from Whole Foods email about Whole Green Blog
Several of us have been having issues with fruit flies in our kitchens, so we were thrilled to read Shannon's tip on our Whole Green Blog:
"I find that flies and fruit flies can be quite the nuisance in the summer. (Especially in a house with no screens!) Cider vinegar and/or red wine are sure fire fruit fly traps. Use any sort of container with a small opening. The flies can get in, but not out. Keep the container in the kitchen and change daily. To keep away regular flies, keep a few potted basil plants around in your kitchen. It will keep the flies away as well as give you delicious fresh herbs all year long."
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Fwd: Slow Food
Slowing Down
from http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/hungrymind/slowingdown.html
When did you last take the time to truly enjoy a meal? To savor the flavors individually or in concert with a well chosen wine? Perhaps linger over dessert and a final sip of sauterne with friends or family, fully immersed in — and aware of — the pleasure that is food and its partaking?
When did you last contemplate the food before you? Its origins, its history, its journey to you and the people responsible for growing it or raising it or crafting it?
For most of us, the answer is probably "a long time" or even "I can't remember." Some of you may even answer "never." But each day, there are more people who can say "last week" or "yesterday" or even "everyday." These are the folks who have discovered and embraced the concept of Slow Food.
It is an idea whose time has come. Slow Food is the antithesis of "fast food" and "fast life," products of a society in which speed is worshipped at pleasure's expense. It is an attempt to instill a measure of gastronomic composure and reflection into a world obsessed with haste. Its genesis was inevitable in an era when factory farms are replacing artisans, artificial flavors are replacing natural ones, and fads rule.
Slow Food, both the term and the idea, is now embodied in an international organization active in 100 countries. It emerged from a 1986 protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant near Rome's famed Spanish Steps. Wielding bowls of penne pasta, Carlo Petrini, the founding father of Slow Food, and his associates, stormed the golden arches and a revolutionary movement was born.
It's a movement with a soul, one that cares deeply about food artisans and their methods, preserving those unique flavors and gastronomic experiences that are disappearing beneath the twin juggernauts of corporate agriculture and mindless bureaucracy. By promoting the pleasures that can be found only in food, Slow Food has alerted many to the value of locally grown food, to food that tastes good, to food that is pure and from which farmers and artisans can make a living.
Slow Food is not about haute cuisine, painstaking preparation, culinary elitism or ostentatious consumption. The opposite is true. It is about peasant food, the unabashed celebration of simple meals and unadulterated flavors from a time when such things mattered. It's also about knowledge and education — knowing about the food we eat and where it comes from and teaching children and adults that there are gastronomic choices they can make that will give them pleasure, improve their health, and help the environment by promoting biodiversity, animal welfare and responsible agriculture.
Slow down. Take those few extra seconds to smell the wine's bouquet, or the perfume of those flowers on the table. Revel in the odors and activities of the kitchen. Enjoy the flavors on your plate and bask in the conviviality and love around your table.
Be curious. Seek out local food artisans. Ask questions about the food you buy. Insist on purity. Educate yourself about the food you need to fuel your life. But most of all, rediscover the sheer joy of eating. Alice Waters was correct when she wrote: "Slow food can teach us the things that really matter — compassion, beauty, community, and sensuality — all the best that humans are capable of."
Bon appétit!
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
MySpace vs. Workplace
MySpace vs. Workplace
During the day you're all business; at night you like to let loose and have some fun. No problem with that -- unless you share your adventures with others on the Internet.
At 35, Eva Montibello is not exactly ancient, and she considers herself reasonably Internet-savvy. Still, it never would have occurred to her to scrutinize a MySpace page the way she would, say, a resume.
When she did so, she found it an eye-opening -- and eye-widening -- experience.
Montibello, the marketing manager at a Newton-based consulting firm, was screening job candidates last year when an application came in from a recent college graduate. As she prepared to set up an interview with the applicant, one of her younger co - workers asked a fateful question: "Did you check out her MySpace page?"
Montibello did so, and there on the applicant's public profile she found what she calls "all kinds of compromising photos," including one of her applicant Jell-O -wrestling. Still, that "wasn't necessarily an issue" to Montibello or her boss. "The real issue came when my boss was interviewing her and mentioned it, and the person was like 'Oh, yeah, it was so funny,' and was so cavalier about it, instead of being responsible," she says.
