The methodical organization of talking and eating: assessments in dinner conversations

The paper analyzes food talk and more particularly food assessments produced during dinner conversations videorecorded in naturalistic settings. This focus reveals how expressions of food preferences, taste, and other evaluations are deeply embedded within collective activities, related both to the ongoing conversation and to the management of the meal as a social event. The paper reviews existing interactional studies of dinner conversations, and provides a detailed analysis of the interactional, linguistic and multimodal patterns which characterize the sequential environment in which assessments are produced. It identifies three recurrent contexts: at the beginning of meals, at closings of sequences and topical developments, and at ‘delicate’ moments characterized by emerging disagreements and conflicts. This sequential analysis reveals how taste and food preferences are highly sensitive both to the social occasions and to the organization of turns at talk; analysis shows that not only are assessments systematically positioned within specific sequences in dinner conversations, but also that they can be mobilized in service of other social practices, such as fueling topical talk, reorienting participants’ focus of attention or stopping emerging sequential trajectories.