The methodical organization of talking and eating: Assessments in dinner conversations Lorenza Mondada ICAR Research Lab (CNRS), Department of Linguistics, University of Lyon2 ICAR, ENS LSH, BP 7000, F-69342 Lyon Cedex, France article info Article history: Received 22 December 2008 Accepted 6 March 2009 Available online 25 March 2009 Keywords: Dinner conversation Conversation analysis Naturalistic data Assessments Multimodality Food preferences and taste as situated accomplishments abstract The paper analyzes food talk and more particularly food assessments produced during dinner conversa- tions 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 con- versation 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 mul- timodal 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 devel- opments, and at ‘delicate’ moments characterized by emerging disagreements and conflicts. This sequen- tial 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 posi- tioned 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 stop- ping emerging sequential trajectories. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This paper offers a qualitative and systematic analysis of assessments of food proffered by participants during mealtime conversations videorecorded in naturalistic settings. Much existing work on attitudes, representations, feelings related to food is based on elicited ac- counts obtained through interviews, questionnaires, and rating scales. By contrast, this paper deals with naturally occurring assessments of food produced by family members or friends during actual dinner conversations. Adopting an interactional perspective, the paper is in- spired by a long tradition within conversation analysis of detailed studies of dinner conversations, by studies of mealtime activities within the framework of language socialization and by analyses of food talk proposed within discourse psychology. On the basis of a data consist- ing of videorecorded dinner conversations among families and friends in France, which have been carefully transcribed, this paper offers a systematic analysis of the organization of food talk within social interaction. This analysis reveals that food assessments are very precisely positioned within mealtime activities, occasioned by the details of talk in interaction as well as other collective practices that characterize meals as social events. In this way, the paper contributes to the study of taste and food preferences as they are occasioned, expressed and elaborated upon in social practices. 2. A review of the interactional literature on dinner conversations Food attitudes, representations, evaluations have been studied within a rich interdisciplinary body of literature, exploring eating behav- iours and taste from various perspectives and methodological frameworks. Within this field, a large majority of studies are based either on experimental data or on constrained and elicited responses to questionnaires or interviews, which permit statistical studies of ratings, ac- counts, and self reported conducts. Such studies are based neither on direct observation nor upon video documentation of eating practices and food talk as they naturally occur in the everyday life of families and friends, without being orchestrated by any researcher. From an interactionist perspective eating practices are considered as situated within social collective events, and as indissociable from other social activities such as dining and talking together. A valuable interactionist literature exists which is based on detailed studies of naturally occurring dinner conversations, and which is able to contribute in a central way to the study of eating practices and food talk. 0950-3293/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.foodqual.2009.03.006 E-mail address: lorenza.mondada@univ-lyon2.fr Food Quality and Preference 20 (2009) 558–571 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Food Quality and Preference journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foodqual