Food for thought

Since moving into this retirement village, my “education” has grown. I think I’m the youngest person here, but for me to learn anything about older/oldest people is a blessing. Not a religious one, either! My main thoughts turned to the food I now eat each day.

Meals eaten here are very similar to what my grandmothers and step-grandfather used to eat. The middle of the day is the main meal, and the evening meal would just be something light and simple. Most of the people here, in this retirement village, are no older than my parents were when they died, so why are meals different than when I was young?

Growing up in my own family home, our meals had already changed and had been set up years before I was born. The middle of the day ones were sandwiches or anything light and simple – essential for school lunch - and the end of the day would be our main meal, with meat, potatoes, vegetables and gravy, and followed by dessert. That seemed to happen within families of every kid I went to school with. The only difference was on Sunday, with a main roast at lunch time and light food in the evening. Maybe that was because every Sunday our grandparents would join us, and that was what they were expecting.

What changed the setup?

I Googled “when do we eat meals” and I got a lot of diet preparation – see the 2014 (UK) and 2015 (Aus) articles. People on a diet should, apparently, think about 6 small meals a day rather than 3 main meals each day. I already know about this because many years ago, as an adult with very good physical training, I used to live on 6 small meals – and I enjoyed that way. But that wasn’t really what I was asking. (Oh, and “diet” is not the word which I have used… that is “lifestyle”. Look that up.)

I changed my request on Google to search for “history of meals” and I got some very interesting information. Food Timeline looks centuries back at how people used to survive then. They said that meal times “differ greatly from culture to culture and through time”, and depended on socio-economic class. In Britain in 1900 they followed early morning 8am (tea, bread and butter), breakfast 8-8:30am, luncheon at midday, afternoon tea 5pm and dinner 7:30-8pm. Soon after, in the 1930s, they changed to breakfast 8am, lunch/upper classes or dinner/rest at midday-1pm, afternoon tea 4pm, high tea 5-6pm, dinner 7-8pm and supper 9-10pm. Six meals back then?

This was taken from the book Consuming Culture: Why You Eat What You Eat, Jeremy MacClancy; Henry Holt:New York 1992 (p. 61-66). Food Timeline also follows other books for different world areas.

Wikipaedia compares many “normal” meal times, even BBQs. They said about mealtimes that:

• Breakfast is eaten within an hour or two after a person wakes in the morning.
• Lunch is eaten around mid-day, usually between 11 am and 3 pm. In some areas, the name for this meal depends on its content.
• Supper or dinner or tea is eaten in the evening. In some areas, the name for this meal depends on its content, but many English-speakers use "supper" for this meal regardless of size. 

AlterNet looks into the biological reason about the no-reason to eat 3 meals a day. Anneli Rufus, the author of this page in 2011, said what is real these days:

People around the world, even in the West, have not always eaten three squares. The three-meals model is a fairly recent convention, which is now being eclipsed as… eating becomes a highly personalized matter of choice. What and when and how frequently we eat is driven less and less by the choices of our families, coworkers and others, and more and more by impulse, personal taste and favorite nutrition memes, and marketing schemes such as Taco Bell's promotion of late-night eating known as "Fourthmeal: the Meal Between Dinner & Breakfast." Selecting how and when we eat is like loading our iPods.

Perhaps this was written in the USA, but it’s real for us as well. AlterNet has a lot of other information about food, not necessarily the time to eat but… well, read it if it would interest you.

At the end of each day I now order a small salad, and I add that to some meat which I would either eat cold (slice ham) or heat up (I only have a microwave) and maybe add a wee bit of tomato relish. Except, of course, whenever I go out anywhere for a meal.

A different meal. My different lifestyle.