Try this at work: ask your friends/colleagues what they had for dinner last night. How many of them remember?
You will be surprised how few can readily recall last night's meal. Can you remember?
The Netherton family is fond of its food, cooking it, reading about it, eating it, buying it. Nearly all meals at home are made from scratch and it's a rare day when there isn't dessert. We even have a food diary going back over 30 years, with records of dinners eaten, restaurants visited, new recipes tried.
And even with this level of interaction with our pans, plates and palates, we sometimes take a minute or two to be able to answer that simple question; what did you have for dinner/tea/supper last night?
Much has been written about so called mindful eating - this article from the Washington Post is an interesting take:
Many people seem to assume that mindful eating means eliminating distractions, though that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, for many people struggling with eating disorders or a conflicted relationship with food, mindful eating may increase anxiety during meals, while distraction may be therapeutic.
For the rest of us, research does show that eating while distracted can lead to increased food intake at that meal and the next meal, in part because it affects our memory of what and how much we ate.This is one of many articles and studies about how distracted eating, ie scarfing your dinner in front of the telly, can influence food intake, appetite and weight gain.
We think it's simply bad manners not to pay attention to the meal that has been prepared for you.
And here you can read about how our food memory is messing up scientific data too.
At Scout camp, where catering for a lot of kids in less than ideal conditions is a challenge, we sit the kids down at communal tables for breakfast and dinner and no-one leaves the table until the last person has finished eating; seconds are never served until everyone has finished eating and the plates are not cleared until everyone has finished eating.
It is disquieting to see how fidgetty this makes them on day one, but how quickly they fall into the routine.
We do not want anyone to think that we are rooted in Victorian values. We spend as much time on our phones as anyone else, to say nothing of taking a photo of our food before we eat it.
But we would encourage everyone to take more notice of what they eat, to focus on the food and the company, participate, converse, concentrate, if only one a week. Savour the flavour
Fish and chips, pizza and spaghetti Bolognese may come top in polls of Britain's favourite meals, but the Sunday roast can always be found within the top 10 and it's fair to say that the ritual is as much a part of the magic as the roasties.
Before my mother died, a couple of years ago, she taught my father to cook for the first time in his long life. Now, aged 90, he cooks himself a full Sunday dinner, at least twice a month, sets the table and sits down to eat it as if surrounded by the whole family.
This is a huge achievement for someone whose culinary ability ran to jam sandwiches until 3 years ago and keeps him connected to the woman who fed him for nearly 60 years.
You don't have to lay the table, be formal, use the correct cutlery, sit up straight and keep your elbows off the table to enjoy eating together - have a picnic, even on the living room floor; build a fire and cook and eat outdoors save up that little bit extra and "eat in" rather than "take away" once in a while, but whatever else you do, turn off the phone for half an hour and savour your dinner.
Netherton Foundry Shropshire 2019 ©
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