Grazing Overtakes Eating

“Three squares.” Even today, people can recognize this as identifying three wholesome meals following a pattern of eating in the morning, at midday and in the evening.  

The expression was first used in the 1860s.  The expression’s frequency peaked in 1920. It has been in decline ever since.  This makes sense since much of the 20th century was guided by ideals that tended to diminish the ritualistic pattern of three daily breaks for food. Certain values tended to fade away: personal interaction, tradition, sociability, leisure. They were replaced by values more conducive to a consumer society: efficiency, convenience, expediency. A recent survey laid out the results: fewer and fewer people follow the three-meals-a-day pattern.

The new way of eating was parodied in David Lodge’s Novel  Paradise News. The main character, a quiet British guy is visiting Hawaii.  What strikes him immediately is how everyone is carrying around food and snacking.  This isn’t eating, he thinks. It’s more like “grazing.” Twentieth-century folks might comment: Why not? Efficiency, convenience and expediency provide our guiding ideals.  Grazing, not having to bother with the inconvenience, time-intensive, cumbersome practice of sitting down to a meal is just how we live out our ideals. It’s also liberating.  Limits, restrictions,

constraints are bad. It is always good to break free of the heavy-handed, tyrannical, burdensome hold they have upon us. Grazing is a liberatory act. No one is telling us when it is ok to eat and when it is not.  

The centrality of efficiency and convenience indicate an important shift in our self-understanding.  Today, that understanding, in the advanced technological west at least, is highly individualistic, inclined toward iconoclasm, caught in a wild pendulum swing between sensualism and asceticism, and fascinated with authenticity.  What all of this means is that some traditional markers of the human condition are pushed to the periphery: the importance of community,

recognition of how inherited traditions are bearers of wisdom, a sense of incarnation which aims at a spiritual/sensual harmonization, and a commitment to goodness that defines it as more than immediate gratification of whatever aspirations happen to float through our beings.  The complex of conditions identifying our contemporary situation also plays itself out in practical nutritional terms. We know those well, especially obesity as a public health issue.

It’s quite possible that those who embrace convenience and efficiency, who reject the pattern of “three squares,” think of themselves as  emancipated from the tyranny of being forced into a particular pattern. They can envision themselves as being more free than those who continue to be constrained by the culturally approved pattern. Their days are defined by doing what they want , when they want, not by an externally imposed schema.

This sounds fine...until we start thinking about it.  Plato, a long time ago, had noticed a problem.

Those who say: “I do what I want whenever I want” are actually the least free of individuals. Yes,  counterintuitive as it may seem, this was Plato’s point. Such people are prisoners of their immediate impulses. They are controlled by every and any immediate inclination that courses through them.  They have little effective freedom, that is, the ability to chart a course, say engage in healthy eating, and actually achieve the envisioned outcome.

Even time, for them is, oppressive. For the patterned eater, the day is divided into spans, some for engaging in projects, some for shared time eating with friends and colleagues. Time is not separated from ongoing events. It is, in fact, marked by such events: work time, lunchtime. The day is parcelled out via the quality of ongoing events.  Time is not just a neutral ticking away of seconds. When people used to talk about “high noon” they

meant a particular portion of the day, the one in which the sun was at its highest point. Time and ongoing events were inseparable. Golf, tennis and baseball still embody this notion of time.

When abstract time, i.e. clock time completely separated from actual events, dominates, then the temptation for giving into immediate inclinations or impulses is harder to resist.  Every moment is potentially eating time. Grazing then makes sense. What also makes sense is indulging in fast food and processed food, the kind of edibles most congenial to grazing.

Skipping the “three squares” (or however else patterned eating has been parcelled out) has little to do with liberation from constraints.  It actually adds a new level of oppression: being imprisoned by immediate impulses and inclinations.