In Portugal (as well as in Argentina and France) the day is, in many ways, structured around fixed meal times. Food is important. It takes precedence. Lunch is most often a hot, sit-down meal, eaten at a table with proper cutlery and crockery, with colleagues/friends/family. Dinner is the same. Lunch is very much a fixed time and no-one would ever dream of scheduling something at that time, unless it was absolutely essential.
In contrast, in the UK, eating is often seen as a hassle and an inconvenience, something to fit around the rest of your day. There is a tendency to "just grab something quick" and so the nutritional not to mention social significance of food and meal times is dismissed and eroded. When someone is passionate about food, interested in cooking and eats three proper meals a day (as I did in the UK and continue to do) it is often seen as being greedy. Eating two hot meals a day is seen as excessive despite the fact that in Mediterranean countries, which have an extremely healthy diet and lifestyle compared to countries in the Anglosphere, this is commonplace. In Portugal I eat a very small breakfast, a two course lunch (soup and a hot meal) and a cooked, hot dinner. I almost never snack. Occasionally people have a drink and small snack late afternoon in Portugal (5-6PM). I only really eat this meal if I am going to a class afterwards and won't eat dinner until later than usual. Breakfast is approximately 9am, lunch 1pm and dinner around 8.30pm. When I eat each meal I am hungry and ready to sit down and eat. And I always eat at a table. I am providing this information, not to highlight anything particularly interesting about my eating habits, but to demonstrate the Southern-European/Mediterranean meal structure, which most people in Portugal follow. In contrast, in the UK, people eat a larger breakfast, snack frequently (tea and elevenses), disregard lunch, often eating nothing more than a pre-prepared sandwich and some other form of snack food and only eating one cooked meal a day, and even this meal is frequently not eaten at a table. People also use the excuse of tea breaks to eat biscuits and other snack foods.
From a nutritional perspective this approach is clearly less healthy than, for example, the way the Portuguese or French people tend to eat. Eating foods such as cheese, or other foods perceived to be unhealthy/high in calories, in the UK is often scorned and ridiculed. And yet, many people eat a large amount of processed foods (which contain extremely high levels of salt, saturated fat and preservatives). I also found in the UK that people are very badly informed about nutrition, listening to tidbits of information from the media and the government and forming a zealous but misinformed opinion of diet and nutrition. An example is the "5 a day" campaign which many people in the UK have completely misinterpreted, believing that all the need to do to ensure optimal health (disregarding the rest of their diet and lifestyle) is to consume 5 pieces of fruit and vegetables each day. In my opinion the government and media should educate people about cookery, food, ingredients and meals, rather than preaching overly simplistic slogans.
Mireille Guiliano, author of French Women Don't Get Fat mentions the same issues I have addressed in comparing the Anglo-saxon (US) diet to the continental western European (French) diet.
Guiliano explains the key factors to the French woman's ability to stay slim as:
- Smaller portion sizes
- Savoring food to increase the feeling of satisfaction, choosing a small amount of high quality food rather than larger amounts of low quality food
- Eating 3 meals a day and not snacking
- Taking in plenty of liquid such as water, herbal tea and soup
- Sitting down and eating mindfully (no multitasking and eating while standing up, watching TV, or reading)
- Emphasizing freshness, variety, balance, and, above all, pleasure
This is precisely what I would argue the issue is. Food should be savoured and respected. It should be given time, both in terms of choosing ingredients and recipes, cooking and eating. This simple shift in attitude results in significant health benefits as well as social benefits. Pleasure, in eating, is not wrong. Food should be enjoyed and meals should be social occasions. People should have set meal times and not just graze and snack all day, paying attention only to their stomach. Food is more than that.
Studies on the Southern European Atlantic Diet, the traditional diet of northern Portugal and Galicia, have shown that the diet reduces the risk of heart disease. In stark contrast, studies have shown the almost 2 million people are malnourished in the UK, despite having almost unlimited access to food. Obesity is also a major, growing issue as it is in the US.
"Experts say the poor state of the average British diet — often high in fat, salt and calories, but low on nutrition — means malnutrition is a problem even though food is plentiful....doctors say they are seeing patients who are both overweight and malnourished. According to government statistics, 75 percent of Britons are overweight; more than one-fifth are obese."
