On Eating

The Edwardian day had shape. Breakfast was taken at breakfast time. Luncheon arrived at luncheon time. Tea appeared in the afternoon, and dinner was served in the evening, at a table, with cutlery, in the company of other people who were also sitting down. One did not eat while walking. One did not eat at one’s desk. One did not consume a meal from a paper bag while staring at a screen and pretending this constituted dining.

The modern day has no shape. It is an unbroken stream of consumption: something grabbed on the way out of the door, something eaten with one hand while the other operates a keyboard, something unwrapped in the car, something spooned directly from a container while standing in the kitchen at eleven o’clock at night, illuminated by the open refrigerator like a man who has given up on the entire concept of meals and surrendered to pure, continuous grazing. This is no way to eat. It is barely a way to refuel.

Sit down. This is the first and most elementary instruction. Find a chair. Find a table. Place the food upon the table, on a plate (a proper plate, not the lid of the container it arrived in), and sit in the chair, and eat. If a table is not available, find a surface that approximates one. The meal should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, after which you stop eating and do something else. Eating is an activity, not a background process.

The plate matters. Not because of the plate itself, but because of what the plate represents, which is the decision to treat food as something worthy of a small amount of ceremony. A plate requires cutlery. Cutlery requires a surface. A surface suggests a chair. The chair implies stillness. Stillness permits attention. And attention, directed at the food in front of you rather than at the screen beside you, is the difference between eating a meal and merely consuming calories.

On the subject of the food itself: eat proper meals. By this I mean meals that contain vegetables, protein, and something that was, at some point in its history, a whole ingredient rather than a manufactured substance. You do not require a degree in nutrition to understand the basics. Eat vegetables; they are not optional, regardless of your feelings about them. Eat protein in reasonable quantities. Eat fruit. Reduce your consumption of whatever it is you eat too much of; you already know what it is, and I will not insult you by specifying.

Three meals a day. Not seven small meals, not “grazing,” not the modern invention of eating continuously from waking to sleeping and calling it a metabolic strategy. Three meals, eaten at roughly the same times each day, with gaps between them during which you are not eating. The gaps are the point. The body was designed to eat and then not eat; the constant provision of food is a novelty of this century, and not a welcome one.

The manner of eating matters as much as the content. Chew your food. Do not eat so quickly that the meal is over before you have registered its occurrence. Put the fork down between bites if you must; the food is not going to escape. Eat in company when you can, for a meal shared is a different thing from a meal endured alone over a keyboard, and the difference is worth preserving.