Food Fight: the Significance of the Family Meal

Food Fight: The Significance of the Family Meal

“Sometimes a meal is just a meal,” claims Thomas Foster in his book How to Read Literature Like A Professor, “More often than not, though, it’s not.” Whether it is dinner between the hunter and the hunted in The Most Dangerous Game or a pig roast in The Lord of the Flies, a meal involving the main characters play a significant role in almost all literary work. Many times a meal will mark the turning point in a plot. Other times the author will use dinner time to foreshadow later events. In William Faulkner’s Barn Burning the family meal symbolically defines the mindsets and the tensions between the main characters.

Traditionally the family meal represents a sense of security and togetherness. Faulkners description of the Snopes’ meal shows a lack of just that: “... they ate the cold food and then went to bed, scattered without order or claim up and down the two rooms…” In other words, the Snopes ate their food and went their separate ways. This suggest that there is an invisible, emotional wall between the characters. Even though the author puts all the main characters at the same place at the same time, there is no conversation carried out. There is no sense of togetherness. A time when traditional families will bond, the Snopes meal only magnifies their separation.

Of course one has to consider the fact that the Snopes are not in a traditional setting. The story is placed during the Great Depression. They are poor. They are hungry. Their spirits are low. The description of the meal depicts all of that. For example, Faulkner does not describe the Snopes’ dinner as a meal: “they would presently eat the cold food remaining from the mid-afternoon meal.” As the family eats cold leftovers, the reader gets an idea of how poor the Snopes are. The fact that the author describes their dinner as just “cold food” represents the emotional state of the characters. For the Snopes, dinner is not a meal with...