Let’s take another look at eating together. This happy picture is not the norm for many people, who have lost the joyful habit of eating together, eating well.
The war in Ukraine showed how vulnerable our food supplies can be; perhaps this insight will help us to see how life can be difficult in places like Sudan, Yemen, or Syria, where long-term fighting and climate change can devastate crops by preventing sowing and harvest.
Meanwhile in Britain we see an endless procession of efforts to persuade people to eat better for their health’s sake. But there is a false god in the background: Mammon, or in modern English, Profit; profit for the big corporations that manufacture food products.
Manufactured food – ready meals, take-aways and precooked ingredients – deskill those who buy them and use them. If people lack confidence in preparing meals from scratch, that means more profit for the manufacturers.
This gives rise to something my relatives have reported in families across the UK, and I have witnessed with my own eyes: the loss of the family meal around a table. Children arrive at primary school never having learned to use a knife and fork. The grammar of table manners is lost to them; eating is not an event with rules and conventions. One mother I knew described meals in her house as ‘movable feasts’ but there was little festive in the way her teenagers ate as and when their hunger struck them, with scant regard for her or their younger siblings.
How can such people come to Christ’s table when they do not eat together? Let it be remembered that never did I visit without being offered a cup of tea and a biscuit …
agnellusmirror 