MICROWAVE MANNERS

Mary Kenny observes the Mary Kenny observes the

demise of the dining-table

THE Christmas dinner, to which most of us sit down on 25 December, remains the one fixed ceremonial family meal in the calender, the one last echo of that Victo- rian table, immortalised by Dickens and by Isabella Beeton. 'Once you had included the servants and hangers-on,' writes the food historian Michelle Berridale-Johnson in Mrs Beeton, 'there were often 20 people to be fed at each meal.' At least at Christmas, the ritual endures, adapted to our life and mores: filly Cooper has written amusingly about the 're-constituted' family (ex-wives, ex-mothers-in-law, present or former stepchildren) sitting down for the Christmas repast — and the nightmare of placing the whole tribe appropriately.

But the 'structured' family meal, as an everyday occurrence, is on the way out. `The rise of the TV-dinner and the decline of the traditional family meal have had a marked effect on the life of the average household and the relationship between family members,' ran a report from Man- chester Polytechnic in July this year. The microwave oven has fuelled the demand for instant gratification; and eating separ- ately rather than around a table has en- couraged people to pursue individual in- terests and hobbies. As Simone Sekers put '1 think everyone ought to be infamous for 15 minutes.' it in the Sunday Telegraph recently: 'Most family life is based now on a programme of nourishment that consists of, not meals taken together round a table at a fixed time, but food taken on the wing. "Graz- ing" as this new eating has been termed, is what occurs in the fragmented family when its members rush in, shove whatever con- venience food appeals to them in the microwave and cram the rest in their mouth.'

Social observers are noticing the dis- appearance, or at least the reduction in use, of that piece of furniture, the dining- table. When Dr Judy Buttriss, senior nutri- tionist at the National Dairy Council, was looking at the diet of low-income families in London one of the surprising trends she noticed was the absence of a dining-table amongst poorer people.

`Beefburgers and fishfingers dominate the diet of low-income families, who only cook from raw once or twice a week,' reported the Health Education Council in December 1989. Snacks, take-away and convenience foods dominate the food pro- file, not just of a minority, but of consider- able sections of society: 400 TV-dinners pre-prepared portion-controlled instant meals ready for heating up, specially de- signed to eat while watching television are eaten daily. At a time of recession, there is scant sign that convenience foods are receding.

And schools are progressively going over to the airplane-tray type of catering, where each pupils looks after himself; school food tends to be more of the snacking than the structured kind — though nutritionists point out that an apple and a bag of crisps, though snackery, is a nutritionally ba- lanced food break. There is another trend, too. 'Modern fast food greatly encourages

the banishment of knives and forks: infor- mality as well as speed requires it,' writes Margaret Visser in Much Depends on Dinner. 'An important secondary consid- eration, one which is frequently expressed by fast-food managers, is that removing cutlery means there is nothing to steal.'

And yet the paradox is that while the `structured' meal is in decline as an every- day activity — because of the microwave (half of all households now own one), the convenience food, and the habit of watch- ing television — nevertheless we live in a culture which has a passionate 'food' ele- ment. Never before have there been so many lavish and wonderful cookbooks on sale. Perhaps never before has food been so fashionable in Britain among the middle classes. 'An advantage of food becoming fashionable,' writes Henrietta Green in the current Guild of Food Writers News, 'is that everyone wants to talk about it, discuss every mouthful, exchange recipes and sources of good produce. Talking about (food) was once frowned on; only a couple of decades ago amongst the upper classes, it was thought the most amazing social gaffe even to mention, let alone praise, a meal. Like furniture or family portraits you would never comment on it.' This interest in and knowledge about food is a mass-market phenomenon, and concern about nutrition penetrates every economic group. Even among low-income families who tend to depend more on hamburgers and fishfingers, there is an awareness about nutrition, says Catherine Burns of the Health Visitors Association. People tend to know about the dangers of having too much fat in the diet, and are aware of food scares like salmonella, lister- ia and BSE. (Indeed, the sales of micro- waves have taken a bit of a knock this year when it was found that 30 per cent did not heat some foods sufficiently to kill off bacteria. And fresh concerns about possi- ble cancer-inducing dangers in clingfilm do not help.) So we do have this strange picture of a society in a country apparently as in- terested in food as the French always have been, and yet, a society which seems to be leaving the dinner-table behind and eating convenience foods on its knees while watching television.

