Amid the blizzard of diet cobblers that fills my inbox at this time of year, generally promising to cleanse you of all evidence that you ever ate anything at all, is one email that made me roll my eyeballs with such intensity I’m sure the neighbours could hear the grinding of flesh. It proposes “mindful eating”. A few ill-advised clicks later and I land on a self-styled food guru’s manifesto. “Have you ever noticed,” it starts, “how incredibly silent it becomes at dinner as soon as the food hits the table? Then you may have experienced mindful eating.”
Honestly, no. Not in my house. And long may that continue. According to our nutritional adviser too many of us eat semi-consciously. We are careless. We give no consideration to taste and texture. We are bad to the core. Part of the solution, apparently, is silence. This, she suggests, will help us towards mindful eating. It’s a new one on me. Ever the diligent reporter, I Google the term. Good God. There are more than two million references to it. Mindful eating is actually a thing.
Stop. I am determined to squash this notion under my weighty heel, before it gets any further. I greet the concept of mindful eating with one big fat raspberry. Let’s hear it for mindless eating: for noise and clamour at the table, for shouting and burping and crappy jokes that do not land and interruptions through half-emptied mouths; for raucous laughter and shouts of “more please” and “give me the recipe?” and “why in God’s name did you sleep with them?” Because a dining table wreathed in contemplative silence is a special kind of unmourned death.
The silent dining table is the domain of the long-married couple in the overambitious, underachieving restaurant of a country house hotel; the couple who scrape at their prissily garnished plates wordlessly, because they ran out of anything to say to each other 10 years ago, but can’t quite summon the will to divorce because of all the admin. It’s the suffocating family home where teenage children stare at their peas and dream of escape from the disappointed husks that are their parents. It’s the vainglorious food bloggers, those grim napkin sniffers, awarding every dish a score out of 20 so that all you can hear throughout the meal is the scratch of pencil on notepad.
I like lunch. And dinner. And breakfast. I’m a big fan of all these meals, and all the others in between. I care about ingredients and good cooking, and the effort put into these things by those feeding me. But I do not regard the table primarily as a place of nutrition. That’s just something which, happily, comes with the territory. It’s a place of joy, or should be. I grew up in a noisy, secular Jewish family and we were at our noisiest, the five of us, crowded around the table, fighting for attention. Making everybody else laugh was the goal. We communicated with each other through meals.
There’s a serious point here. Somewhere along the line certain people have taken it upon themselves to pathologise not just what we eat but how we eat. Curiously, quite a number of them talk of their own histories of eating disorders, now vanquished. They give the impression that they think this trauma makes them more relatable, which it may well do. We can all sympathise. But does it qualify them to tell us that something that wasn’t broken for the vast majority of us needs fixing? We don’t need help and certainly not this kind of help. We don’t need silence at the table. Mindful eating needs to be put in a metaphorical burlap sack and drowned in the canal. And that’s something about which I refuse to shut up.
