After AmCon students came to dinner Monday, as I was cleaning up the blue plastic plates and plastic forks of various colors for re-use, I thought again about tableware. This time I thought less about how what these implements convey about one's class and economic standing and more about what they might say about one's communities. My thoughts were hardly profound or original, but I was grateful to have enough dinnerware so that everyone could eat, enough to make hosting a smallish crowd easy. And I noticed that having enough of these in plastic rather than good china and silver also suggests something of the sort of hospitality I am prepared to offer and that my guests are willing to accept: casual and convivial rather than formal. In this situation the implements are pared down almost entirely to their function with little symbolic meaning remaining. They are tools for eating and building social communities not markers of my economic resources or social status.
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