Given the choice, would you rather eat dinner at a restaurant or in your own home? The data on American eating habits suggest that you are likely to opt for the restaurant.
Almost half of us adults eat out at least once a day, 44 percent as the National Restaurant Association measures it. Reportedly, we spend close to 50 percent of our food money on away-from-home eating.
As a rule, I much prefer to eat at home. But when did anyone ever accuse me of being normal?
My main gripe with restaurants in general is that they serve too much food. To my taste, it’s downright unappetizing to confront plates loaded with whatever.
Almost always, I would prefer half as much food for half─or even three-quarters─as much money. And yet, only one restaurant known to me features a menu giving a choice of larger or smaller portions.
Also, eating out is often an activity hazardous to our health. As the AARP Public Policy Institute warns, good nutrition becomes much more difficult when we buy meals or snacks outside.
And the same source urges us to avoid eating places that entice customers with rich dessert carts and all-you-can-eat specials. Preferring restaurants that offer fruit, salads, and other healthy foods, instead of opting for the nearest pizza or burger joint is better for us.
These initial thoughts may tempt you to indict me for nutritional perfectionism. Not guilty. I do stand for healthy eating habits, but pleasure in eating remains important to me.
Over-analyzing food robs diners of enjoyment. Focusing mainly on the nutritional effect of meals is a surefire way of depriving us of pleasure. This attitude can drive us into judging that whenever food tastes good it must be bad for us and vice versa.
Such a negative approach to eating can make us wish for the innocent days of our youth when we ate Spam or Franco-American spaghetti without giving a thought to their nutritional impact. Canned hash, slices of bread topped with butter and sugar, and thick frappes were other features in my young eating life.
But that was long before Americans worried about such things as fat.
Risking cultural elitism, let me cite as good eaters our old allies, the French. The recently published book “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” shares some reasons why one does not often see overweight women (and men) on the streets of Paris.
What makes the difference? “French women take pleasure in staying thin,” says the author Mireille Guiliano, “while American women see it as a conflict and obsess over it.” Both women and men in the United States have become obsessed with weight, much to the detriment of our enjoying food.
Weight will remain an important issue in the United States, however, as long as so many of us continue to eat large helpings of stuff that poses a threat to our health. For the senior generations among us, the stakes are higher: good eating habits can more easily make the difference between our physical/mental flourishing and eating-induced illness.
To help with eating well, in this time of nutritional high-mindedness, a few rules-of-thumb can help. To me, the single most important rule is not to eat too much of any one offering. This approach goes far to help us eat healthily and, I am persuaded, enjoyably.
At the risk of seeming merely precious, let me also propose the ideal of each major meal being an event. Like all ideals, it cannot always be achieved but it’s still worth aiming at.
One factor that makes it an event is not the food itself, but its presentation. The difference between serving dinner out of Styrofoam packages and dishing it out from china bowls may seem trivial, but it actually counts for a lot. People who appreciate food care about how it looks.
In the course of my work with elders, I remember meeting a retired single woman who lived alone: each evening she would lay out the tablecloth, light the candles, put on sweet music, and serve herself a well-cooked dinner. Her income was modest but she knew how to live.
If we have the luck to eat without feeling rushed, that too makes meals incomparably better experiences. Gulping food down in a hurry makes for neither good digestion nor feelings of contentment.
Meals that bring old and young together also strike me as highly desirable: the contemporary decline of family meals surely serves to impoverish the lives of Americans young and old.
Compressing morbidity, the phrase that the medical pros use to talk about reducing the time when we are sick at the end of our lives, can in large part result from smart eating.
A robust appetite for good food counts as one of life’s greatest gifts. If only we could eat more of what is good for us and do so in amounts suited to our best interests!
Richard Griffin