Eating is quintessentially a domestic activity. Most people still take most of their food at their place of residence. If we consider institutions like hospitals, military bases and religious and educational institutions as places of residence this is even more the case. Eating anywhere else has usually been the consequence of the requirements of travel or work. While the means of preparing meals at these different places of residence are various – upper-class households have servants and institutions have employees – most of the labour associated with the preparation of meals has, in the past, been delivered by household members. Given the prevalence of nuclear family households in the UK since early modern times, most of the labour associated with obtaining (though not growing), preparing, cooking, serving and clearing away food has been in the domestic mode. Familial social relations – personal, gendered, asymmetrical and enveloped in a discourse of care and love – have regulated food provision. Until recently the market mode has governed agricultural production and wholesale and retail distribution of ingredients, but the transformation of ingredients into food was not touched by the logic of economic exchange. However, increasingly with the manufacture of foodstuffs, typically convenience foods, and increasingly with the sale of completely pre-prepared meals by supermarkets, entire dishes have been supplied as commodities, though even these require assembly into meals in the domestic kitchen. The logic of commodification, with its general tendency to corrode personal bonds, invades yet further realms of practice.

This chapter sketches developments in the provision of opportunities to eat out and reflects on the terminology used to describe different venues. It then reviews the available, limited, evidence about the features of three modes of provision – the commercial–retail sector, the institutional catering sector and the communal mode of entertaining kin, friends and acquaintances. This information, derived from secondary sources, is necessary to contextualise the behaviour reported by our interviewees and respondents. Some understanding of provisioning is also required for theoretical reasons, since our analytic approach requires a comprehensive appreciation of all stages in production–consumption cycles.

There are many types of place away from home where currently people may eat a meal in Britain. Some of these are commercial establishments which specialise entirely in the provision of food. Thus we have, among others, cafés, restaurants, steakhouses, diners, brasseries, bistros, pizzerias, kebab-houses, grill rooms, coffee bars, teashops, ice cream parlours, food courts, snack bars, refreshment rooms, transport cafes and service stations, buffets and canteens. There are commercial places to eat which are not primarily devoted to food provision, like the tavern, the pub, the wine bar, the hotel, the in-store restaurant, the boarding house and the motel. There are commercial establishments that provide food to be eaten off the premises – fish and chip shops, lunch counters, sandwich bars and other purveyors of take away or carry out foods.

This chapter presents a detailed description of some of the minutiae of the experience of dining out: what exactly did people eat?; how did this come to be decided?; where, when and with whom did they eat?; and to what extent did they prepare for the occasion in advance? The purpose is to survey the diversity of the experience. The evidence comes from questions asked of both respondents and interviewees about the very last occasion on which they had eaten a main meal away from home.

The chapter focuses on the ways in which the promise of variety is experienced and used. Some would maintain that increased variety of choice is the greatest benefit of consumer culture and would therefore welcome the fact that in the field of food there is now more choice than ever. Such a claim might reasonably be advanced on the basis of the contents of supermarkets and on the number of commercial outlets selling cooked dishes of many sorts. Indeed, according to Mennell's (1985) influential diagnosis, ‘increased variety’ is one of the two dominant trends of food provisioning in the twentieth century and the spread of restaurant-going is a significant element of the shift.

Wood (1995) is sceptical, arguing that some of this variety is illusory, a pretence wherein commercial organisations, for reasons of profitability, tend to offer increasingly standardised and uniform food and service.

The semi-structured interviews were conducted first because it was thought that in the absence of prior social scientific inquiry it would otherwise be difficult to construct informative questions for a survey instrument. For example, we were not sure whether people would be able to recall details of what they had eaten on their most recent excursions, something about which we were much reassured in the course of the interviews. Nor were we entirely confident that the themes and trends discussed in the popular media would intersect, never mind resonate, with the generality of ordinary experience. Thus, in the absence of previous scholarly investigation, we deemed it essential to pay great attention to the experiences and understandings of a cross-section of the population. Hence an accurate empirical description of practices and discourses, and their social distributions, was a major objective.

Semi-structured interviews – with thirty-three principal food provider(s) in thirty households in diverse circumstances living in Preston and the surrounding area, during the autumn of 1994 – each lasted between one and two hours. To ensure variety, interviewees were volunteers contacted through various organisations, a leisure centre, a community association, a tennis club, an environmental group, a primary school, a trade union branch and, finally, a national DIY chain store.

Our sampling was modelled on DeVault (1991), and like her,we sought to speak to ‘anyone, man or woman, who performed a substantial portion of the feeding work in the household’ (22).

