Until about 1985, "I've eaten well today" meant you'd had plenty, and it was said with satisfaction rather than an apology.
A second slice of beef arrived on your plate without you asking for it. A child who said he was still hungry got a dripping sandwich and nobody sighed. A visitor was fed before he was asked what he wanted and sent home with a plate under a tea towel. Being full was the point of the meal, and making sure somebody else was full was the whole of what hospitality meant in a house that had very little else to offer.
The phrase has turned over completely. "I've been good today" now means "I've eaten less." Eating well means a small plate of things successfully avoided, and the person who clears it is expected to look slightly ashamed.
That inversion has a date on it. The calorie became a moral unit in the eighties, when the advice to cut the fat arrived and the counting started, and from then on plenty and virtue were opposites. A woman who put a second slice on your plate in 1965 was looking after you. The same woman doing it in 1995 was undermining you.
What nobody involved understood is that the old kitchen had the mechanism right and the new one had it backwards.
A dinner built on meat and animal fat stops the body asking. The beef, the dripping, the milk pudding, all of it satisfies for hours, which is why a family could sit down at six, be full until morning, and never think about food in between. Plenty at the table produced restraint everywhere else without anybody trying.
The new plate does the reverse. Take the fat off, put the flour and the sugar on, and a person is hungry again by nine, and now the hunger is his fault, and the answer is to be better at ignoring it.
So a country that was fed and content became a country that is fed constantly and never satisfied, and it calls the second condition discipline.
Your grandmother never once said she had been good. She said you looked thin and put more on the plate, and she was closer to the science than anybody who has been to her since.
Mike
A second slice of beef arrived on your plate without you asking for it. A child who said he was still hungry got a dripping sandwich and nobody sighed. A visitor was fed before he was asked what he wanted and sent home with a plate under a tea towel. Being full was the point of the meal, and making sure somebody else was full was the whole of what hospitality meant in a house that had very little else to offer.
The phrase has turned over completely. "I've been good today" now means "I've eaten less." Eating well means a small plate of things successfully avoided, and the person who clears it is expected to look slightly ashamed.
That inversion has a date on it. The calorie became a moral unit in the eighties, when the advice to cut the fat arrived and the counting started, and from then on plenty and virtue were opposites. A woman who put a second slice on your plate in 1965 was looking after you. The same woman doing it in 1995 was undermining you.
What nobody involved understood is that the old kitchen had the mechanism right and the new one had it backwards.
A dinner built on meat and animal fat stops the body asking. The beef, the dripping, the milk pudding, all of it satisfies for hours, which is why a family could sit down at six, be full until morning, and never think about food in between. Plenty at the table produced restraint everywhere else without anybody trying.
The new plate does the reverse. Take the fat off, put the flour and the sugar on, and a person is hungry again by nine, and now the hunger is his fault, and the answer is to be better at ignoring it.
So a country that was fed and content became a country that is fed constantly and never satisfied, and it calls the second condition discipline.
Your grandmother never once said she had been good. She said you looked thin and put more on the plate, and she was closer to the science than anybody who has been to her since.
Mike
