THE DECONSTRUCTION OF TABLE MANNERS.

Here's the latest thing we could impound in nyekulturny.

The scene: It’s an hour into a dinner party you’re hosting for “friends.” (Note the quotes.) Most of your guests are on their second (or third) round of adult beverages and are tucking into the main course — sumptuous grilled shrimp paired with grits, the latter of which you made yourself according to an old family recipe. Shouts of approval echo from around the table, but then you hear a very audible murmur: “These grits are good. However, you know, when I make them I use real cream, not milk.”

Dear reader, do you require any more evidence that Puffington Host is for metrofexuals with ample spare time? That paragraph describes the latest microaggression, "invidious comparison eating".

Potentially the most passive-aggressive bad-dining habit, ICE is when [c.q.] a person indirectly asserts a dish they’re consuming is lesser by listing the “superior” merits of another version (usually their own). ICE can play out in any sort of group meal setting (e.g., restaurants or coffee shops), but it’s particularly offensive when it transpires in a domestic space, right in front of the home cook.

Lest you assume ICE is some newfangled fad, let it be known that this nasty behavior has been going on — and more importantly, recorded — for hundreds of years.

In his landmark 1899 study of wealth and consumerism, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” Thorstein Veblen argued that invidious comparison is a key way in which members of the wealthy and/or moneyed class actively set out to distinguish themselves from those of lower socioeconomic status. He specifically posited invidious comparison as “a process of valuation of persons in respect of worth,” which plays out often by accumulating and (here’s the important part) displaying or publicizing superior assets.

In other words, it’s not enough that your dinner party “friend” can afford to purchase and deploy real cream when they make grits; this fact must also be broadcast to the masses to establish their superiority.

Veblen had bespoke suits or hand-tooled luggage or matching carriage horses in mind, but to a class of people that has trouble engaging in a social media kerfuffle without invoking their degree, or having the latest virtue signalling emojis and three names and pronouns in their tag, superiority-establishing is a thing, whether or not it's a kitchen table issue.

That article being for Puffington Host readers, a discourse of monumental proportions, complete with childhood trauma, ensues.  One of the contributors, however, provides a realistic conclusion.

[Nick Leighton] offered this advice for dealing with ICE: “As a host who has prepared a meal or as a fellow diner being subject to this behavior, there are many etiquette paths one can take. From addressing it politely yet directly to ignoring it completely, it all depends on one’s mood, tolerance and how deep the relationship is with this person. For today, I’d probably lean toward offering a weak smile and then a quick change of subject. And then, for the future, I’d think twice about my guest list.”

When all else fails, you always have bourgeois conventions.