In the qualitative interviews several opportunities were offered for people to evaluate the experience of eating out, affording some illustration of the applicability of this schematic classification of pleasures to the language of our interviewees. The invitation to describe the last three occasions of eating a meal out was supplemented by direct questioning, sometimes insistent, about what they liked and disliked about eating out in general – what kinds of places and foods they preferred or would always avoid. Thus much opportunity was afforded for people to discuss their tastes, their reservations and the nature of the gratifications derived. The terms that were used most frequently to describe experiences were substantively without content: people would tend to say of the various elements of the meal event that it was ‘nice’, ‘really nice’, ‘very nice’, ‘good’, ‘enjoyable’, ’lovely’, ‘fabulous’ or ‘I loved it’, ‘I liked it’. The vocabulary deployed to describe pleasures was restricted. It was, however, clear that interviewees had a practical sense that there were different types of gratification, some of which appealed more than others to different individuals. We have already indicated (in chapter 3) some of the reasons people gave for eating out and from further analysis of their talk about those reasons, we can infer the nature and relative importance to them of the different types of gratification which combine to make eating out a generally positive experience.

In this chapter, we consider how eating out is related to domestic organisation and speculate whether this relationship has changed over time. Two debates are relevant. The first is the so-called re-negotiation debate, regarding the implications for unpaid domestic work in situations where paid work takes up a substantial part of the time available to couples in households. The second concerns the implications for family life and social cohesion of commercialisation in the food field.

Recent analyses of change and continuity in domestic organisation and housework, without exception, take women's increased employment participation as their starting point. The growth of dual-earner and dual-career households, where both partners are full-time employed, potentially poses a great challenge to traditional arrangements. In such relatively well-to-do households time rather than money may have become the greatest constraining factor in life. This, of course, is not to ignore the simultaneous growth in the number of households where the opposite must be true and lack of money continues to be the primary constraint. Also, in Britain, implications may be limited because 40 per cent of economically active women work only part-time, a popular ‘strategy’ for combining paid and domestic work, but one with less impact on the dominant pattern of household division of labour.

If an increasing number of households now suffer from ‘new’ time constraints (see Gofton, 1990 and 1995, Schor, 1992, Hewitt, 1993), the question is how such households organise their unpaid work?

The process through which a consumer actually receives a good or service, and how that reception is managed, is a defining element of almost all consumption events. Even the most fleeting and simple of transactions, the activity of transferring money to someone else in exchange for goods, can be evaluated in terms of the quality of its delivery. Whether a shop assistant was pleasant, whether the mail order form was appropriate, whether the despatch of goods was quick are criteria influencing customer satisfaction. Consumption episodes which involve more elaborate and extensive servicing work are more susceptible to judgements of this kind. A meal in a restaurant may take several hours and involve repeated communication with staff; taking a holiday in a hotel may last a couple of weeks; a course of educational instruction may take years and involve sustained interaction; a relationship with a general practitioner may last decades. When the process of consumption is protracted, and where the level of personal interaction between provider and recipient is extensive or sensitive, then the nature of the setting and the human relationships involved become especially important. The nature of the experience, and hence the perceived quality of the episode, depend upon how the presentation and transaction of the service is managed.

The environment of delivery in the commercial mode is largely determined by the producer. This is the fundamental truth of Finkelstein's (1989) observation about the already given character of the restaurant as a setting.

There are many different types of place to eat. One important question is who uses different places and how often they go. As sociologists we are initially very interested in the social and cultural characteristics of people who behave differently. Such characteristics indicate the financial, social, practical and cultural forces, systematically distributed across the population, which constrain or encourage people to engage in particular ways of eating out.

It would be surprising if the very poor spent the same on eating out as the rich. However, sociologically it would be very unusual if income were the only relevant feature of differences. Earlier commentaries have identified other factors which affect eating out. For example, it has been maintained that women are discouraged from eating out (Wood, 1990; Finkelstein, 1989). Eating out also has class connotations. It was a practice severely restricted by social class until at least the middle of the twentieth century. It has generally been thought that the significance of class declined thereafter. Thus, for instance, Burnett (1989: 264, 318) says that it was only in the inter-war period that the lower middle classes began to eat out and that it was some time after the Second World War that the practice became more or less universal. Also, it is the principal thesis of Mennell (1985) that social differences in food consumption behaviour have been in long-term decline: the ‘diminishing contrasts’ of age, region and season, but particularly of class, have accompanied increased variety of available foodstuffs.

There has been an explosion of social scientific interest in food in the last decade. Nutritionists, social policy advisors, anthropologists, agricultural economists and historians have always studied food habits, though for different reasons. However, before the 1990s general social scientific interest in the practical, social and cultural aspects of food was minimal. For a sociologist, the field consisted of a stuttering debate on the nature of the proper meal and its role in domestic organisation (e.g. Douglas, 1975; Douglas and Nicod, 1974; Murcott, 1983a and 1983b; Charles and Kerr, 1988), a few occasional essays on exceptional behaviour like vegetarianism, health food shopping and children's sweets (Twigg, 1983; Atkinson, 1980; and James, 1990, respectively), and Mennell's (1985) major, largely neglected, historical comparison of the development of food habits in Britain and France. This situation had changed markedly by the time of writing, with the publication of a series of literature surveys and textbooks (e.g. Beardsworth and Kiel, 1997; Bell and Valentine, 1997; Mennell et al., 1992; Wood, 1995) and of research monographs and essays (Caplan, 1997; Fine et al., 1996; Lupton, 1996; Marshall, 1995; Murcott, 1998; Warde, 1997).

One indicator of the growth of interest in food was the Economic and Social Research Council's programme ‘The Nation's Diet: the social science of food choice’, which began in 1992. We undertook one of the sixteen projects.

Much of the sparse analytic literature has tended to be highly critical of the nature and standards of eating out in Britain. Restaurants are condemned variously for the quality of the food from a gastronomic point of view (e.g. Driver, 1983), for standardisation accompanying the introduction of mass production techniques (e.g. Wood, 1994a) and for offering oppressively inauthentic contexts for social interaction (Finkelstein, 1989). Indeed, there are many reasons for anticipating negative reactions towards eating out experiences. There is evidence of appreciable ambivalence about food in general. Thus Lupton (1996:143) reports that ‘some interviewees demonstrated an overwhelming interest and enjoyment of food; others seemed to have very little interest in food, viewing it simply as a way to survive rather than a source of pleasure’. Similarly, Purcell (1992) found a significant proportion of her Oxford sample considered food nothing more than a biological necessity: food is merely fuel. In addition, there is widespread current concern not to be overweight which, in extremis, manifests itself in serious food disorders, suggesting that occasions which require more eating may be unattractive (see Bordo, 1993). Furthermore, much concern is expressed that many British foodstuffs are potentially damaging to health; there is considerable suspicion of the food production system which might make eating in restaurants, where one is ignorant of the sources and qualities of the raw ingredients, seem particularly risky. Finally, English food has not traditionally had a reputation for excellence, rather the contrary.

Western, capitalist and especially Protestant cultures have a long history of ambivalence towards consumption (Hirschman, 1982; Schama 1987; Sombart, 1967). Consumption smacks of luxury, waste, unnecessary expenditure, self-indulgence, excess. Antithetical to the puritan virtues of work and thrift, consumption is morally suspect. Campbell (1987) detected a paradox. Capitalist development required that some people, even if not the early Protestant entrepreneurs, purchased and used the increasing number of items produced. To generate the expansive material culture of modernity required an urge to consume as well as an urge to accumulate, a Romantic as well as a Protestant ethic. The urge to consume is now well established, as observations about wants being unlimited imply.

In Campbell's view it was the replacement of a traditional with a modern hedonism which explained the continual transformation and extension of consumption norms. No longer was the search for fulfilment simply a matter of seeking maximum repeated exposure to known pleasures, but had become a matter of imagining and anticipating novel and ever more stimulating gratifications. Modern hedonism thus instilled the inevitability of disappointment, for this is an attitude which depends upon the endlessly renewed quest for more rewarding, more exquisite, more self-enhancing experiences.

Hedonism is increasingly identified with consumer culture. Spending money, rather than wasting time or indulging sensual desires, characterises its contemporary form (Cross, 1993; Schor, 1992). However, consumerism is not simply an expression of hedonism. Much consumption is simply routine.

In Feeding the Family (1991),DeVault deploys the concepts of social organisation and shared understandings in her analysis of why it is women who are recruited into the project of caring for the family.

The notion of social organisation emphasises the significance of individual agency as well as the bearing of larger social relations on this activity. DeVault, who draws on Dorothy Smith's feminist methodology, suggests that the starting point of her analysis is the careful listening and interpretation of accounts of ‘everyday lived experience’, by which she means ‘what happens in people's everyday lives – as well as the processes of interpretation that give meaning to everyday lives’ (1991: 11). Individual accounts reveal something about the wider social power relations within which everyday life takes place; ‘we find that social organization is “in the talk” and that we can mine the talk for clues to social relations’ (DeVault, 1990: 101).

DeVault uses the ‘family’ as example. ‘When we speak about contemporary families’, she argues, ‘we refer to two kinds of realities, to both experience and institution’ (1991: 14). People experience ‘family’ in diverse ways.