What is happening, says Evelyn Rose, the much-respected cookery writer for the Jewish Chronicle with over 30 years' ex- perience of teaching cooking, is that food is becoming a hobby. People are tending to cook at weekends for pleasure, while during the week they tend to use conveni- ence foods, to 'graze', to regard eating as fuelling up. There is no getting away from the fact that women do not want to spend as much time nowadays — or do not have the time to spend — in the kitchen. (One survey revealed that the maximum amount of time that the average woman will give to a meal is 35 minutes.) 'Never again do we want to be drudges in the kitchen,' says Mrs Rose. 'We are not going back to that.' Men are getting involved more, the chil- dren are doing more cooking (although this does sometimes mean taking a frozen pizza from the deep-freeze and 'zapping' it in the microwave.) But because cooking is de- veloping into a leisure activity, a meal has become more of an occasion. The Jewish Friday night endures, as do the family meals for festivals, and indeed the Jewish Shabbat is an excellent illustration of what the 'structured' meal is for: the generation- al exchange, the ritual, the family gather- ing, the metaphor of 'breaking bread' together. Not coincidentally, the central Christian sacrament focuses on a meal: 'He took bread and gave You thanks: He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples and said Take this, all of you and eat it. . . . Do this in memory of Me.'

At her Master classes now the theme asked for is 'Simple but Sophisticated'. People want to be able to cook impressive- ly when entertaining, but they still do not want to spend much time doing it. Some 67 per cent of married women now have jobs (as opposed to 10 per cent in 1931). One cannot get away from the fact that it is mothers going out to work which has dented the 'structured' meal.

At the same time, Evelyn Rose points out, there comes a point where people get a certain revulsion against convenience foods. 'You feel that you have not been involved in it: there is nothing of me in this.' This would, I think, particularly apply to mothers who traditionally express- ed their care for their children in terms of food. (`So you're miserable?' says the Jewish mother in Sally Cline's Just De- sserts. 'So — eat!') Yet one of the problems with conveni- ence food now is that the standard has become so high, the ordinary mother (or father) may feel inadequate to the task of competing. 'There is nothing to touch Marks and Spencer for quality,' says Miriam Polunin, of the Guild of Food Writers. 'And that's the drawback! Ordin- ary people feel they could never do any- thing as well as M&S.'

And yet, perhaps one should see all this in the context of history. The diet and eating habits of the poor have been a matter of concern to the bossy classes for a long time. During the second world war, evacuated city children would exasperate Women's Institute supervisors because they would not eat 'proper' food and sit down at a table. 'They don't like veget- ables and they won't eat soup, in fact, they don't seem to like anything but fish and chips and bread and jam,' ran one report in 1940, quoted in Annette Hope's London- ers' Larder. 'Almost all disliked fresh vegetables and fruit. Some children hardly knew how to eat with a knife and fork they were used to being given pennies to buy fish and chips or biscuits which they ate in the street, and preferred sitting on the doorstep to eating at table.'

In the 19th century, Michelle Berriedale- Johnson notes, there was also quite a bit of `eating on the hoof, because of shiftwork, and fast food in the shape of eels and pies bought from street stalls. The very poorest more or less existed on cups of tea. The laden table and the extended family meal was a bourgeois phenomenon. Middle class women hardly ate anywhere but at home until the 1880s, when they began to visit restaurants. 'Yet, if the large family meal was a middle-class ideal, it was something that most people aspired to.' The differ- ence is there is little widespread aspiration to the collective, table-set meal, as an everyday occurrence, and indeed some believe that the family meal was as much a form of unhappiness as cordiality.

Margaret Visser nonetheless believes that a 'structured' meal, around a dining- table, has an intellectual purpose. 'A meal is an artistic social construct, ordering the foodstuffs which comprise it into a complex dramatic whole, as a play organises actions and words into component parts such as acts, scenes, speeches, dialogues, entr- ances and exits, all in the sequences designed for them. However humble it may be, a meal has a definite plate, the intention of which is to intrigue, stimulate and satisfy.'

This writer's rules about sitting down to a meal spell out its disciplines, though these disciplines are so at odds with much common practice now; 'Because it is din- ner, those eating it will refrain from other pursuits while it is in progress. No one will knit, watch television or read a newspaper. The possibility of physical violence of any sort will not even cross anyone's mind; and neither will such rudeness as leaving the table before everyone has finished eating and all agree to rise. During the meal everyone will adhere to a code of be- havioural ethics called "table manners".'

There is a lady with her work cut out.