"I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It's chicken and eggs." Paul Simon

There is another major pleasure provided by food, something that my boyfriend and men in general are particularly fond of, it is to have people who cook for you and serve you. I have always known this was a pleasure and it is even more obvious since I have lived alone. I had never realized how cool it was to have my mother cooking for me. However, the most enjoyable moment when someone cooks for you and serves you is when you are in a restaurant. There is nothing like going back home after a hard-working day and hearing my boyfriend saying "don't bother zith cooking, let's go to the restaurant tonight".

Originally, eating out was only a solution to get some food when you could not be home, for instance because you were travelling or working. It is only at the end of the eighteenth century that eating out became a pleasure in England. This did not happen that often and was basically for well-off people. Nowadays eating out is a very basic leisure. John Burnett, the author of Plenty and Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day, even assumed this in 1989: "in a recent survey of leisure activities, going out for a meal or entertaining friends to a meal at home were rated as the most popular occupations after watching television". Eating in a restaurant or simply sharing a meal with people you like became one of the things people prefer.

I used a book entitled Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption and Pleasure written by Alan Warde and Lydia Martens to study the idea of pleasure in eating out.

 

They mainly say that people wanting to have a meal in a restaurant is first and foremost a wish to break daily life and do something different, avoid cooking and eat something different, in a different place and, sometimes, with different people. Moreover, the only fact to get ready is a pleasure in itself, instead of staying home wearing pyjamas. Usually people enjoy special occasions like birthdays, celebrations or anniversaries to eat out, because having dinner in a restaurant is still a privilege -not everyone can afford it- but a couple who was interviewed just said that they do not need any occasion: "I think we eat out obiously because we enjoy eating". You do not absolutely need to have an actual meal, even having a coffee or a drink is a deep pleasure (especially at a table outside when the sun shines).

 

However, this pleasure becomes different when we are talking about take-away meals...