Meals, Health, and Reclaiming Time

Before you ask, no, this is not an attack on the American diet per se.  It is a discussion on how we eat today, not what.  And I hope that, by the end of it, I will convince you that what I say has merit.

First, some background.  My family has always eaten together.  As long as I can remember, we’ve eaten meals, particularly dinner, as a group.  There are exceptions, of course—if my parents are on a business trip, or if I or my sister or brother had a night with friends—but as a rule, we ate family dinners.

By the phrase “family dinners,” I mean that came downstairs at the same time, sat at the same table, and ate the same food.  There were no televisions.  There was no radio.  There might be music, but it was strictly background.  Our only method of sensory stimulation was each other and our conversation—and, of course, the food.

Now, this had a couple of effects.  First, we developed tight family bonds.  We know each other, and know we can depend upon each other for support when necessary.  Second, it forced us to stop for a little while.  We needed to shop, sit down, and share time together every day.  And we learned how to make time for that.

Now, here is a dirty truth about America: we have forgotten how to make that time.  We are constantly on the move; we study and work to madness.  This is part of the John Henryism of our society, in which we believe that anything is possible if we work harder.  This is where the billable hour comes from; we believe that more time = more value = more success.  We sacrifice the meal as part of this.  Witness the advent of the working lunch.  Witness the encroachment of extracurriculars and schoolwork on meals and social time.  We are obsessed with more, more, more, more, more, because society tells us that if we’re not pulling 60 hours of work a week plus three hobbies plus two hours of exercise a day, clearly we’re inadequate, and who has time to eat or sleep anyway?

The fact is, though, that the billable hour is a stupid idea.  Study after study after study shows that more time does not equal more value.  Any student can tell you that when studying, there is a beautiful period of two to four extremely productive hours after which, you stop focusing.  You read, but you stop processing the information.  You can’t see the obvious solutions.  Your brain, in short, needs rest.

This is why the Ten Commandments include the Sabbath law.  This is the reason that most successful cultures maintain a tradition of daily rest.  Witness the coffee break in the Northeast, the espresso stop in Europe, the siesta in Spain, the teahouse in China.  The human being is not a machine; he (or she) needs rest every few hours in order to continue working well.  For a very long time, in common life, that rest took the form of a meal.  Not food; a meal.

Let me explain what I mean when I say “Not food; a meal.”  It is entirely possible to eat without revitalizing, or even to drain further.  The working lunch is one example.  Eating while working does not revitalize.  Your brain is still working—indeed, it is working harder, since now you must navigate two tasks instead of just one.  So, food per se does not provide the mental energy and strength to navigate daily life.  If I want to regain energy, what I must do is step away from the desk, leave my current task, and do something else.

Additionally, eating alone often depresses energy rather than boosting it.  Eating alone is, frankly, an incredibly lonely experience.  Such an experience saps energy rather than boosting it.  And it is easy to be lonely in modern society.  It is frighteningly easy to be planted in the middle of a crowd and be completely, utterly, and hopelessly alone.

So, when I say, “a meal,” what I mean is an experience shared with friends, family, or even friendly strangers.  When presented with friendly faces and good conversation, even the darkest mood often lightens.  The promise of the family or friendship dinner is not just the food; it is the group, the conversation, the feeling of belonging.  The basic instinct of belonging in a group comes out in the meal.

Why a meal, you may ask?  Well, consider this: our places of meeting, greeting, and gathering are frequently restaurants, cafés, bars, and the kitchen.  That is no accident.  Humans grew up around the hearth.  Indeed, many studies indicate that we literally evolved around the hearth; that cooking food shrank our gut, enlarged our brains, and fundamentally changed our way of life.  Perhaps most important, the sharing of food and drink smoothes differences, softens edges, helps reconciliation, builds trust and friendship.  I’m not certain how, but if I had to guess, I would say that sharing a meal signals an induction into the tribe.  It is a very visceral act of sharing, an ancient way to say “Yes, you belong here.”

The issue is, as a society, many of us don’t belong anymore.  Consider that the percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has jumped from 2% to 17% in the past two decades, particularly among the educated white elite, and even more particularly among the male part of that elite.  That is a loss of identity.  We no longer belong to a church.  And that loss is not unique to the churches any longer; we are more isolated from everything.  How many of us know our neighbors?  City council?  Roommates, even?  As the world has shrunk, it has become more atomized.  As we travel more, we lose the ability to build long, lasting connections.  And so, we have a class of people in the world that no longer belong anywhere. And that is a terribly lonely state.

For the above reasons, it is easy to be lonely in modern society.  I suspect this is one reason that we see the advent of social networking sites, or why the rate of mood disorders such as depression have risen so rapidly.  Of course this is not the only reason, but it is a factor.  To be lonely for a long time is depressing.  To not belong to a group is depressing.  Quite literally depressing.  Many studies have shown that not having a stable social network means a higher chance of depression, greater likelihood of illness, even a shorter life expectancy.  I know.  I’ve gone there.  I’m still looking for the way out.

The collapse of the meal is, like it or not, both an effect and a cause of this problem.  To share a meal is, as I said, a very basic and essential way of saying that a person belongs.  But in order to have such an experience, one must belong—or at least, have a group to which you want to belong.  One cannot create it from nothing.  You must find others to share it with.

The thing is, though, that most of us have others with whom we would like to share a meal.  The challenge is who, and when.  As part of the individualization and atomization of society, we no longer have a set schedule as a society.  People have activities all over the map, and they grab food when they can.  They don’t have time to sit down to eat a meal with friends.  Sharing a meal with a friend has become so rare that it comes with an element of romance attached.

I have to ask: does it have to be so complicated?  Why has eating, one of the most basic and fundamental experiences of being alive, become so rare, so difficult, so troublesome that people are working on food replacement pills?  Why, in short, have we allowed ourselves to become so busy that we cannot even care for our health and our relationships?  Can we really say that this makes us happy?

 As for the time argument—most of us do have time to share a meal.  We have far more time in our schedules than we think.  You may even find that, by stopping, resting, and recuperating, you have more time.  You will work better.  You will work harder.  You will have something to anticipate.  You will have a goal.

I suspect that some people will read this and think it is an excuse, that we should work more.  Yet, I would pose the question: why?

Why do we need to work more?

Why should we work more if we make enough money, work enough hours, have met our goals of productivity for the day?

What if what we want cannot be obtained through more hours at the office?

What if, in fact, work are compromising what we really want?

Is work, per se, redemptive somehow?

In short, is work the end goal of working?

I value work.  I try to work very hard on my studies and my research.  But I don't work for the sake of working.  I work for a goal that is separate from the work itself, be it discovering a new scientific law, starting a new student group, or anything else.  And one of those goals is to have time.  Time to sit.  Time to think.  Time to meet friends, to talk, to laugh, to share something.  Because like it or not, we are social animals.  We do not just like social interaction.  We need it.  Or we die.

Few and far between are the people who, on their deathbed, wish they had spent more time in the office.  Most of us wish we spent more time at the hearth.