also very thin.
Recommended.