Deciphering meals in the 21st century

[robert_jones]

sashagoblin has, perhaps unwisely, lent me a book on Food and CultureI'm quite interested by Mary Douglas' ideas about the semiotics of food in British culture (and more specifically British middle class culture). She proposes that meals take a three-fold shape, and are structured metonymically. If one's frame of reference is mathematical, rather than

Comments

[marrog]

TV dinners do exist of course, but they are usually referred to as things self-evidently bad

Your opinion, or that of the 1975-written book? I don't think this is a prevailing sentiment any more. I would consider it to be pretty normal these days to make proper home-cooked meals and then eat them off proper plates while sitting on the couch in front of the telly; my partner and I do it nearly every night and it seems like a reasonably common practice among my friends and acquaintances.

Mind you, we don't have live broadcast television of any variety, even the basic five channels, so our TV watching is without exception made up of things we genuinely want to watch and enjoy together and have taken the trouble to procure, not Any Old Crap That Happens To Be On. So perhaps I feel pretty wholesome about something that is perhaps still a slightly more careless habit among some others, I dunno.

[robert_jones]

Neither I nor Douglas are expressing any view on the rightness or otherwise of the mores under observation. The point I am making is that I have never seen the expression 'TV dinner' used without the implication that (a) the speaker thinks it a bad thing, (b) the speaker assumes the audience will also think it a bad thing and (c) no explanation needs to be given as to why it is bad. Of course it is possible that my observations have not been comprehensive, and that a positive usage in fact exists. I'm just going on my own experiences here.