They ultimately hired someone else. The applicant's blase reaction to questions about her MySpace photos "wasn't the deal - breaker, but it was a factor," says Montibello. "We had another candidate who was equally qualified, and who showed up at the interview and was professional all the way. When you're comparing two or three people, everything matters."
Like it or not -- and many employees emphatically do not -- social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are creating an increasingly murky workplace terrain.
What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens on MySpace can make it into the wider world, whether it is office gossip, racy photographs, or first-person accounts of weekend revelry. Conversations -- about work, about bosses, about co - workers -- that used to take place at water coolers or on barstools now potentially have a much larger audience. With one high-speed collision after another between MySpace and the workplace, the personal and the professional are converging in new and unpredictable ways.
Yet there is no consensus on where the line should be -- or even if there should be a line.
"Whatever I do outside or after work shouldn't be brought up against my work review," contends Lydia Fabiano, 23, of Braintree, who has a MySpace page she allows co - workers to see. "Just about every person has their own thing that they do outside of work. As long as it doesn't hinder your work performance, it should be two separate things. Whatever I do at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night shouldn't matter at all to my boss."
However, employers don't necessarily see it that way. The clash between the interests of employers and the private lives of employees has been on vivid display recently.
The Defense Department, citing concerns about too much "recreational traffic" on MySpace and a dozen other websites, announced that it was cutting off access to the sites by military personnel. A supervisor in an Olive Garden restaurant in Florida was fired after she posted photos or herself, her daughter, and other restaurant employees hoisting empty beer bottles. (The restaurant contended the photos could damage the company's brand). A university in Pennsylvania, contending she had promoted underage drinking, denied a 27-year-old woman a teaching degree just before graduation after she posted a photo of herself that was titled "Drunken Pirate."
She filed a lawsuit against the university, but Harvey Schwartz, a Boston attorney who specializes in civil rights and employment discrimination, says that in general, he doesn't think sites like MySpace will be considered private from a legal standpoint. "I don't really see it as much of a legal issue," says Schwartz, of Rodgers, Powers & Schwartz. "If you're putting something up on the Internet, anybody can read it. I don't think you should complain if somebody reads it who you hadn't planned on reading it.
"This is something that people are going to be learning. It's a new area," he adds . "It's just like when e - mail first happened. People were wild and crazy with what they said on e - mails, and it came back to bite them. People are going to learn the same thing about MySpace."
On the most basic level, employers worry about lost productivity. Lynda Slevoski , vice president of Associated Industries of Massachusetts , says she hears increasing complaints from employers about employees dawdling on MySpace during company time. "Because you can do so many things on MySpace -- you can get e-mail, you can do chat groups, you can have a virtual baby shower -- there are more ways for an employee to be sidetracked at work to do all this stuff," Slevoski says. "At some companies, people are spending more than half their time on MySpace, as opposed to working. And they're utilizing company equipment."
Employees, meanwhile, have their own set of concerns. Some wonder whether employers are using MySpace profiles to violate the privacy of employees or applicants and obtain personal information to which they are not entitled. Warren Agin, a Boston attorney who specializes in Internet law, says employers would run afoul of antidiscrimination laws if they use a MySpace page to learn, say, that a job applicant is gay, and decide not hire him or her on that basis.
"There are many aspects of MySpace profiles that are not legal on job applications," notes Jody Kordana, an administrative assistant at Pittsfield Community Television . "Say a woman goes for a job interview, and she passes the standard recruitment process, and someone goes to her MySpace page and discovers she's a single mother or she had stated something about her difficulties in finding good child care." That, Kordana says, could lead some employers to unfairly conclude "she might not be reliable."
"MySpace is a social site. The whole idea is to make some friends, or to have old friends find you, on a social level," says Kordana, 34, who also works as an actress. "And we should be completely free to do that. But on a professional level, we're having to censor ourselves from potential future employers. How much control do we want the companies to have over our private lives? If you are proving yourself in the workplace and you are not putting the image of your employer at risk, I feel that your private life is yours."
