The American family dinner is an endangered custom with magical powers attributed to it. It is also, as cultural historian Abigail Carroll explains in her fascinating new book, Three Squares, “only about 150 years old.”
IMAGE: Three Squares
The American family dinner is an endangered custom with magical powers attributed to it. It is also, as cultural historian Abigail Carroll explains in her fascinating new book, Three Squares, “only about 150 years old.”
IMAGE: Three Squares, Abigail Carroll (jacket design by Nicole Caputo).
Subtitled “the invention of the American meal,” Three Squares is an engaging and eye-opening look at the economic and cultural forces that have shaped the country’s shifting formats of consumption over time — and, in turn, the changing meanings and value judgments that Americans have attached to those eating patterns.
Carroll starts with the casual, ad hoc chaos of pre-Victorian consumption. Although colonists saw a defined, three-meal-a-day structure as a way to differentiate their civilised society from the “savagery” of Native American feasts and fasts, in reality, their meals were “generally informal, variable, and socially unimportant affairs.” Food was often in short supply, and tables, chairs, knives, forks, and plates even rarer: Carroll notes that fewer than one in four seventeenth-century Virginia households had a table, and sharing a dinner bowl with a “trencher-mate” was standard practice until the late eighteenth century.
Even more importantly, in a pre-industrial era where nearly everyone spent every day engaged in hard physical labour, eating was an opportunity to refuel, rather than demonstrate dining etiquette:
Food meant survival; it was energy and sustenance, and obtaining one’s fill was serious business. Not surprisingly, the shape and social trappings of the meal meant comparably little.
Then came the Industrial Revolution, and, with it, a new world of city-dwelling consumers whose relationship to food was now shaped by the demands of factory work schedules and the anonymity of urban life.
Obviously, people living in a large city could not possibly know everyone, the way they might have in a small town or village. Instead, they began to rely on social etiquette to manage interactions between strangers, but also display and judge class status. Dinnertime became both a training ground and showcase for Americans’ emerging code of polite manners.
IMAGE: From “Rules of Civility” in the Gentleman’s Gazette.
IMAGE: Lunch pails, 1880s, via The Smithsonian Magazine.
Meanwhile, as we’ve discussed on Edible Geography before, lunch is another legacy of industrialisation and urbanisation. Interestingly, Carroll fills in the other half of that story: the impact that eating outside of the house at mid-day had on the evening meal.
No longer laboring together as an economical unit, family members needed a new way to bond, and dinner fit the bill. With husbands, wives, and children inhabiting separate worlds during the day—office, factory, home, school—coming together around a table in the evening took on heightened significance. [...] Communal consumption replaced cooperative production as the glue that held the family together.
In other words, the invention of lunch simultaneously served to ennoble the evening meal, leading to the semi-sacred status the family dinner holds today. Of course, this change didn’t happen overnight, leading to a couple of decades of confusion and awkward clashes in which “it was common for one family to dine in the evening while its neighbors dined in the afternoon.”
IMAGE: Freedom from Want, Norman Rockwell, 1943. According to Carroll, “whereas dinner had served as a vehicle of family cohesion of middle-class identity in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth, as Rockwell hinted, it became a way to connect with the nation.”
Carroll’s focus is the American meal, for which the Industrial Revolution was, indeed, revolutionary. What’s intriguing, though Carroll does not go into this, is that this seismic shift from lunch to din