How eating meals disappeared.

There used to be more time for this…

Image: The Feast of St Nicholas, Richard Brakenburg, 1685, Rijksmuseum. Used with permission.

Hello my friends! I’m sad today because I finished Go Home, Ricky! and I didn’t want it to end. More on Ricky! below.

With the nonfiction part of my brain, I've been thinking about eating meals. (What!) Last week after I wrote about the incredible nervous-system regulating power of eating predictable meals, I came across this on the first page of my new cookbook, Nom Nom Paleo Let's Go! by Michelle Tam. In the first couple of paragraphs she writes

"[My family] and I can all be described in Cantonese as wai sek (為 食)—we live to eat."

This is much of my family too. Sadly we did not eat like families you might see in old-timey Hong Kong movies. 

Or like the Italian families I knew growing up where basically life revolved around the making and eating of meals and the reliable times of being together, and interest in cooking and eating was just a given that no one was ashamed of, unlike me. How come we don't eat like that anymore? 

Maybe I'm romanticizing? Still, eating family meals used to be dead normal. Now it's not.

Here is a brief history for you, from my particular viewpoint:

Twelve thousand years ago, give or take, our ancestors stopped grazing all day as they roamed the savannah hunting for berries and bison. They settled down, planted crops, and developed a convivial schedule of getting together regularly to eat. They probably fought about doing the cleanup, as we do, but what they didn’t do anymore was eat all day long and into the night as they foraged the fluorescent aisles of the 7. Like us.

Regular, repeated mealtimes is a human design pattern that stayed in place until our best choice was to work a job that doesn't even allow bathroom breaks, let alone meals, however illegal that may be. (Or legal! That can even be legal.)

Until some Silicon Valley bro realized it would be more "productive" to drink a dubious grey powdered formula while sitting at his desk, which he then sold to all his closest friends before taking it public.

Until kids had to get up at 4am for swim practice, and bagels were handed over the seat back and consumed while driving.

Until a few people made a ton of money convincing billions of women to go on starvation diets.

Until parents had to work late and kids had rehearsal and families found it impossible to get together at the end of the day.

That's how eating meals disappears. We’re working harder for someone else, we have less time for ourselves and our families, and it’s very profitable—again, for someone else—if we buy habit-forming snacks to fill in the gaps. 

And now this is what eating looks like, at least in the anglophone world. Eating fast, eating on the run, eating portable foods, eating all the time, eating cheap shelf-stable food engineered to keep us wanting a lot more of that food while not really nourishing us.*

Of course, there are whole cultures that still revolve around the conviviality of predictable meals. You can see people observing this ancient human eating pattern in places like Mexico, Japan, Spain and France, and no doubt others. Thailand, I bet. In the English-speaking world though: not so much.

And obviously, all cultures have social problems. Eating meals in community doesn’t fix everything.

But eating regular meals is the easiest and fastest method I know to break a binge habit for good. You could start today. Here's a quick guide.

*Btw, I'm not on a purity kick. I bow down to the creator of the Twinkie™. I just don't think eating Twinkies in a moving vehicle is a great time-saving option for me anymore. 


Other things are...


HAVE YOU SAVED THE DATE: March 9, 16, 23 2-3:15pm Eastern
Let's HAVE CLASS. Let's be live together. Let's vibe. Let's QUIT BINGE EATING and do it fast, easy and for good. Three Wednesdays in March, live on Zoom, recorded of course, save the dates, details to come.


READING

  • Go Home, Ricky!, Gene Kwak. This is a great companion volume to I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness. If that book left you freaked the heck out and staring into the void, this is the antidote to get you off the ledge. Ricky is a small-time wrestler who runs away from home not because he can't deal with being a parent but because he can't deal with not being a parent. Nobody has more style and energy and nerve than Kwak. It's going to be hard for my reading pile to top this book. Read if you like to be stunned and laugh very hard.

  • The Hatak Witches, Devon A. Mihesuah. I really wanted to like this. I really did not. Main character is a cop who is kind of a bully? And an asshole? But not a lovable one. Included: my least favorite plot device, a young woman kidnapped and held captive for you-know-what purpose. It's part horror, part detective fiction, but the mood didn't feel right for either.

WRITING

and XOXOK that is the week! As always, thank you for reading. I appreciate you all so much.

Max DanielsComment