Fashion Taste and Eating Out

The fashionability of dining out has meant that the practice has become more than a means for maintaining the body, it has become a source of shared cultural beliefs. For example, foodstuffs have frequently acquired social meanings that refer to properties beyond their nutritional qualities. In certain times and places, the taste for game has been associated with wealth and prestige because it was hunted by the landed gentry; oysters have been regarded as aphrodisiacs; truffles have been seen as embodiments of the mysteries of old Europe. Barthes has described food as 'a system of communication', 'a body of images', 'an intimate part of the protocol of social life'. Similarly, the places in which one eats carry various meanings; a restaurant has distinctions that a cafe, a tavern and a picnic do not. The diner sees in both the restaurant and its foodstuffs some broader social values; for example, a luxuriously appointed restaurant may evoke an aristocratic way of life long associated with the pleasures of being served by an indentured class. Or an appetite for and 'au courant' view that food is not a banal and simple ingredient in the maintenance of life but rather a cultural event and form of aesthetic in which its arrangement and colouring should be appreciated as if they were works of art. In these ways, the practice of dining out in a restaurant can also be seen as a purveyor of cultural values and social images; it is where we can learn to act and feel in accord with the desires of the times.

When people start flocking to a small, inner city bar because they have learned that cocktails are in (again), they also come to see that the hours spent over a gaudily coloured beverage are amongst their most pleasurable; when the pasta restaurant becomes the favourite haunt of the cosmopolitan it has much to do with his/her acceptance of the idea that ethnic diversity is attractive. The different meanings and cultural values attached to the various forms of dining out indicate that tastes in foods and preferences in the style of dining out are not independent of other features of the social epoch. Restaurants have been included in the orbit of fashions.

Fashion, Taste and Eating Out - Joanne Finkelstein
The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory (Polity Press: Cambridge 1994)