Technologies of Hospitality

In a chapter of her Eating Together: Food, Friendship and Inequality , Alice Julier compares Emily Post’s instructions for “formal dinners” and Martha Stewart’s concept of “entertaining.” Much has changed in between.

For starters, Post insists that “formal dinner parties depend on the availability of servants” (37). Even if one doesn’t have servants around the house all the time, it’s possible to hire some to cook and serve the formal dinner. Formal dinners are seated, and they take place far away from the kitchen. “The one thing every hostess tries to avoid is the risk of the smell of cooking,” Post writes. Julier quotes Margaret Visser: “cooking smells were thought to be suggestive both of food in its purely nutritive function and of the intimate background workings of the household; the smell of food was therefore considered an imposition upon the guests” (39). Hostesses shouldn’t serve anything unusual, but stick to the classic six-course meal (41).

Stewart has a very different idea.

She advocates letting guests gather in the kitchen and even help with the preparation: “As other guests arrive,” Stewart writes, “the kitchen expands and when it is full we adjourn to the parlor.” Stewart suggests serving ethnic foods. In place of formality and tradition, Stewart emphasizes individualism, choice, and equality. Above all, Julier thinks, Stewart’s “entertaining” is about style: “What people really need to be successful at sociability is knowledge of the visible signs, the symbolic aspects of display that illustrate ‘good taste’” (48).

These are fairly obvious changes. But Julier discerns in this shift a Weberian “rationalization” of hospitality. Drawing on H. Murray’s Do Not Neglect Hospitality: The Catholic Worker and the Homeless , she notes that rationalization has “extended into hospitality, commercializing and commodifying it, particularly in the sense that one must have specialized training in order to provide hospitality.” Stewart contributes “to a construction of sociable behavior that rests on the presumption that people can choose from a variety of possible ‘selves’ if given a guided tour through the possibilities” (53).

This supports Julier’s overall thesis that “meals provide a landscape from which to explore all manners of cultural and economic dilemmas. Decisions about whom we eat with, in what manner, and what kinds of food are inextricably tied to social boundaries. The personal, after all, is political” (2).