Another outcome of this phenomenon of shunning mealtimes and eating meals with family/friends/colleagues is the stunted development of social skills. Children therefore don't learn to cook, which is an essential skill in life and they also don't have the chance to develop their conversation skills and to learn about social interaction. I would also argue that the lack of emphasis on meal times is one of the major causes of the unhealthy relationship many British people have with alcohol. Wine is not commonly consumed with meals and alcohol in general is reserved for social occasions, creating a link, from an early age between socialising and alcohol and not between socialising and food. Again, in stark contrast, the Southern European countries consume wine regularly and moderately, with meals and in front of their children. Alcohol consumption is not perceived as something to be hidden or something which one only does to become inebriated. As Hadley Freeman so eloquently puts it:
"socialising [in the UK] is so shrouded in bashful anxiety that it is taken as a given that real friendships are forged only under the forgiving umbrella of mutual inebriation"
Because children and young people don't gain valuable social interaction skills at the dinner table, with their family and friends and don't learn about relationships and conversation in this environment they are more anxious and withdrawn, in socialising. Additionally, because they aren't provided with examples of healthy (and health-enhancing) consumption of alcohol from an early age, they see alcohol as a way to rebel and to enjoy themselves, rather than as an integral part of the enjoyable experience of having a meal and socialising in that way.A night out in the UK is so often a euphemism for binge drinking, which is not at all the case in the other countries I have lived in, particularly in Argentina and Portugal. Alcohol abuse, in my opinion, has nothing to do with the price of drinks sold by supermarkets and bars and everything to do with cultural and social attitudes towards binge drinking and intoxication. Case in point; alcohol is much, much cheaper in Portugal than it is in the UK and yet binge drinking is almost unheard of here and yet it is an enormous social, health and financial issue in the UK. The British government likes to use retailers/bars as scapegoats because it is much easier to blame them for selling alcohol cheaply and in this way forcing grown adults with free will to spend their money on absurd amount of alcohol (which is what the government/media likes to make out that they are doing!) than to admit that this is a severe underlying social and cultural issue. Contrast this attitude, from a statement made by a minister in the Northern Irish Executive, a country in which there is a severe issue with alcohol abuse, with the attitude prevalent in France, where alcohol is cheap and where children see it, in their homes, on their table day after day and where, despite this (or because of it!!!) there is an infinitely healthier relationship with alcohol:
“Alcohol advertising on television should also be banned before 9pm. Our health messages cannot compete with the vast sums being spent on advertising by the drinks industry. I will therefore work with my colleagues across the UK to ensure that existing legislation on alcohol advertising is rigorously enforced. I will be raising the issue of a watershed for alcohol advertising.”
Binge drinking can only be tackled by addressing attitudes, not by hiding alcohol and pretending the issue will go away. And that starts with food, mealtimes and the very concept of socialising. To put it simply, binge drinking (in public) is socially acceptable in the UK and is not elsewhere. The government needs to look at why that is.
Jo Daykin, Northern Ireland Drugs and Alcohol Strategy Coordinator, said binge drinking had become increasingly "normalised".
"It is a sobering reality that if Northern Ireland's binge drinking culture continues it could result in a generation's health being lost to alcohol misuse," she said.
I recently came across an article which contained the following statistics, which for me, sum up my experience in the UK:
"Eighty percent of British children have televisions in their bedrooms, more than have their biological fathers at home. Fifty-eight percent of British children eat their evening meal in front of the television (a British child spends more than five hours per day watching a screen); 36 percent never eat any meals together with other family members; and 34 percent of households do not even own dining tables. In the prison where I once worked, I discovered that many inmates had never eaten at a table together with someone else.
Let me speculate briefly on the implications of these startling facts. They mean that children never learn, from a sense of social obligation, to eat when not hungry, or not to eat when they are. Appetite is all they need consult in deciding whether to eat—a purely egotistical outlook. Hence anything that interferes with the satisfaction of appetite will seem oppressive. They do not learn such elementary social practices as sharing or letting others go first. Since mealtimes are usually when families get to converse, the children do not learn the art of conversation, either; listening to what others say becomes a challenge."
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