There’s more to food than meets the eye, or is it just a matter of taste? An exploration of class mobility and its effect on the etiquette of serving the meal and table manners in the Netherlands.

This research aims to explore how class and mobility affect meal etiquette in the Netherlands. The primary focus is on how today’s class and mobility may stimulate social inequality. The impetus is the current gap in research on how class and mobility affect the cultural consumption of meal etiquette in the Netherlands. While considered a leading horizontal and egalitarian country, the growing upwardly mobile population and socio-economic developments have unclear impact on the present social stratification. Cultural consumption necessitates a set of taught manners and rules, learned through different stages of socialization, which shapes a person’s distinct set of behavior and taste. If Dutch status groups do differentiate themselves through the etiquette they observe, then each group might have its own sort of cultural capital. Class co-determines people’s etiquette as etiquette can signal class; however, the relations between class and etiquette are probably made more complex by social mobility, which creates unclear boundaries by creating discontinuities between primary socialization and later influences in life. The main questions concern the extent to which class and mobility are perceived through meal etiquette, how meal etiquette relates to the class of origin and destination, and how upwardly mobile people adapt his or her meal etiquette. Stratification is fundamental to better understand how a country operates. By understanding how class or status operates in the Netherlands, one can also better understand how, as individuals and as a group, we could facilitate communication, integration, and the transition into unknown environments. This research investigates meal etiquette amongst 14 Dutch working professionals, split into blue-collar and white-collar occupation groups. The participants were selected based on their Dutch nationality and profession type. The qualitative research approaches the participants through open-ended interviews and thematic analysis.