The Trouble With Brunch: Q&A with Shawn Micallef

Growing up in working-class Windsor, Ontario, Shawn Micallef remembers the times he and his family would go out for brunch to celebrate a special occasion. When he moved to Toronto, where people regularly line up for the late-morning meal, even if it comes with surly and slow service, he began to see the Sunday ritual not just as an obsession of but also a defining characteristic of the middle class.

The Spacing magazine editor and author of The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure talks to Yahoo! Canada Finance about status anxiety and class consciousness.

What’s your beef with brunch?

When I moved to Toronto from Windsor, I had very different idea of what brunch was. It was a thing we did on Easter or a christening or Mother’s Day and it was always someplace fancy—a nice golf club or the Hilton hotel—with big tables so the whole extended family could be there. You didn’t have to wait in line and it was a big buffet so you could go up and get your food when you were ready.

In Toronto, this brunch thing was just what people did, and it became this event with enough stress and performance and artifice around it that it just bombed out the whole day. It’s never at a diner where you can get in and out quickly; it’s always at a popular, trendy place where you have to wait in line, even though a block away there’s another restaurant serving the same food or even better with no lineup. The tables are all tiny. You can’t make any plans after because you never know how long these things are going to go.

I started wondering why we were doing this. What was the compulsion to do it? It got me thinking about conspicuous consumption. It’s a way of showing off wealth and status. When you look at our work lives, we never have enough time; we’re always working. Yet we’ll spend three hours drinking mimosas, and those things clash.

In The Trouble With Brunch, you talk about how conspicuous consumption has, in some ways, blinded us to increasingly precarious employment conditions. How so?

Growing up in Windsor, everyone mixed. In Toronto I started bumping into a class sensibility I wasn’t as familiar with. In big cities like Toronto or Vancouver or Montreal there are these middle-class scenes that have their own shopping places, always on hipster streets, and restaurants; I was curious how a whole chunk of society existed.

A lot of them, a subset, were creative class people, people with creative jobs or precarious employment, people working on contract, not having benefits, no pensions. There’s all this precariousness in their lives, they’re working all the time, checking our email Sunday at midnight in bed. We’re using our very precious leisure time on something which is not actually very leisurely. It’s curious.

It’s interesting too, as you note in the book, that most people identify as middle class, even when they’re not. You write about how this perception can have far-reaching consequences.

“When I was in Windsor, I thought I was middle class until I met real middle-class people and realized I was more working class. But everyone is spoken to as if they’re middle class. When you listen to politicians during election season, they’ll say things like “I’m here for the middle class.” Even Barack Obama said in a speech that everyone from a person sweeping up in a factory and a CEO are all middle class. By assuming we’re all middle class, it has real political and policy implications.

What are better ways to spend weekend afternoons other than standing in line for brunch?

I’m not actually against brunch per se, if it were leisurely and fulfilling. What if brunch were a way to identify with each other? It could be brunch, it could be Ultimate Frisbee; what if leisure was the way to create social cohesion among people with a similar lot in life—precariousness, which is epidemic these days?

The thing about the creative class or those with precarious employment is that there isn’t a sense of solidarity. We all do different things; there are writers, web designers; it’s highly individualistic. It’s not like Windsor, where everyone worked at the Chrysler plant.

My theory is that in the past, when people dined together, they felt they were similar; they had similar struggles and a common cause. It was ‘we the people’, and the people had to come up with solutions.

So, taking it to the extreme, finding alternatives to noisy, drawn-out brunch gatherings could make the world a better place?

It just seems that so many parts of the middle class are going for brunch and answering email at 11 p.m. and not talking about the foundations that might be eroding underneath them.

The world could certainly be a better place if we thought about class more.

This interview has been condensed.

.