The politics of feasting

Do you serve whipped potatoes or mashed? Do your kids turn their noses up at sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows? Have you finally graduated from the kids' table to the adults' table? Thanksgiving can be a highly political event, marked by manners and hierarchy and rites of passage, according to Heather Evans, a professor of literature at Queens University.

We asked Evans to describe the politics of feasting and how the current economic downturn may cast a cloud this year's festivities. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

Let's begin by discussing the social purpose of feasts.

I think there are two primary reasons. One is to affirm our belonging with a group, to participate — whether it's a small group like a biological family or a larger group like a neighbourhood or town or the much larger, larger group of an entire country and choosing a day to feast.

At the same time, there's sort of a parallel or correlative aspect that it also helps affirm where we fit or don't fit in hierarchy or social relationships. The people who get invited to feasts get to feel good about belonging and those who didn't get invited to the party are reminded that they're not part of that group. Feasts reaffirm relationships but also demonstrate where people fit into social hierarchies, both at the micro and the macro level.

Do you mean we exclude people purposefully?

In some cases yes, if you hold a feast for your event … and you say I'm going to invite these people but I'm not inviting these people, these friends don't quite make the cut. Part of it is affirming who's in and who's out.

But feasts also help affirm social hierarchies; they help affirm where you are positioned within that group. If you have a dinner party, who is sitting at the head of the table? Who's at the foot? Who's done all the cooking and who's done all the shopping? There's that wonderful graduation ceremony, almost, where you go from the kids' table to the grown-ups' table — that's part of negotiating that power.

Thanksgiving is interesting because there's such a culturally prescribed menu. It becomes interesting to see how individual parties either align themselves with that menu or differentiate themselves from that prescribed menu. The typical menu is turkey and potatoes and gravy and rolls and you have to have an orange vegetable, whether it's sweet potatoes or carrots. If you choose not to do that — you choose to have a tofu turkey or you choose to have a roast of lamb or roast pork — you're marking yourself as something that's a little bit different from that prescribed menu.

And sometimes chefs take ownership over the way meals are prepared; for example, we only do our potatoes a certain way.

Oh yes, and that's another part of feasting — it helps align you with that group. Are you among the group that do your roast potatoes or do you do whipped potatoes or do you do sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top? … Food helps us define where we fit with other people, it helps us define relationships with other people.

This year, when families gather for Thanksgiving, do you think there will be a sense of gloom, given the financial turmoil around the globe?

Possibly, partly because everybody is talking about everything that is going on — part of this is not just about the food but getting a whole lot of people together at the same time and the food then becomes a catalyst or reason for talking about food shortages or about economic situations.

And the timing, the Canadian and the American Thanksgivings are a bit apart but they're both co-ordinating with two elections, so politics are at play. Not only in our feast are we dividing ourselves as individuals relative to our family or communities but we're defining ourselves as a nation, relative to other nations, to other cultures, to the rest of the world.

As the markets are crashing and as people are facing more and more financial concerns, there's a tendency to start looking into the past and feasts do that too. Feasts help us mark where we've progressed since the last feast.… We're now looking back and people are saying this situation is a lot like the situation we had after the market crash in 1929 and it provides us with a chance to say, "How are we different? How are we similar to that situation?"

There's an opportunity there for some nostalgia, which can be really reaffirming — everyone sharing the same memories of survival and getting through all that — but then there's also that potential where we need to be looking down the road and we say, okay, we may have to make similar sacrifices, we may be seeing analogous shortages and having to be a little creative in how we get more meals on the table and how we make that food dollar stretch.

How, historically, have we responded to our feasts in tough economic times?

I've actually been looking at the feasts and banquets in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1920s, it was such an opulent time; in the 1930s, it was after the crash and we were still between two wars, between two periods of rationing.

The wealthy always have feasts. One of the things that economic crises do is expand that boundary between those who have and those who have not. The people that are of biggest concern to me are the ones who are in at-risk groups, people who are economically going to find this more challenging …

One of the differences this time around is people don't have the same culinary knowledge that we used to have. Between wars, when we had rationing, we also had families that fairly consistently had one member that was really really knowledgeable about food and could make that one egg, and that little spoonful of sugar and that little cupful of flour into something that looks like a real treat.

I'm not sure how many families have that anymore. On the one hand, we're obsessed with food. We've got our diet books and we've got our TV shows and we've got our celebrity chefs and we've got food magazines. We've got food all over the place coming at us but the people with the money to consume those are the people who rely largely on consumer products — they pick up something at the deli or they go out for dinner. They're not practiced in making the basics stretch the way cooks did in the '30s.