“One of the silliest things about a well-meaning but foolish culinary school of thought is that each of the three daily meals must be ‘balanced’.” So claims American food writer MFK Fisher in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf, reports The Guardian. And she continues: “First of all, not everyone needs or wants three meals a day. Many feel better with two, one and a half, or five.”
A BOOK BORN FROM FAMINE, STILL RELEVANT
Fisher evidently wrote her book as a guide on how to eat pleasantly and nutritiously during a famine period caused by war, but in her insightful advice there is much that still inspires and stimulates us today. More than 80 years later, threats to the sacred breakfast-lunch-dinner food model can still make news: “A nation of snackers: Britons no longer eat three meals a day,” a recent Times article exclaimed in astonishment.
THE STUDY OF EATING HABITS
Deviations from the “standard” model are the subject of research by academics and health professionals, and food retailers commission studies in an attempt to understand (and influence?) when and how customers consume their food. […]
A MODEL CREATED FOR WORK
It is instead a regime created not to satisfy the needs of our bodies or to give us pleasure, although we have managed to adapt it to these purposes, but to fit a workday.
ITS ORIGINS IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Like many aspects of our current way of life, it has its roots in the Industrial Revolution: it was then that breakfast became a brief meal consumed before the morning’s work, lunch something light but substantial to be devoured quickly on days when breaks were unpaid, and dinner a final moment when everyone gathered in the evening after finishing work. Before that, people ate naturally, but meals consisted of different foods and, historically, the times varied.
HOW INDUSTRY SHAPED OUR TASTES
Rigid meal times, dictated by industry, in turn created opportunities for magnates to shape our tastes and behaviors, including John Harvey Kellogg, who did much to influence breakfast as we know it today. He and other members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church founded sanatoriums in the United States at the end of the 19th century as part of the “healthy living” movement, and it was here that the promotion of bland breakfasts like cereals – “a pale wheat pabulum,” as Fisher called it – became linked to teachings on moral righteousness. […]
THE DECLINE OF THE THREE-MEAL PARADIGM
There is growing evidence that our eating habits are moving away from the three-meal paradigm, driven by lockdowns due to the pandemic and changes in the composition of our families, including an increase in those living alone like me. Nevertheless, the ideal of the meal eaten at the table continues to be supported by those who claim, for example, the value of family dinners for children’s overall physical and mental well-being. […]
SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WEIGHT OF THE MEAL
Academic Anne Murcott writes that the modern “cooked dinner” has come to represent a “typical, even orderly domestic life.” The expectations it creates can be harmful in other ways too, causing anxiety and eating disorders. I know from personal experience, during a period of poor mental health, that the pressures created by the first meal of the day sometimes became so unbearable that I found myself curled up in bed, paralyzed by indecision. Partly this stemmed from the feeling that my inability to consume a balanced breakfast reflected something bigger about myself – that I was failing in life in general.
FISHER’S PROPOSED ALTERNATIVE
Fisher paints an appealing picture of the alternative to fixations on structure and balance: “The best answer… is to have food so good and such generous casseroles, bowls and trays full of it, that there cannot even be a conditioned appetite for more, once the true and sensual hunger has been satisfied.”
INTUITIVE EATING
Traces of this can be seen in contemporary ideas of “intuitive eating,” an approach that emerged in reaction to punitive diet cultures, encouraging the abandonment of the concept of “forbidden foods” or “bad foods” and the incorporation of eating habits otherwise seen as transgressive, including snacking.
THE VALUE OF SNACKING
A really good snack, as writer Laura Goodman argues, can relieve some of the pressure of family dinner and encourage spontaneous and intuitive pleasure in eating. Delicious bites eaten as and when we feel like it: perhaps a small way to begin loosening the grip of the three fixed meals.
(Excerpt from the foreign press review curated by eprcomunicazione)