While the issue sorts itself out, there will continue to be episodes that illustrate how MySpace has complicated the relationship not just between employers and employees, but among employees as well.
Take the case of Dana Schaeffer of Burlington. When she started a new job a year ago, Schaeffer, now 42, required training from two co - workers who were in their 20s. At home one night about two weeks after she started the job, she was on her own MySpace page when, she recalls, she thought to herself: "Hmm, I wonder in anybody in my office has it. They seem like a pretty techno-savvy place." So she typed in the name of one co - worker, checked out his MySpace page, then typed in the name of another, and went to that page . . . and was stopped cold. There was a vituperative message about her, directed to a co - worker. She went to that person's page, and found an even more vicious reply to the original message.
It was devastating for Schaeffer. "They went back and forth on how much they couldn't stand working with me," she says. "I was absolutely, absolutely horrified. It was very hurtful."
She said nothing to her co - workers, and still hasn't. But in hindsight, Schaeffer has figured out what she should have said to them -- and they are words that could stand as a mantra for the modern workplace: "I have a MySpace page, and I know you do too."
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com. 
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Amgen sponsored the Tour of California
Didn't the Fat Cyclist suggest something like this on his blog? I think he wrote (facetiously) that drug makers should sponsor racing teams to show how well their drugs worked.
--Phillip
from http://www.boston.com/sports/other_sports/cycling/articles/2007/05/24/long_road_ahead/?page=3
Cycling and doping have become so linked in recent years that Amgen , which invented the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO) frequently abused by riders, decided to sponsor the Tour of California as a way of stressing EPO's benefits for people suffering from anemia.
"We're using this as a platform to educate the public," said Mary Klem , spokeswoman for the California-based firm, which insisted that the race's athletes be tested for EPO, which is banned in Olympic sports. "Our mission is to serve patients. Our medicines are vital to people with serious illnesses."
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Chinese tea thermos
I found a store that supposedly sells a double-walled tea thermos like we saw people using in China. But it doesn't say how to order one. Notice in the picture that the tea is of the better quailty leaves and includes goji berrires and a chrysanthemum flower.
--Phillip
--Phillip
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Saturday, May 12, 2007
Want to Do Something Nice for Susan? Send her a Card
Want to Do Something Nice for Susan? Send her a Card
http://www.fatcyclist.com/May 11th, 2007
First off, credit where credit's due. This was not my idea (though I like it a lot). This is something a bunch of people came up with on the Forum. Basically, a lot of you have wondered what — in addition to (or instead of) buying a Special "Pink Lemonade" edition of the jersey — could you do to let Susan know you're pulling for her.
Well, how about sending her a card? You know, just something nice telling her you're praying / thinking about / hoping the best for her. Send it to this address:
Susan Nelson
c/o D.R.
P.O. Box 1104
American Fork, Utah, 84003
This Post Will Self-Destruct in 8 Hours
Here's the plan. As soon as I post this, I'm disabling Internet access here for the day, so she won't see this post.
At the end of the workday today, I will delete this post, and Al's awesome / awesomely lengthy post will resume being the most current post. So if you plan to send a card but can't do it right away, you'd better right down / print this address.
She'll never expect we're going to surprise her with a bunch (Dozens? Hundreds? Depends on you) of cards.
Botched will collect the cards at the PO Box above (he set it up specially for this — thanks, Botched!) and then bring them over.
Everyone, thanks again for being such an incredible group of friends.
PS: I now have in my hands a giant box with 300 Banjo Brothers Pocket Messenger Bags. I understand that today Matisse & Jacks is sending me a package with 100 boxes of Bake-at-Home Energy Bars. Now all I need is for the jerseys (the original ones, not the pink ones, which we haven't even finished designing) to arrive. Twin Six says that they ought to arrive before the end of this month. I'll send 'em as soon as I get 'em!
Thursday, May 10, 2007
The Fascinating History of Dinner Time
The Fascinating History of Dinner Time
from http://v.mercola.com/blogs/public_blog/The-Fascinating-History-of-Dinner-Time-11823.aspx
This interesting article from History Magazine explores the evolution of meals from medieval to modern times.
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from http://www.history-magazine.com/dinner2.html
What Time is Dinner?
