of constraints to eating together.
Skills and meanings can be closely linked in a festive eating together practice, in which the guests (and usually the host) demonstrate specific skills, which are at the heart of the eating together practice: this is, for example, the case for meals in which the objective is to discover or showcase a recipe and the dish is a major topic of discussion during the meal. In the same way, the esthetics of the table stands at the border between the material (e.g. beautiful dishes) and the meanings: welcoming well implies “pulling out all the stops”:
– I’m a fan of plates, glasses, cups and all that, it’s part of it, I love it, even for Elliott, I love children’s things and all that, so it’s part of the pleasure of the table.
– It goes to the point of making little presentations? Yes, when we do… well, not every day, let’s relax (laughs), but when we have friends over,
– yes, I do it. Before I knew Eliott I used to do it a lot, but now […] I do it a little less, I do it mostly when we have friends coming over, that’s it, to make a nice table I like everything that is, contrary to this drawing, everything that is mismatched, mismatched plates, I love everything that is a little vintage, 60s, a lot of stuff in that style, Scandinavian stuff, that’s it, I like everything related to crockery… (Roxane).
Thus, we see that the material can be seen as a basic constitutive element, but that there is a very wide range of material around eating together, in response to particular meanings and skills.
From the perspective of supporting the emergence or maintenance of eating together, it is also interesting to understand how the interactions between the elements that make up the practices make it possible to overcome certain constraints eating together encounters. Indeed, it may be relevant to target the elements according to this hierarchy. Material constraints, which can be considered central to the deployment of a practice, can, for example, be circumvented when the practice can call upon meanings and skills that are already in favor of eating together:
– But you see, when we were in the castle, there must have been 15 of us, now there are a few less.
– And where do you do it?
– Well, in the living room.
– Do you have a table?
– Yes, but it’s a low table, so we eat sitting on the floor with plates, but there you go (Marion).
On the other hand, material conditions that are in favor of eating together (e.g. sufficient dedicated space) can be ignored when meanings and skills do not support eating together. The driving forces or the obstacles to eating together seem to depend more on the meanings, in the face of which the skills are called upon to get around any material obstacles. This leads to the next section, which discusses the constraints that can work against eating together.
Organizational constraints can indeed complicate the fact of eating together. However, in some cases, organizational skills, carried by the meanings in favor of eating together, can counteract these constraints:
Cecile has to get up at 6:00, I have to get up at 6:30… so she has time to do a bike session or a little bit of gym activity, something like that. Then she goes for a shower and I take over there on the bike, and when I go to wash up she takes over in the kitchen, usually to prepare something [for lunch and breakfast], and usually when I get out of the shower I give her the final bit of help, then we eat (Thibaut).
We can thus say that eating together is a complex practice that solicits the constituent elements of practices at various levels (Figure 1.3).
Figure 1.3. Summary of the components involved in the implementation of eating together. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/seredelanauze/evolution.zip
The interactions between these different elements sometimes make it possible to maintain the practice of eating together even when conditions are not optimal.
1.6. Does eating together always promote well-being?
As the previous sections show, the meanings associated with eating together are essential in maintaining this practice, especially when it is associated with a fulfilling and healthy family/social life:
“It’s still nice to share a meal” (Camille), “Eating alone quickly becomes a mess” (Marion).
These quotes summarize how conviviality is, quite intuitively, a positive aspect of eating. However, in other cases, eating together can be seen as a constraint:
– The constraint would be to do a lot, in fact?
– Yes, to do a lot and to do it in a very repetitive way every day, every day, every day […]. I knew that in my family – because we were a large family – so I always remember my mother saying to herself, “What am I going to do tonight?” I know that I have things and so it’s the desire to eat something at a given moment, well, I say to myself, “I want this, how am I going to prepare it” […], that’s why I put pleasure in the middle because there is the pleasure of touching the products, mixing them and the smells, the colors, the heat, etc., and then preparing something pretty (Esther).
Thus, this quote confirms that eating together requires logistics and upstream work for the person in charge of the meal, and that eating alone can sometimes relieve this burden without affecting the quality of the food. Moreover, it illustrates that eating alone does not exclude taking care of our diet and enjoying eating well.
Earlier, the chapter identified that eating together refers to a set of more or less tacit rules, and eating alone would allow freedom from them, which may, for some, be seen as a benefit:
My diet has become more chilled, in the sense that the fact that living with my parents has changed the way I eat, because in a way we are infantilized when we live with our parents as adults and we are subjected to “don’t do this, don’t do that, we eat at such and such a time, we do this, we do that” (Bérengère).
This may allow the pursuit of certain objectives, which are more difficult to achieve during shared meals:
I realized that I lose weight more easily when I am alone because I manage my rhythm, I let go, I am not managed anymore because of the look of others, not that of my daughter, nor that of my boyfriend, nor that of my family, I manage myself calmly, I am at ease and I have the impression that the weight goes away by itself too (Amélie).
These findings invite the question of well-being related to eating together, echoing the work of Mugel et al. (2019). This work employs the concept of eudemonic food well-being, according to which well-being is not only about pleasure (hedonic well-being) but also about the role of experience and the meaning given to actions. In light of this concept, we understand that eating together is not an absolute guarantee of well-being, and that it is necessary for the experience to be in line with the meanings of individuals for it to be a source of well-being. More broadly, particular circumstances, such as the lockdowns experienced by the French from March 2020, make it possible to qualify the fact that eating together is always a vector of well-being: in circumstances as constrained as the lockdowns were, preparing a meal every day for a household in which relationships are not always easy can be a major challenge, and the shared meal does not always have the power to generate conviviality and shared well-being. This invites consideration of a complex relationship between eating together and well-being that takes into account the constraints: