 Good evening everybody. Welcome to this evening's SOAS Food Studies Center Distinguished Lecture. My name is Jacob Klein and I'm the chair of the Food Studies Center. The Center was established in 2007 to promote research and teaching in the field of food studies here at SOAS and also to foster and facilitate links between SOAS and other individuals and institutions with an academic interest in this field. The Center runs a weekly seminar series, convenes workshops and conferences, and oversees a master's program in the anthropology of food. Each year, the Center invites a prominent figure in the world of food studies to deliver a distinguished lecture. Previous speakers in the series include Sidney Mintz, Suzanne Friedberg, Melissa Caldwell, James Scott, James L. Watson, Yotam Otolenghi, and Amita Babiskar. Several of the previous distinguished lectures have been recorded and can be viewed via the SOAS Food Studies Center web pages and YouTube playlist. Tonight's lecture will also be recorded and made available to you online. Tonight's distinguished lecture has been made possible by the contributions of several people and institutions. I'd like to highlight the incredible assistance and support we've received from the SOAS Centers and Programs Office and in particular from their executive officer, Charles Talandier-Ubsel. Since 2014, the SOAS Food Studies Center has enjoyed the collaboration and sponsorship of Gastronomica, the Journal of Critical Food Studies. Tonight's lecture will be published in the Journal, as have several previous distinguished lectures. We are deeply grateful to Gastronomica, to its publisher, the University of California Press, and not least to its editor, Melissa Caldwell, and to its managing editor, Rebecca Feinberg, both of whom are here this evening. Tonight's lecture by Professor Alan Ward will be followed by a Q&A session. Afterwards, you're all warmly welcome to join us and the speaker for drinks and nibbles. The reception will be held in the cloister area located on the ground floor of this building, the Paul Webley wing. It's just to the left as you leave the lifts. Alan Ward is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He was previously Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, has held visiting positions in Adelaide, Mannheim, Sao Paulo, Paris, New York, and Helsinki, and is currently a guest professor in both Uppsala in Sweden and Ulborg in Denmark. Professor Ward has been at the forefront of the sociology of food and eating since the 1990s. His wide-ranging research in this area has been based primarily, but not exclusively, in the United Kingdom and includes studies of meal patterns, food guides, and restaurant cuisine, trust in food, and eating out. Ward's research into food and eating has played an important role in his wider sociology of consumption, including in his influential work on the questions of cultural omnivorousness and distinction. In his 1997 book, Consumption, Food, and Taste, Cultural Antimonies and Commodity Culture, Ward studies changes and continuities in food practices in Britain between the 1960s and 1990s, shedding light on the interrelationship between processes of economic production and patterns of consumption. A subsequent book, Eating Out, Social Differenciation, Consumption, and Pleasure, co-authored with Lydia Martins and published in 2000, presented us with a solid empirical study of eating out in the UK, based on both qualitative and quantitative research. It addresses, among other things, the relationship between public eating and domestic cooking, and asks to what extent practices and tastes in eating out should be seen as a matter of personal choice or an aspect of group membership. In his most recent book, The Practice of Eating, published in 2015, Ward encourages us to move beyond dominant models of eating behavior based on consumer choice and develops a systematic practice theory approach to eating, which emphasizes the importance of routine activity, embodied procedures, and institutional contexts. In this book, and throughout his work in the sociology of food, Ward subjects our food and eating practices to an exemplary degree of methodological rigor and theoretical sophistication. In so doing, he has led the way in demonstrating the potential for the study of food to contribute profoundly to the development of social theory and a more nuanced understanding of modern life. It is a great honor to welcome this year's SOAS Food Study Center and Gastronomica Distinguished Lecturer, Professor Alan Ward. Thank you very much for that kind introduction and thank you for the invitation and to Gastronomica for its sponsorship too. You'll notice the first not intentional mistake is that I come from the University of Manchester and not Universities of Manchester. I must have been looking the other way when I'm here. My knees are here. If I do that so they can see what I'm doing. How about that? Does that sound okay? So I'm going to talk to you about some research I've been doing over the last three years in the context of a wider sort of question about does it make any difference whether people eat out as much as they do or as more than they might have done in the past, which is the general framing for something that's rather more slightly narrower, which is the research project I've been working on is a re-study of the one that Jacob mentioned from the 1990s which was a study of eating out in the UK. So the study was repeated after 20 years and it gives an opportunity to understand something about the rate, the nature and the direction of change and stability. In the process I will talk about some of the things that have changed, some of the things that stayed the same. I will talk about restaurants and domestic hospitality and a little bit about domestic food production and I will try to point to the institutional and social causes of change in the process. You could ask why I studied eating out. Certainly when I started doing it in the 1990s people asked me that rather often when it wasn't a particularly popular thing to think about and was thought to be a rather trivial form of consumption. Actually the catering industry is very significant economic order but more than 1 in 20 workers in Britain work in the catering sector and currently over about a third of household food expenditure is spent outside the eating outside the home. DEFRA calculated that 1 meal in 6 in 2014 was being eaten outside the home. That includes your breakfast and your sandwich at lunch which is not the topic of my research which is more main meals in restaurant like contexts but nevertheless it's an important activity. Seems to me it's something where there is a significant increased interest in the media often without much solid evidence to discuss all those things that have changed enormously in the last 6 months. So I want to look at some of the evidence. Eating out doesn't get a particularly good press I don't think. People are suspicious of it. Sometimes for good reasons sometimes for probably less good reasons. People are worried about the intrusion of the market into private and domestic life, the process of commodification. Some people think that eating out is bad for the family meal which they treasure enormously. People think it stops you cooking which in one sense it does but maybe not in general. It clearly is a form of laziness. You must know that when you go to a restaurant that you're not working. You're taking a convenient route out of things. The next one maybe I'm not sure. In studies of consumption there's a bit of a worry about people enjoying themselves and there's plenty of evidence that when people eat out they do actually enjoy themselves. People are concerned for the consequences for health. I should say all these things are things that interviewees have actually mentioned in an everyday echo of this sort of consideration of eating out. Eating out is not equally available to everybody which is obviously a sociological point. This is the book that Lydia Martins and I wrote in 2000 which was based on a study of eating out in three cities. I got the money courtesy of the funder at the bottom there which is my research institute to do this same study again. And with Jessica Paddock and Jennifer Willins who are my co-authors on this work and doing much of the research, we have done the same study again. And that same study involves in 2015 a survey of 1100 people in London, Bristol and Preston in May 2015. Qualitative interviews which gested with some of the survey respondents so neat thing. At the end of the survey we said would you be prepared to talk to us again about these kind of issues? And it's certainly the best way of getting a sample of qualitative interviews that you could possibly imagine. So about half the people said they would talk to us again. So we have evidence on 31 people of both their survey responses and an in-depth interview of an hour or two. And we've done a re-analysis of the 1995 material to harmonise the data in the survey. The qualitative interviews were done in a slightly different way. In 1995 we didn't actually know whether people would be able to tell us anything about eating out, whether they could remember where they'd been or whatever. So we did the qualitative interviews first to see what we could put into a survey. In 2015 we didn't need to do that because we produced basically as near as possible identical survey. And we interviewed people afterwards to pursue some of the things that the survey chopped up. I want to talk about kind of four sorts of trends, things that we can find in the data when we compare 1995 to 2015. And I want to argue that these are some of the important features of eating out in 2015. That there's a process of normalisation associated with commodification. That there is some impact on eating at home. That we can see some interesting effects of the diffusion of tastes from global cuisines. And that there are inequalities of access to eating out which have significant social consequences. So the first point is about the normalisation of eating out. Now almost everybody in the UK eats out on commercial premises, only 6% don't. One of the arguments in the first book was that eating out has become a recreational activity. It's not something that you just do because you have to. People do that of course, but that actually it has become something that people look forward to, people plan, people want to do. Let me just show that slide. The frequency of eating out hasn't increased very much. This is questions about main meals. And this is the answer to a question about how often in the last year have you eaten out in commercial premises at a friend's house or at the house of some member of your family who doesn't live there. And if you look at that, it's almost exactly the same. It's not entirely a true picture because if you ask people when they last ate out, which we did on in both studies, they appear to be eating out more frequently than this suggests. But the difference isn't, is the error is more or less the same in both years. So there is just, there is some increase in eating out, but not a huge amount, which might surprise you. There's a marginal increase in eating out with friends. It's the most significant change in that table. And it's a significant proportion of household expenditure. I've made the expenditure point before about a third of household expenditure on food is on eating out. It was 27% in 1995. It was only 10% in 1960. So this is where Britain's are spending money, you know, at an increasing rate. And quite a lot of that is on main meals in cafes and restaurants. Who eats out frequently? This is the summary of a statistical model. The people who, the most powerful factors are being younger, having no children at home, having experience of the service class, professional managerial occupations, either of your parents or of yourself. So we've, when we think of, when we're looking at class, we're looking at what was your parents' class when you were a teenager? And what's your own class? And having a high absolute income. Slightly less significant are identifying as white British, which is a response to an ethnicity question, and living in London. Being a man or a woman doesn't make any difference to the frequency with which you're your dad. And nor does education, both of which are significant worth thinking about. We think that there is a process of eating out becoming more normal. One of the things that seems to have changed is people's attitudes towards the activity of being a restaurant. So people are now, we ask the same 25 attitude questions in 1995 and 2015. People are happier to have children in the restaurant when they're eating out. The question is, do you like eating out in restaurants where there are children? Quite a lot of people don't, and more people didn't in 1995 than they do in 2050. People feel that they're less on show when they're in a restaurant. These are the words of the question. Disliking eating out alone, I mean most people don't want to eat out alone in a restaurant. Still not a very high proportion of people in restaurants or alone. But people are less disconcerted about it in 2015 than they were. There's a greater tolerance of formality. We asked a question about how do you feel in restaurants that are stuffy and formal, and people are happier in them in 2015 than they were in 1995. And there's a decline in the number of people who will say that they want to eat out more often than they currently do. So this is the nature of the kind of questions I've just been relating to. Do you agree or disagree a lot or a little with a proposition like I would like to eat out more often than I do now? And a third of people strongly agreed with that in 1995, but only a seventh in 2015. So there's sort of sense that eating out is becoming a little bit more special, a little bit less special, a little bit more casual, a little bit people have got used to it. And I think one of the key things that's happened is that there were a lot of people in 1995 who had never been used to going to restaurants, and their children didn't take my age. I didn't get taken to restaurants by my parents, nor did any of my friends as far as I know. By the 1990s, people were taking their kids to restaurants and you get a generation or new generations of people who were used to an activity, which actually was just uncomfortable for people in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. People were intimidated by the waiters and intimidated by the white cloths. There was a different sense of the experience of eating out. And this argument is, again, supported by the sort of occasions that people are going out. These are reasons for less meal out. And what you see there is a decline in those going out for a special occasion. When you ask them what the special occasion is, is it a wedding anniversary or you've passed an exam or it's a birthday, those kinds of things. And an increase in the number of meals that are convenient and quick. It's quite a crude sort of question, but nevertheless it probably captures the sense in which there is a eating out is becoming a more casual activity. And this argument about casualization is supported by quite a lot of other evidence. So twice as many people are eating out alone than they were 20 years before. Companions and the people at the table are more or less the same. So some things stay the same, some things change. Special occasions decline. The last occasion was more recent, fewer days ago, in 2015. Fewer Saturdays and more midweek days. People are less likely to dress up. They're more likely to make a decision to eat out themselves. So did you make the decision to go out? Many more people said I did in 2015 than in 1995. The time between deciding to go there and going has got shorter. All things that suggest that it's an easier decision to make, an easier activity. More people eat the same dish at home as they eat in a restaurant, which is also a sense that people are eating something that's less special, less distinctive. Here are a couple of the things that I find quite strikingly strong. So the number of courses that people had in a restaurant in 2015 is much less than it was in 1995. So I can't actually see the number. So three or more courses in the restaurant was the case for a third of people in 95, but only 22% in 2015. How long it takes is even more striking, I think. So did the meal last less than an hour? Increase of 15 percentage points. Two or three hours or longer, a drop in of 18% of occasions. So people are going out and eating rather quickly, one suspects. But again, indicating that there is a change in the nature of the experience. And that shows up in a question about did you enjoy yourself? The first thing to say about did you enjoy yourself is that people find eating out enormously enjoyable. So you have a question which says did you like it a lot, a little? Neither here nor there, dislike it, dislike it a lot. Hardly anybody dislikes any aspect of it. They don't say dislike, but the real enthusiasm with it has fallen on commercial premises. So the food's not as good. The company's not as good. The day course is not as good. The service is getting really bad. The conversation is just the same. The overall experience has fallen a little bit. But if you compare that to going to somebody else's home, so a friend or kin, it's actually got better and it's very, very good. So if you want to eat out, I suggest you get yourself an invitation to one of your friends rather than go to a restaurant. But again, an indication that the restaurant experience is getting a little flatter. Why might that be the case? People are becoming more used to commercial eating out. They're becoming more critical. They may be eating some of their meals in lower quality kinds of places. Probably the more establishments there are. The number of restaurants in the UK has increased significantly in the period. Probably the more mediocre cooking there might be. And probably if you're going to quick and convenient meals in casual restaurants, the service doesn't seem so wonderful. That's my first point. Second one, does this make any difference to domestic provision? A rider on this, I mean, the study is not about domestic provision. But we did ask questions about whether people ate yesterday with their family. We asked them about the domestic division of labour in the household. Quite a lot of questions about that to get at cooking and laying the table and those kinds of things. The domestic division of labour is doing exactly the same as other studies have shown. It's getting a little bit more equal. Women still do far more than men do. Women are doing just less than they used to. Men are doing very slightly more than they did before. And our data shows that. It seems to me that is that to be attributed in some way, does eating out in a restaurant or eating out in restaurants relatively regularly and being comfortable about it make any difference to how you organise your domestic arrangements? I suspect not. The central argument is that eating out in restaurants doesn't make that much difference in the end. But in the process we do find some changes in the way in which households are organising them. One thing that's changed is that the number of people who said, we asked, a key question is, tell me about your last meal in a restaurant. All 1100 people reported everything they ate, who they went with, how long it took, whether they went on the bus. A whole set of questions about them. And one of the questions is, who was there? And interestingly the company of family has declined a little bit. One of the arguments of the first book was that eating out in restaurants is pretty good for families generally because most people eat out with their family, with their partner, with their kids, with their parents or whatever. But that seems to be declining a little bit. This I think is interesting. We have a general belief that family meals are staying much as they were. This is a question, did you eat with a household member yesterday at breakfast, at lunch and at dinner? It excludes one person households and people living in multiple occupation households. So this is where they rise. There's a couple and children or related kin. And that's fallen quite significantly, I think. So less than half of people have breakfast with any member of their household. Only a third have lunch and dinner has fallen too. So in the UK dinner is the main family meal has been there for the last 20, 30, 40 years. Though it didn't used to be 50 years ago. So I mean, you might attribute changes in lunchpans partly to the opportunity to eat out. This is not exactly nonsense. It's a correlation matrix which shows whether it makes three interesting points. Whether if you eat out frequently in a restaurant, do you also eat out frequently at a friend's home, at a relative's home, do you take a ways and so on. If the box is green, you significantly do those things together. If it's white, there's no relationship. If it's red, there's a negative relationship. So in the first column, I think is interesting, is the one negative relationship is between frequency of eating in a restaurant and dinner with your household member yesterday. In 1995, that cell was white and not red. So there is a shift, that sense. So this makes a point. If eating is a privilege or a pleasure, the same people are doing a lot of it. So it's an accumulation of pleasure. The point about... And the other thing is look along the fourth row from the bottom, frequency of pre-prepared food. I thought this was going to be a wonderful insight into generational change. What it shows is that there's a negative relationship between preparing food from fresh ingredients, whatever fresh ingredients might be, and buying pre-prepared meals. And there is a strong negative relationship between frequency of prepared food, eating lots of takeaways, interesting cooking, making packed lunches. And I thought that maybe there was a significant difference between preparing food at home and using pre-prepared foods, preparing for fresh, I should say. It turns out that it's people living alone and men, and the white British who are using pre-prepared foods. And there is no age, generation difference there. So I'm very disappointed by that. So conclusion of this part, eating in restaurants does reduce domestic labour overall, but it seems to me that other innovations like takeaway meals and cook-chill supermarket dishes are far more significant in terms of effects on domestic labour. There is no positive indication in the qualitative material or the quantitative material of any sort of decline in the ideal of eating with your family, but I think the frequency of eating breakfast and lunch, I know the family members, is apparently pretty low and diminishing. So there's something to be thought about there. Third trend I want to talk about is the diffusion of global tastes on the allure of variety. There is no doubt that there is a greater availability of cuisines from across the world in the commercial sector. And that people are engaging with those cuisines more frequently. In the past we tended to talk about, it's very difficult to find a term that kind of covers all the things that are not native British or French, and then everything else. So typically everything else was called ethnic until relatively recently. That's pretty misleading and problematic, I think, but struggling to find a different term. At the moment we're using foreign and uncommon and various sorts of words to get at the fact that there are tastes for particular kinds of cuisines that have emerged in recent years. The effect of globalization is to increase aesthetic appreciation and adventurers, I think, and it's clear that people think quite a lot about the culinary origins of the food that they're eating when they're in a restaurant. These are questions that we asked about the type of cuisine style of the restaurant that you ate your last main meal at on the last occasion, and they're a list of things that we thought... I mean, you can't ask about every cuisine in the world, so we asked about the ones that we thought might be most prominent and significant. This shows two things. It shows whether people had visited such a place in the last year, which is the black line, or whether the last occasion was in such a place. Traditional British, most people have been to, most people have been to an Italian restaurant in the last year, and almost half people have been to an Indian restaurant. There's quite a wide experience on the face of it, looking at using that data. If you want to know what's most popular, it's probably best to look at the last occasion statistically. It's a better way of doing it. And there, traditional British is way ahead of the other kinds of cuisines, but nevertheless still Italian, Indian, and other ethnic, which could be lots and lots of different things, are the next most popular. There's a range of different popularities and different exposure to different cuisines, and it is significantly different from 1995. In 1995, 48% of people that we surveyed hadn't eaten anything other than a British restaurant in the last 12 months, down to 22% by 2015, and the proportion of people who were eating in Chinese restaurants, Italian restaurants has increased. We have problems of precise comparison because we had to ask about a lot more cuisines in 2015 than we'd asked in 1995 when it was somewhat less of an issue. So people are becoming more adventurous. I could show you a quotation from somebody who... Some people are very adventurous, and they say we eat absolutely everything, and the pleasure of going to foreign countries is to eat things like jellyfish and so on. And adventure is born. Arlie is a late middle-aged woman from London who captures the ambivalence about adventurousness. So she's saying I'm a little bit more adventurous than I used to be. I'm not saying I'm as good as my friend Alice. She would have a go. She likes street food. Have you seen them on the television when they walk and they cook the food in front of them? Yes, they're cooking. Is it starlings? Or what is it? I'm sure it wouldn't hurt you. It's up here rather than here. So I've got better. I will try things like dim sum. We went to a dim sum restaurant. We tried all sorts of different flavours. Even Alice said I don't like this. I don't want to do them. Others were fine, and she liked shrimp and crab and chicken. Whereas I don't know what's in the food. The first time I ever went to Kong Kong, I ended up in a burger bar because I said to Pam, I must never tell anybody this because they'd be horrified. But it was the only place where we recognised the food. So we're supposed to be adventurous, I think. There's lots of knowledge and pleasure and achievement from being adventurous. But there are limits. And this, I think, captures the balance. When you actually look at what people did eat, it's not that adventurous on the face of it. So these were the top 10 dishes in a restaurant 2015 compared to home entertaining. So curry is the most popular restaurant dish in the UK. Burger comes next. Steak, roast dinner and pasta. If your friend or your mum or your son have cooked you a dish at home, then they're pretty much likely to cook you either an Indian curry or a roast dinner or pasta. So if I think you should go to eat with your friends, there's a high chance that you'll know what you get. But what we're striking about this, I think, is that despite the talk about adventurous food, it's not necessarily so. Or what happens most of the time isn't so distinguished or distinguishing. So two slides about domestic hospitality. It's hardly changed. It's a classic experience of common-sality. It's a pleasant occasion for eating with friends and non-resident kin. The same people do the hosting as did before. They hire up the social scale, actually. And the same people are guests. What has changed is the events are shorter and that more meals given to you by your friends will have one course rather than more courses. And there's some decline in formality. In 1995, we thought the dinner party was on its way out. It's not much worse than it was then, but it's still on its way out. One of the differences that's interesting, I think, is what sort of a present do you take to your host? The present that's increased significantly is taking something to eat. It's rather divides our interviewees, some of them say. Fancy going out to dinner, being invited out to dinner and having to be told to take the pudding with you. Other people think it's become part of the convention of doing collective, networked, arranged activities. But it changes the pattern of reciprocity, which is very important. Again, our people are adventurous at home. We've seen a little bit about the what's served at home. These are a couple of women in their 40s. One of them makes her mum tea, her mum lives somewhere else three nights a week and cooks for her brother-in-law. And she basically cooks what she would cook at home anyway. It depends who's coming, what they're coming for, but it's ordinary domestic cooking. If it's a family get together, this is Nicola. I serve something similar. She serves salmon on crout almost every time, but it doesn't appear to be the same because it's accompanied by different kinds of vegetables and presented in different kinds of ways. So I change the sorts of bits that go around it. I do have set main courses. So being a guest in a domestic context is wonderful, but you're getting fairly ordinary kinds of food. I think the fourth trend is about variety and distinction and about the uneven diffusion of tastes for different kinds of cuisine. The third question there from the official foodie handbook. What really matters? Wealth, health, or that the fish is not overcooked? What does it matter? What do you eat? I look at this in terms of a major thesis in cultural sociology, which is that your cultural preferences tell other people, tell yourself about who you are and tell other people about who you are. And your tastes are recognized by other people and sometimes they reward you for them and sometimes they will tell you off for not eating your broccoli, for instance. And these tastes and the rewards map onto a social hierarchy. It was argued in the middle of the 20th century that there was a division between high culture and popular culture and that those of high socioeconomic status liked high culture and those of lower social classes preferred popular culture. And one lot were called snobbish and the other lot were called vulgar. In the later 20th century it became clear that if you want to demonstrate your cultural competence and your good taste, you would include things in your repertoire which are both from high culture and from popular culture. There are now very few people who consume only high culture and it's getting the balance right between classical music and rock music, let's say, a lot of the debate has been about music or particular kinds of cuisines, which is what I'm going to take, which indicates social standing. So crossing boundaries is important and the sociological concept that I'm sure you all know of cultural capital is what's at stake. If you have a lot of cultural capital you can probably make friends with influential people and you may be able to convert it into economic gain. If you're thought to have very poor taste and have very little cultural capital people with power and influence won't want to have anything to do with you. And they may well think rather badly of you. So the thesis of Pierre Baudier, which is extremely important in contemporary sociology and cultural studies, what can we learn from eating out in relation to the omnivore thesis? I've shown you this thing before. This is what I'm going to work on. It's the cuisine style eaten within the last year and on the last occasion. And what I want to look at is who goes to which kinds of restaurants to eat which kinds of foods. I think types of cuisine are socially marked and the way in which they're combined so the issue of boundary crossing is a way of determining in a sense your good taste and your good taste corresponds. Or the hypothesis would be your good taste corresponds to your social position, to your income, particularly your education and your social class. And what the evidence shows is that some people eat in lots and lots of types of restaurant. Others eat only one or two and that they group into three sorts of blocks. So you ask if you've eaten last year in a traditional British restaurant, what other things would you be likely to eat in? And the answer is American, Italian and Chinese. Another group of people have eaten in vegetarian, Thai, Japanese, other ethnic and Indian restaurants. And the third group of people, these things just kind of pattern out, have eaten either modern British or French. We think this is meaningful in terms of anybody who understands eating out in Britain and that it reflects a kind of hierarchy and the terms exclusive, uncommon and popular which took a very, very long time to work out that that might be the best way of describing it, are dealt with by different people. So people have different experiences and in order to look at this omnivore thesis we've looked at some of the people who, 28% of people, ate only in popular places. We've called that a restricted pattern of experience. Most, the largest group of people had eaten in popular and uncommon. So they'd eaten some, they probably eaten Indian and Japanese and British, almost every region in British. And then a third group, 18% of people had eaten in all three groups. So they'd eaten exclusively, uncommonly and popularly. And we think of those as being omnivores. So they're cultural omnivore, maps on to, obviously it's a taste, it's a food metaphor in the first place, omnivore, try everything, try everything. And we also separated out, because it's interesting, those amongst the omnivores, amongst the 18%, who had been to six or less styles of restaurant and those who had been to seven or more, they're major omnivores. What makes people into omnivores? This is a regression model, identifying as white British, belonging to the service class again. So you and your parents were professional manjura workers, having a high level of income. Education, which is very important, if you think about cultural capital, education is something that makes you culturally more competent. And being in middle-aged groups, there are negative effects. You'd be better off living in Bristol or London rather than Preston, if you want to be an omnivore. And having dependent children is a negative effect. Again, gender makes no difference. What I want to show you is that Britain has foodies. People use the word relatively again in an ambiguous sort of way. Sometimes it's, do you want to admit to being a foodie? I mean, our interviewees do so relatively happily, but it was a term of critical abuse, I think, when it was invented. But what we think we found here is that there is a relatively small proportion of the population who corresponds to the profile of foodies, the ones on the right-hand side. So they eat out far more often than anybody else. They eat at friends, 22% of them eat at a friend's house once a fortnight, compared to 5% of the restricted. Reason for the last meal out, not a special occasion, very much the opposite, but just a social occasion. Again, quite a lot more than the others. How long do you eat for? Only 1% of them are eaten for less than an hour, despite the fact that almost the majority of eating out events last an hour or less. And 60% of them, that should say two plus hours, two or more hours. And interestingly again, they're the most critical of restaurant food. So they don't like the food as much as other people. They don't like the service at all. And they don't like the occasion overall. And this corresponds to what they do at home. So do the host guests at home? Nearly all of them do, 92% of them. They go grocery shopping more often than anybody else. Nearly half of them go several times a week, compared to an average of about a third. Independent food stores read recipes, do special cooking, everyday cooking. This is a group of people who are interested in their food. You would agree with me, wouldn't you? And the question really is, does this mean that they're simply food enthusiasts and food is a recreational activity that they enjoy, they know a lot about, they invest time and effort in? Or is it a demonstration of social distinction, of their social position relative to others? I think the fact that there are minor and major omnivores and there are differences between them probably suggests that it's both, in fact. Some people are just crazy about food and some of the interviewees would admit that that's the case. But at the same time, if you don't have this pattern of eating out, you're likely to have a different set of friends and a different set of connections. So I think it is, you can display cultural capital and distinction through the things that you choose to eat and the restaurants you choose to go to, but you might also be through. And we have, I haven't got a very good example of a quotation. I mean, several people talked about themselves as being a bit of a foodie or foodies. This is somebody who has cooking competitions with their friends every now and again. A bit of a kind of master chef done in your own home. Lots of people express quite a lot of in-depth knowledge and enthusiasm, but I haven't managed to find a quotation that will capture that a lot. But there are foodies. So there are foodies, but they're omnivores and they're, I think, exhibiting cultural capital. And the social patterning is the same in 2015 as it was in 1995. The content's different, but the class pattern is the same. So reflections getting towards the end. Have things changed much? I think there has been some further commodification. Markets are being used more frequently. There's certainly greater enthusiasm, at least amongst a significant proportion of the population for new foods and dishes. There's a process of normalization, casualization and informalization going on in restaurants. People are getting used to it. They take it less seriously. It's a more ordinary activity. Commercial meals in particular are being simplified. There is new food content with a more varied range of main dishes being reported and fewer traditional British ones. Nevertheless, surrounding routines and understandings are fairly similar. There's some change in basic timing arrangements, most obviously brevity of meals. But social differentiation persists and is similar as it was in 1995. And one of the reasons for this is that, contrary to the average newspaper column, 20 years is a pretty short period to see culture change of any series in any serious degree. I ask myself the question, has the growth of eating out a difference to other ways of obtaining food and providing food? And our considered conclusions are the following. The spread of restaurants stimulates greater interest in food and in cooking and eating, introduces new food stuffs and new concepts for dishes to a wide population. But it's probably not as important as cookbooks, holidays, migrants, or supermarket ready meals, which have more impact on what we now eat or what we eat in 2015. There's a marginal decline in the frequency of family dinners associated statistically with a slight increase in the number of meals eaten out, but eating out is still relatively infrequent. It's about once every eight to nine days. So it's not going to make that much difference. Again, I think changing domestic provision is more affected by takeaway. People have ritualised takeaway nights. Lots of people, most people eat takeaways. If you eat out in a restaurant a lot, you'll like to eat a lot of takeaways as well. It's part of the... It is more clearly part of British culinary culture in 2015 than it was in 1995, though people ate takeaways in 1995. Domestic hospitality hasn't changed much. I had thought that people would be, when they were entertaining their friends at home, feeding them the sorts of things that restaurant chefs and master chef competitions might need them to. But actually, that doesn't appear to be the case at all. And the same people are being hosts and guests. So there is a general adjustment to commodification overall, but the adjustment seemed to me to be relatively marginal and not to be put down to the cause of the restaurant, which leads me to some comforting thoughts about eating out. I think there are... Eating out is by no means as... should be considered by no means as negatively as is often the case. So it gives you flexible and unimpeded access to cooked food. You can have a quick and convenient meal. It relieves burdens of obligatory domestic labour from women, on some occasions. People like it very much, and they like it mostly because of the conversation and the company. It's a social activity, and the interviews make it absolutely clear that it's a social event. You're with your friends and your mates and your family. It expands culinary horizons, and it's probably improved British cuisine to a significant degree. The role of chefs may be more through their effect on cookbooks than it is on people going to their restaurants. But that's part of a process of increasing public interest in cooking and eating, which I don't think is a bad thing. So, on the balance, I think the restaurant hasn't done too badly. It's a vector for making food seem more... more of an aesthetic than a functional form. Say, people like it. Restaurants have improved to judge from descriptions of what they were like in Britain in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But change is still slow, and there's plenty of resistance to change, resistance to the kind of things that restaurants might add. I'm very aware that this is a study of three cities. I have a small number of people in three cities in England. I should say beyond England. And whether what you might want to deduce about other locations, I'm not sure. You would probably say that many of the underlying institutional changes are ones that are happening certainly throughout Europe. I think Britain is more like the USA than Europe at the present time, partly because it has higher levels of individualisation, de-regionalisation and informalisation. Nowhere is that clearer than at lunch, which has now become a very asocial, antisocial kind of event. So Jennifer Willins has written a rather nice paper, one of my co-workers, on lunch. I mean, people are doing things like going and sitting in their car to eat their sandwiches because they don't want to talk to people at work while they're eating. Lunch is absolutely optional of what you do. You can sit with people who you've got or not. You can bring your sandwiches, you can bring yesterday's leftovers, you can go to the shop, you can just go for a walk. It's a very kind of disorganised and de-institutionalised meal. Yet it's one of the three main meals in main British land. So Britain is probably at the front end of a wave in terms of globalisation and commodification, but I might expect other places to be following. And I think you can use these notions of normalisation, informalisation, globalisation and aestheticisation as ways of thinking about kind of drifts and shifts in the way in which the experience of eating out is developing, but they don't necessarily all work in the same direction. So food, I think the issue of the foodie is a good one in relation to some parts of the population are treating food as aesthetic to the highest sort of degree, whereas most people don't. For most people it's a rather normal, ordinary thing to do quickly when you're hungry. So there are a set of kind of social processes which work across each other, which is one of the reasons why the trends are not dramatic and there hasn't been a huge shift from a way of doing things in 1995 to 2015. That's partly to do with the counter, the counter forces operating that I've been describing. This is the research team on our holidays and I'm the one on the left they tell me.