Sherrie McMillan looks at the evolution of mealtimes.
TODAY WE DON'T always agree on the names and times of our meals. Some of us have dinner at eight, while others have supper at five. It wasn't always that way.
The names of meals and their general times were once quite standard. Everyone in medieval England knew that you ate breakfast first thing in the morning, dinner in the middle of the day, and supper not long before you went to bed, around sundown. The modern confusion arose from changing social customs and classes, political and economic developments, and even from technological innovations.
Despite our stereotypes of big English breakfasts of sausages, kippers (sardines), toast, tomatoes, etc., big breakfasts weren't really common until the Victorian age. Breakfast before the 1800s was usually just toast or some variation of gruel or porridge, except when a lavish spread was offered to impress guests. The main meal of the day was dinner.
In the Middle Ages, great nobles ate the most formal dinner, around noon or one p.m. Their dinner was more than a meal; it was an ostentatious display, a statement of wealth and power, with dozens of servants attending in a ritualized performance. Cooking for this grand, daily show began hours in advance, and the preparations for presentation began at 10 or 11 a.m. The meal might take hours, and be eaten in the most formal and elaborately decorated chambers. Lesser nobles, knights and manor holders ate a far less formal dinner, but at the same time of day.
Middle-class tradesmen and merchants, however, had to eat a little later. Their day was bounded by work, not by feudal rituals. They couldn't leave their shops to see to their own dinners until clients and customers had gone off to their own. So merchants and traders would eat at one or two in the afternoon, and then hurry back to meet the afternoon customers. The middle-class dinner might be served by one or two servants and consisted of bread, soups, pies, and perhaps meats and fish. The dishes varied with the season, and from country to country.
Peasants broke off after six or seven hours of work in the morning to have dinner around noon. This was their main meal too, consisting of bread or porridge, peas or beans, perhaps with some cabbage, turnip or onions thrown in. Sometimes they had meat, fish, cheese or whey (a byproduct of cheese-making). Their meal was much like that of the middle class except there was usually less to eat, and little variety. They ate far more at dinner than at breakfast or supper.
Today many people find it strange that the biggest meal of the day once centered around noon, but it made great sense at the time. Artificial lighting such as oil lamps and candles were expensive, and provided weak illumination at best. So people went to sleep at sundown, because it's difficult to work and eat in the dark. The last meal of the day was a rushed affair, a quick snack before the lights (the sun) went out. The only exceptions were those who had to work at night, and the extremely wealthy and powerful people at royal courts. The wealthiest courts, like those of France and Burgundy might stay up after sunset, their grandly decorated halls illuminated by thousands of candles or torches. But they were unusual; most medieval people never witnessed such spectacles.
Traders and merchants, who sometimes had to stay in the shop to handle the last daylight stragglers amongst their customers, might close shop at dusk and spend the last hour or two of their day in candlelight or firelight. But they made it to bed as quickly as they could, to rise early the next day and open up their shops again. Only the extremely wealthy had candles to burn and could waste daylight hours sleeping in late. So supper, the third and last meal of the day, was usually eaten before the sun went down, or very shortly afterward.
The English knew the last meal of the day as supper, and it was a light repast, usually made of cold leftovers from dinner. People generally went to sleep soon after eating it, and did not like to go to bed on a full stomach any more than modern people do.
Most nobles and manor lords ate supper between four and six p.m. They might have entertainment afterward, unlike the lower classes, but even nobles usually went to bed before too many hours had passed. Peasants might have just the last of the day's bread for supper, eaten at sundown. Then they went to sleep, to be up and working with the sunrise.
And that was the standard schedule for centuries. There were some exceptions, of course. People at the wealthiest courts might stay up after dark, as already mentioned. They had plenty of money for things like candles and rush lights, and were used to the world revolving around their schedules, rather than the other way around. A king or a lord who was passionate enough about his pursuits to put off eating for hours while hunting would make his retainers and family wait too.
Some groups, like Parliament in England might meet in the morning and work until late afternoon, without a break. They would go to their homes for dinner at four or five or even six p.m. Their families generally had to wait for them. Supper would then be pushed ahead until eight or ten o'clock, or not eaten at all. Supper was considered an optional meal by the English, who often stuffed themselves so full at dinner that they could not eat again until the next day. Who today would think of skipping the last meal of the day? We are far more likely to skip the first or the second.
