more on plastic dinerware and hospitality

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.

Back to tableware: this time, ads over time

1847

1929

We know that tableware has both a functional value and a symbolic value.  This dual quality makes it a prime example for considering how advertisers present this product to potential buyers.  Here we see four examples that span more than a century.  Although this is not a carefully selected sample, it does seem to suggest that into the early 20th century silver tableware was presented as a luxury item that confirmed one's high social status.  The ad from the 1950s is consistent with the common view that that was a era in which household domesticity was a widely held ideal.   (No mention in the ad, of course, of the communal, utopian experiment where Onedia tableware originated.)  The Dansk ad has the minimalist style of the 1960s and shows us the product itself so that we can make our decision about the unconventional shapes and lack of ornamentation.  The text of the Dansk ad does appeal to expert aesthetic (rather than scientific) opinion by its mention of museums and awards.  Perhaps this echos the 1847 ad's assertion that there is art in the silverware.  All this fits with what we've been reading, but a larger sample would be needed for a conclusive interpretation.

1953

1961

Plastic spoons: a comment on convenience and class

 Last fall we learned that the number of forks a person owned was an indicator of social class in colonial North America.  This poster reminds me that those forks were made out of something durable such a pewter or even valuable such as silver.  Today eating utensils may not be such a reliable indicator of economic resources as in the past since relatively less money is needed to acquire them.  Nonetheless, the poster also serves to suggest that which utensils one has (rather than how many) may now be an indication of the values the user holds along with the spoon and fork.