This book explores the idea that table activities--the mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining--lay the foundation for a proper education on the value of civility, the importance of the common good, and what it means to be a good citizen. The arts of conversation and diplomatic speech are learned and practiced at tables, and a political history of food practices recasts thoughtfulness and generosity as virtues that enhance civil society and democracy. In our industrialized and profit-centered culture, however, foodwork is devalued and civility is eroding.Looking at the field of American civility, Janet A. Flammang addresses the gendered responsibilities for foodwork's civilizing functions and argues that any formulation of ''civil society'' must consider food practices and the household. To allow space for practicing civility, generosity, and thoughtfulness through everyday foodwork, Americans must challenge the norms of unbridled consumerism, work-life balance, and domesticity and caregiving. Connecting political theory with the quotidian activities of the dinner table, Flammang discusses practical ideas from the ''delicious revolution'' and Slow Food movement to illustrate how civic activities are linked to foodwork, and she points to farmers' markets and gardens in communities, schools, and jails as sites for strengthening civil society and degendering foodwork.
Acknowledgements; Introduction; Civility, Civil Society and Democracy; Political Theory: Where's the Household in Civil Society?; Empirical Studies: It's Hard to Measure the Table; The Art of Conversation and Civic Virtues of Thoughtfulness and Generosity; Meals, Conversations and Women; What Changes are Needed?; Part One: Household Foodwork; Chapter 1: The Time Crunch; Farm and City Foodwork; Women's Labor Force Participation and Overworked Americans; Technology and Food Tasks; The Second Shift and the Globalization of Housework; Invisible Foodwork; Solutions to the Time Crunch; Chapter 2: Domesticity: Meals, Obligation and Gratitude; Political and Gendered Domesticity; Deciding on the Menu: Household Variations; Gift, Obligation and the Economy of Gratitude; Psychological Memories and Social Connections; Escape from the Household with Commercial Food; Chapter 3: American Food; American Food as Multi-Ethnic and Regional Corporations Urge Immigrants to Eat American; Racial and Ethnic Pride in Foodways; The Slow Food Movement; American foodways, the Obesity Crisis and Global Warming; Part Two: Table Conversation; Chapter 4: Conversation and Manners; Conversations and Civility; Civil Society: Light Social Conversations and Heavy Political Arguments; The Lost Art of Conversation in the United States; Upper Class and Feminine: Courtesy, Civility, Politeness and Manners; The Universality of Table Manners; Manners and the Middle Class
''Deftly bringing together political theory, feminist analysis, and cultural studies, Flammang uses the familiar world of our private lives and everyday practices with food to interrogate the public life of American democracy and civil society. Thoughtful and creative.'' Anna Sampaio, coeditor of Transnational Latina/o Communities: Politics, Processes, and Cultures
