THE SIT DOWN MEAL

This is a column about food, in the broadest possible sense. Even the word ‘food’ feels ill-suited to describe our complex relationship with the things we choose to eat. Millions of years of evolution and tens of thousands of years of cultural change have turned on the axis of food: when it’s available, how much of it there is, how to get it and how to make the most out of it. For as long as we are conscious we sense food like we sense time, a human day is segmented by meals and the time in between them as much as it is by minutes and hours. 

Just like everyone else that has ever existed, my life can be chronicled by food or, more accurately, eating. As the middle of three brothers it was always the eating that took priority over the food itself. My younger brother and I, despite the 3 year age gap, looked identical - always sweaty and ruddy-cheeked - but we also shared the same monstrous appetite. We used the golden hour after school before our parents came home to bond over what was to become our long-standing clandestine tradition of skimming the top third off all the leftovers and open drinks. 

One summer our grandmother visited from South Africa. Her first experience of Europe was an uncharacteristically sun-drenched week in Northamptonshire, the prelude to a family road trip around Ireland. Sitting around the dinner table for the first time after she arrived, studying the tanned contours of her face and attempting to find a resemblance to my own, something very brief and inexplicable happened. A dimness drew in around the dining table, illuminating the bread and salad across which my grandmother chided me for turning my nose up at the roast lamb. As she invoked the old testament, my inclination to protest was numbed by a sense that the whole family was paying complete attention to her. All totally present for a few long minutes. I had been determined to defend my first tryst with vegetarianism yet my annoyance dissipated and all that was left was a profound feeling of gratitude that she was there with us at all. Whether or not the rest of the family was sharing in this experience I don’t know. It didn’t last very long. Just as Mom began commandeering the cleanup and Dad had slipped away to check the rugby score, the sanctity of our dinner table commune was pierced and the vignette receded. I stacked plates unenthusiastically, mourning the devastating rebuttal that would remain unuttered forever.

I think more of it now than I did at the time. It wouldn’t be the last time I found myself captured by the phenomenality of mealtime. Unlike the gluttonous camaraderie of cupboard-raiding, the occasion of eating together actually seems to elevate our awareness of ours and others' experiences. The meal becomes a form of group mindfulness practice, a vehicle for gratitude. This is, of course, not a new idea. The meal is a pillar of almost all religious practice around the world and throughout history. A motif for family and community. Of connection to each other and the earth. Growing up, we prayed before every meal, thanking God and those who prepared it. Before meals at my Roman Catholic primary school, we sat in the hall and sung together in prayer:

‘Bless us, oh Lord, As we sit together. Bless the food we’ll eat today, Bless the hands that made the food, Bless us Oh Lord, Amen’

Truthfully, I scorned this part of lunch every day because being expected to contemplate the goodie-stuffed lunchbox in front of me for even a few seconds felt like some kind of silly authoritarianism. Of course this is the understandable perspective of a child that can eat only when food is provided for him and is ignorant of what it means to be the provider. Since becoming responsible for feeding myself and others, I’ve come to view eating together as the most human of traditions and an opportunity to align with our evolutionary and cultural lineage. On the human timeline, the sit down meal bridges an incomprehensibly vast period that stretches from before the flames of the first cookfires around 2 million years ago to the decline of hunter-gatherer lifestyle ca. 10,000 years ago, right up to the present day. Be it fruit, leaves and raw insects, rabbit roasted on an open fire or a KFC bargain bucket - the component of sitting down to eat together has, remarkably, changed very little until recently. Preserving this connection is of increasing importance as what constitutes ‘the meal’ becomes an ever more complex aggregation of food science, industrial agriculture and marketing. This is, in part, a bittersweet package deal that is essential for guaranteeing a future where we can feed over 8, 9 or even 10 billion people. A global population of wonderfully different food cultures, constantly exchanging old ways of eating and creating new ways in turn. 

The European version is that contemporary restaurants derive from 15th century Parisian table d’hôte, a fixed-price, set-menu meal served at precisely 1pm to whichever patrons managed to secure a seat at the communal table. Yet establishments recognisable as restaurants existed hundreds of years earlier in China. Tradesmen moving from city to city, weary of the strange local food, brought regional cooking with them. People have been doing the same thing ever since and on a much larger scale. Take anyone from anywhere on the planet and drop them in New York or London and they will be able to find something to eat that they recognise. You could make the case that food is the first point of contact, the first thing to be embraced when one culture pours into another. Foundations to build an understanding on. Even the most virulent British xenophobes are inclined to swoon over their favourite curry house or maybe even an audaciously timed trip to Nando’s. In an ideal world, one culture’s food would never be stolen or misappropriated. Our status as flexible and omni-curious eaters means it is not in our nature to pay attention to this. In an unstoppable, almost Darwinian process, if one of these misappropriated dishes turns out to be very delicious you can bet that it will stick around until the cycle repeats. Food is so pervasive that every time you eat something new you are engaging in a form of unconscious diplomacy that is helping bring us all closer together.