So these established meals were sometimes shifted around or delayed due to work, or simply due to the fact that the sun set earlier in autumn, thus supper was earlier. These factors could lead to a lengthy wait between meals.
From the Middle Ages to the age of Shakespeare, there are scattered references to occasional extra meals, called luncheon and nuntion or nuncheon. Nuntion was eaten between dinner and supper, and peasants were sometimes guaranteed nuntions of ale and bread on those days they worked harvesting the fields in the lengthy days of late summer and autumn, when sunset and supper came many hours after noon and dinner. Luncheon seems to have been eaten between breakfast and dinner, when dinner was delayed. Luncheon was taken mainly by ladies and was not a large meal. It was more of a snack on those days when they had to wait for a late dinner due to the political or sporting affairs of their husbands.
These late dinners became more and more common in the 1700s, due to new developments in culture and technology.
Dinner at Five
Capitalism, colonialism, and then the industrial revolution were changing the world's economy. The tumultuous wars and revolutions of the 1600s had been part of a shift in power. Nobles were losing their status as independent powers as kings and central governments took more power for themselves. Fewer and fewer nobles were playing really strong roles in government. As new professional classes of politicians, diplomats and citizen armies began to occupy many of the roles nobles used to fill, nobles had more time to play. And with all the economic changes that were occurring, many people had a lot more money to spend.
These developments and others, such as the enclosures of the 1700s, the end in England at least of the devastating wars of the 1600s, the lessening of plagues, and also the fact that nobles had been brought under control by the kings of England and France led to more settled conditions, as nobles were no longer conducting their personal and local wars.
The nobility and gentry became a class of leisure and began to spend more time in the cities, where they had parties and entertainment night after night. They had, or at least most of them had, no more work to do.
The middle class grew at the same time, due to growth in mercantilism, trade, crafts and manufacturing. This growth also took place in cities. Rising wages led to more purchasing of goods, and the cycle continued.
People had more money, and in the cities at least, more goods were available, including candles and lamps. People began staying up later with the better lighting, and many of them didn't have to get up so early in the morning anymore. There was also more to do at night. The 1700s were a time of entertainment as well as enlightenment. Theaters and operas were suddenly available on a wider scale in cities like London and Paris, with most performances at night. In Shakespeare's time they had usually been in the day, in sunlight. Now they were in enclosed halls, illuminated by hundreds or thousands of candles and lamps. These were not just affairs for the upper class, either; middle and lower class people went in large numbers.
Morning After Noon
With these late hours for entertainment and parties, and with more artificial lighting, many people in the cities began going to bed later and rising later in the morning. Mealtimes were pushed back as a result. In London, by the 1730s and 40s, the upper class nobles and gentry were dining at three or four in the afternoon, and by 1770 their dinner hour in London was four or five.
In the 1790s the upper class was rising from bed around ten a.m. or noon, and then eating breakfast at an hour when their grandparents had eaten dinner. They then went for "morning walks" in the afternoon and greeted each other with "Good morning" until they ate their dinner at perhaps five or six p.m. Then it was "afternoon" until evening came with supper, sometime between nine p.m. and two a.m.! The rich, famous and fashionable did not go to bed until dawn. With their wealth and social standing, they were able to change the day to suit themselves. The hours they kept differentiated them from the middle and lower classes as surely as did their clothes, servants and mansions.
Some upper-class individuals did get up earlier, children for instance and sometimes their mothers. By 1800 the dinner hour had been moved to six or seven. For early risers this meant a very long wait until dinner. Even those who arose at ten a.m. or noon had a wait of anywhere from six to nine hours. Ladies, tired of the wait, had established luncheon as a regular meal, not an occasional one, by about 1810. It was a light meal, of dainty sandwiches and cakes, held at noon or one or even later, but always between breakfast and dinner. And it was definitely a ladies' meal; when the Prince of Wales established a habit of lunching with ladies, he was ridiculed for his effeminate ways, as well as his large appetite. Real men didn't do lunch, at least not until the Victorian era.
