FOOD.
PERHAYS there never was a time when people who could eat as much as they liked ate as little as they do now. That, however, is not to say that they .think less about food than they did. The terrible scarcity of bread. in Eastern Europe keeps the question at. the. back of the public mind, and the consideration of the effect of food upon health is almost always under discussion. We weigh Manchester boys: against Essex boys and became quite .excited. Just lately the feeding of schoolboys has agitated the -whole educated world. From. the greatest headmaster to the most insignificant parent everyone has an. opinion on the matter. Those who cannot tell you what Dick, Tom. and Harry go through now, describe their own ex- periences in the past or the experience of their relations to the third and fourth generations. A good deal of human interest attaches to. the matter quite apart from its rights and wrongs. Temperament plays snob a large part in all the arguments. Many writers .of violent letters about .school dietaries seem more anxious. to get their money's worth than to feed their children. Again, more people than one would naturally have suspected of such an emotion appear to be moved by a retrospective jealousy. Why does the present generation want to be so much better off than they were ? They ate . horrid food without grumbling, and even went con- tentedly with too little, they say . and they seem to think that a reason for. underfeeding boys of to-day. Or, again,, they push away the 'evidence on both sides and philosophize upon- boy nature. The young,. they say, are not content. They look for pleasure—it is right that they . should—and if they ,do- not- get it they complain. The sort of dull acceptance of circumstances which are neither . painful nor delightful is for later life. Plain meals do not please ; all the same they nourish. Few take the side -of. the schoolmaster quite . frankly. Schoolmasters are wonderfully well able to take care of themselves, so it does not matter. Still they have a side. To satisfy thirty or forty different tastes is a very different thing from pleasing four. or five. The mother of a family may feel it easy.to feed her children well, but it has to be-remembered .that,her.teet of seeress, is,as: a rule, appetite. !If a sufficient quantity disappears and the children look well she does not, worry. When they ,go to school she listens _to grum- .bling which:she:certainly discounts at home. Again, the ...conservatism of . children is much more marked when they are massed together. They must have variety, because no one could eat even their favourite dish always. On the , other hand, while it is possible to persuade : children at home, with the example of . grown-up people. before them, to try something strange ',whose name and appearance is :quite new to :them, it is not, possible: te.:get a: number together to venture so ;lar.,, or. at any. rate it is not possible to overcome the.natural prejualiee-which .assures. them. that the new, dish- is either ; nasty , or . unwholesome or served up on the ground of „economy-only. :. Economy may be a virtue in: parents, at any rate it is just conceivable that it is a necessity ; but in a schoolmaster it is obviously a vice. At one timea theory grew up among the ultra-cultivated !that food was an .uninteresting subject not to be talked of among those who knew how to talk at all. It was a silly convention, and the people who invented it were very heavy eaters. It belonged to the time—a short time— when all domestic work was utterly eschewed. Perhaps it derived partly from a strong reaction against Dickens, who had always a dinner-table on the stage, so to speak, and a description of what was on it. Talk about food was apt to lead to subjects destructive of household peace ; that was another reason against it. Specially was this true when upper middle class life was weighed down with servants. Discussion of the delin- quencies of servants is without doubt the dullest of all topics, and the Victorians very naturally tried hard to keep that topic under. The advent of the restaurant destroyed all necessary connexion between meals and maids and served to popularize culinary conversation. We do not say very much now about plain living and " high thinking. It is a very tiresome phrase, a piece of moralization of which we are sick. As a matter of fact we do live more plainly than we did in one sense. Think of the long dinner which the well-to-do man ate every day and of the wine he drank. On the other hand, if we take single items of ordinary fare how very much better they are now than they used to be. Perhaps because we talk of them more. No one now gives their children the horrible rice and tapioca puddings we all ate when we were young. solid rice which had no connexion in e, child's mind with milk at all, and sago in different-sized gluelike lumps which anyone would nowadays " send back " in the humblest bunshop. There, of course, we can grumble with no fears of upsetting our household or receiving the cook's warning in the morning. But if ordinary cooking is better than it was, if we are in a fair way to become- more like. the French in our habits of eating, regarding it as an open object of interest and the preparation of food as an art, we do yet live far more simply than we did. What about " high thinking " ? Here it is not nearly- so easy to maintain that there has been an improvement. "High " talk, at any rate, is less common than it was. The relation of talk to thinking is very hard to trace, at-any rate in a social sense, but short meals do not make for good conversation. It stands to reason that this must be the case. It is only at meals that any group of people lay aside all their occu-' pations, the only time when they deliberately refrain from working or amusing themselves. When people have finished their dinners they tend either :deliberately to plan or seek entertainment or to " go on with what they were doing " before the bell rang. Very often each member of the -household sits down to read ; at any rate there is no necessity to talk. We have wearied of the unspontaneous expression of " high thinking " once set before us as an ideal, and also, of course, we do- desire definite amusement far more than we did. Again, " snatched " meals and " meals out," apart from any form of festivity, though not the rule, are known to everyone. We do not look upon conversation as a necessary accompaniment of eating as those who made any sort of art of life did at one time. Perhaps before long it will not only be at breakfast that it is permissible to read. Will it over be the fashion, one wonders, to provide reading for one's guests at dinner I Not, we mean, forthe guests of an evening, but for visitors staying in the house. A bookshelf on the table would be a great innovation, but we live in times of quick change. If the " paying guest " craze goes much further, we cannot help thinking that the plan will be' tried. One always imagines that the medittevalcastom of reading aloud at meals was intended to stop. conversation. No doubt in simpler times when tongues were rough and blows ready, gossip and quarrelling at dinner were more anxiously avoided than they are now. At the same time all sorts of conditions of people sitting together in a castle hall or even in a 'monastery must often have been much bored by each other, and the -effort to " keep going " —however amiable the company—socially must have been very great. Of course not everyone could be interested in the book, but at least it served as a screen behind which everyone could take refuge from effort and i eat his dinner in peace. Food lay then as it lies now—right at the foundation of social life and of hos- pitality. We can never dislodge it from its central place however refined we become. How far it is to be coupled with the formal interchange of ideas is a question which varies with times and conditions. We are inclined to believe that " high thinking " at mealtimes depends very largely upon what we may call " classification." If circumstances decree that society should be more " mixed " than it was, and all sorts of people must eat together who did not choose one another, it will be either silly or stilted. Cooking will get better and better and conversation worse and worse, till once more birds of a feather flock exclusively together again. Then they will want time to talk, will eat more, and being rather ashamed of such self-indulgence -will agree not to talk about eating.
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