On its current trajectory, the way we are attempting to feed everyone is also completely unsustainable. Global food production accounts for around 26% of greenhouse gas emissions and half of the world’s habitable land is already used for agriculture. Of the 26% of emissions, livestock production accounts for over half. As people become richer, so do their diets. Meat consumption per capita has exploded in the developing world, tripling in Asia in the last 30 years with Africa forecast to follow suit. This poses huge problems for the future. Food production is uniquely difficult to decarbonise because we cannot simply upscale low-carbon energy sources like renewables and nuclear. So how can the menu of the future cater to the most demanding generation of diners to have ever lived and still somehow reign in its excesses? There is a very precarious balance to be struck. Soil health must be managed meticulously but the huge artificially-fertilised monocultures of commodity crops that ravage it also feed millions of people on the cheap. 

There are solutions on the horizon. Lab grown meat is inching ever closer to becoming commercially viable and is actually keenly endorsed by meat industry giants (because it will save them loads of money). Soilless vertical farms the size of Amazon warehouses already exist in major urban areas, supplying densely populated cities with fresh produce that can be grown locally in a fraction of the time and (theoretically) using a fraction of the resources. Some pioneering eaters are already enjoying burgers made from farmed mealworms, the first of potentially many insect-protein products, if we can overcome the yuck factor. In fact, our chances of curbing the impact of the food chain rely heavily on whether we can successfully alter our diets. We should begin to view less sustainable foods like beef, salmon, avocados and peanut butter as luxury, to be enjoyed occasionally. A notion that seems needlessly monkish to some and bordering on elitist to others. And who can blame them? Unsurprisingly, people care more about making ethical consumer decisions as they become wealthier and spend less time worrying about putting food on the table in the first place. 

If the onus falls on the public to drive change, the logistics are stymieing progress. Here in the epicurean west, choice is king and you only have to wander through any major supermarket to see it. At Tesco Extra, swing left off the central thoroughfare into the aisle labeled ‘Coffee/Cereal’ and you will be greeted by 8 rows of coffee products, stretching the length of a London bus and towering above shoppers. Here you will find no less than 30 coffee brands with beans sourced from almost 20 different countries across 4 continents. Plump bags, organized by roast, grind and origin, instant and decaf. One design depicts a breezy Italian village with a little vintage Fiat buzzing around the square, next to a ristorante with an awning the colour of deep red wine. Squeeze the bag and a small silvery valve on the front of the bag releases a little puff of air and you are hit with an intense aroma that is nutty, fruity and chocolatey at the same time. As the smell fills your nostrils, a web of neural pathways in your brain fire up, just as they do every morning as your first cup brews. On the reverse side of the bags are poetic descriptions of each coffee’s flavour profile, tales of happy coffee farmers and community projects in South America and Africa. In his 2006 odyssey through the modern American food chain, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan refers to this new literary genre as ‘Supermarket Pastoral’, it’s existence reveals a broken connection.

Individually, each element is, rather transparently, a marketing ploy but strung together they coalesce into a carefully curated multi-sensory experience. The transparency doesn’t seem to bother us, at our core we are still beholden to an emotional configuration that predates Tesco. We want to be wooed by something that plugs us into our natural history. Gazing back at an agrarian dreamscape where tightly-knit communities sustain themselves physically and spiritually on the fat of the land. In this vision, the people are robust and liberated. The allure of this kind of lost vitality is so potent that it only needs to be vaguely alluded to, often dishonestly, to be persuasive. If you continue through the aisles you will see the colour green emblazoned on products everywhere. Green tree badges for ‘certified organic’ products, leafy green V’s for veggie and vegan, grassy green borders that hint of the countryside and the word ‘natural’ used so liberally so as to lose meaning altogether. The point here is not to undermine the importance of ethical consumption but to illustrate the permanent state of dislocation we find ourselves in. One in which we spend so much of our time trying to figure out how to eat more ‘real food’. We are not only seeking better food but to live more authentic lives.

I have tugged at this thread repeatedly through the years since I sat at the table with my grandmother. Trying to figure out how eating can be ancient and novel, visceral and also contemplative. In this column we will root down into the past and gaze to the bounds of food future in an attempt to stitch the tapestry together. Exploring how good eating can make your body feel good and fill every day with meaning. Digging up the dirt and picking apart the politics that govern our global food systems. Food as art and cooking as craft, in home and professional kitchens. Telling the stories of people who create incredible spaces and culinary experiences. And of course, lots and lots of sit down meals.