I think this is a very well written piece by the FT’s food writer and restaurant critic Tim Hayward.
He starts with a quote from AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh:
“Although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”
Then he defines the essence of the article:
The moments before we eat are sacred, so how do we spend them?
The following are some of my favourite excerpts which I think summarise his feelings:
It began when servers in chain restaurants were given operating scripts for their tableside behaviour.
Soon the scripts developed to include sales messages, informing you of the specials […] that needed to be shifted that night.
“Have you eaten here before?” […] “let me explain our Concept”.
This is surely not the what to make a guest feel welcome, to invite them to eat, to begin a sensory and emotional transaction that you hope they will remember with pleasure.
Perhaps, pace Pooh, we still just don’t get how important these moments are.
I haven’t got a religious bone in my body but I envy those who say grace before a meal. I suffer no want, and I have no god to thank, but it doesn’t stop me from being grateful […] I never, for a second, lose touch with the joy of eating, so to give in, without marking the moment seems embarrassingly crass.
The UK today is populated by a barbarous, harried people who fear public expressions of emotion and seem to regard food as fuel. We have so much that our major problems are fair distribution and epidemic overindulgence. We have greater plenty than we’ve ever experienced, variety and quality undreamed of by our far more demonstratively grateful forebears.
He concludes with:
Perhaps that is the only answer: a simple pause. Perhaps that is the modern secular grace. In a world where we seemingly can’t take a moment away from our media “feeds”, maybe we should just stop, no matter how short a fragment of a second, to consider how fortunate we are to be fed.
I don’t think I have particularly good memory but one of the things I remember very well are certain meals with family and friends. I really cherish those moments.
My Excerpts 