As we look into history, certainly I can see this from my own past, dinner time should always be a place where family gets together. Not for just the consumption of food, but to be a place where customs, manners, insight, and personality traits are passed from one generation to another.

But when we look closer at this social gathering, it occurs to me that dinner for American’s at least it seems, has become a place where we should learn to respect food and to enjoy the meal. I would understand it if the dinner table was a feeding trough where we all gathered around and the certain volume of food was expected to be consumed, period. But in fact this is not the case. Each person feels differently when it comes to how much food they want to consume. And this should be an ok choice that we all make. How many times I remember growing up and a plate of food was in front of me and it was expectation to finish it. I’m certainly not looking back in anger, but to gain perspective on how American culture nurtures the belief that proportions should be doled out as if one size fits all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why American’s are as obese as we currently are, we don’t respect the body’s natural desire to eat until it is full, instead of eat until the plate is clean. It seems that Americans do regard the “clean plate club” as sort of badge of honor, and I would ask that we all take a step back and consider for a moment what this means.

Biologically there is a natural desire to consume food where we can then store any excess away for later use. A million years ago perhaps this was necessary as the hunter/gatherer in all of us did not have the know-how or understanding and certainly the conveniences that we all have come accustom to in this day and age. If Neanderthal had a mega-mart down the hill, they too would have changed their biological need to store away food in quantities that ensured survival in periods where food was not bountiful.

To many, we still regard mealtime in the same survival ways, eat until we feel full. We then pass this message to our children to eat in the ways that we ourselves were taught how to eat, instead of yielding to common sense and new philosophies and allow our next generation to eat more sensibly and with other methods than what we may have been use to, or have done ourselves in the past. Instead of eating until your plate is clean, why not eat until you are 80% full? Part of me thinks that the reason we don’t do this is that we would regard children as being picky eaters, where they don’t take mealtime seriously and will then want food later on in the day when others are not hungry. But I argue that while this may be the case, isn’t it a better habit that they get into to eat in smaller portions, but more frequently in the day? I’ll caveat that by saying that this also assumes that children are not being filled with the foods that don’t fit into OKL.

Dinner time should be a time when ideas are shared and emotions are felt and experiences are exchanged. Food is a by-product of that interaction, but is instead a side-course instead of the main-course. If the meal takes you an hour, that should be preferable to a quick meal and then everyone goes off to do separate things. We all need to get away from the adage that the size of the plate is the portion that is suitable and look to what our own biology is telling us throughout the meal and listen to the Japanese saying Hara hachi bunme (eat until you are 80% full). Since we no longer have to worry about where the next meal is coming, it would seem that this is one instance where we fight the biological drivers to consume to store, and consume to be satisfied with new energy when we have depleted our existing energy stores. Remember if you eat more than you use, your body will either excrete it or store it–for most of us, the storing is the unpleasant bit and causes us long term issues.