It was not exactly what we would consider an effeminate meal, however. There are records of society ladies taking luncheon at inns in this period, drinking cider, ale and beer with their lunch, something we don't normally think of "ladies" as doing.
Since the middle classes were still eating dinner in midday for the most part, they had no room for luncheon in their day. But that was changing.
The Sack Lunch
The middle- and lower-class day was still bounded by work, as it always had been with most people still eating on the medieval schedule. In the late 1700s and the 1800s, that began to change with the development of factories and then trains and streetcars. People began to work further from home, and the midday meal had to become something light, just whatever they could carry to work. The main meal, still usually called dinner, was pushed to the evening hours after work, when they could get home for a full meal.
So, many people in the middle and lower class began to eat dinner in the evening as the nobles and gentry did. But they did so due to the demands of the workplace, not because they were up all night at parties. And many of them retained the traditional dinner hour of noon or one on Sundays, when they were home from work. Many people still do today.
All these changes occurred first in London and took years to affect even the upper classes in the country. The further away from London one went, the greater difference there was in meal times, with rural Scotland lagging far behind, still eating dinner in the early afternoon at the end of the 1700s, when Londoners were beginning to dine at six or later. The situation paralleled that in France, where even Parisians had eaten dîner by four p.m. in the 1700s, but at five or six in the early 1800s, with souper at one or two in the morning. The rural populace, however, long persisted in eating dîner at midday and souper in early evening.
This caused much confusion and grumbling over differences in meal times when the British or French traveled between city and country. The main dinner meal could be eaten anywhere from five to eight hours later in the city than the country, by the start of the Victorian era. Indeed, with all the changes in dining times and customs, you might think the Victorians would have taken a breather, and stopped changing things, letting them stabilize again. They didn't.
More Meals
Indoor gas or oil lighting came to many homes in the 1800s. It was getting easier and easier to stay up in the evening. By the 1840s dinner had been pushed back to as late as eight or nine for the wealthy, with many of them spending days shopping or working in a city, then spending hours taking the trains to their homes, that were now being built in distant suburbs. People once again grew hungry in the long interval that was now eight hours between new lunch and late dinner. And women once again led the way in mealtime inventiveness. Tea with biscuits and pastries had been popular since the 1700s as a refreshment to serve visitors. Now ladies began taking tea and snacks of light sandwiches and cakes around four or five in the afternoon, regardless of whether or not they had visitors. At first they had this snack in relative privacy, in their boudoir or private sitting room. But by the 1840s they had established afternoon tea as a regular meal in drawing rooms and parlors all over Britain.
The middle and lower classes in Britain were quick to adopt this new meal when they could. Tea came to fill the same role that had once been met by lunch, filling in long hours before a late dinner. But it never caught on in the US. In fact many of the older customs of eating persisted in the US, to the confusion of many.
Not in North America
Just as the local situations of time and place explain the development of new customs in Britain, they also explain the relative lack of them in the US. Many English immigrants to what is now the US arrived before 1776. At that time, most English people still ate dinner between noon and two, and supper at sunset. Luncheon was not yet established as an everyday, regular meal, and afternoon tea would not be invented for nearly 70 years. Immigrants brought with them the customs of the time. Canada, with relatively more British immigration in the 1800s and 1900s, tends to have more similarities to current British customs, at least among English-speaking Canadians.
North Americans stayed on their farms longer too, not moving to cities and taking part in the Industrial Revolution as early as had the English. So the US retained the old mealtimes longer. In the early 1800s, upper-class Bostonians were still eating breakfast at nine a.m., dinner at two p.m., and supper at eight, earlier hours than their counterparts in London. Their two o'clock dinner was the time for entertaining guests, and showing off the silverware and fancy foods. Their supper was light and simple, for family and the most intimate friends.
Luncheon as a regular daily meal only developed in the US in the 1900s. In the 1945 edition of Etiquette, Emily Post still referred to luncheon as "generally given by and for women, but it is not unusual, especially in summer places or in town on Saturday or Sunday, to include an equal number of men." She also referred to supper as "the most intimate meal there is...none but family or nearest friends are ever included." Only hash or cold meat were to be served at supper; anything hot or complicated was served at dinner. In her first edition of Etiquette, in 1922, Post had seen no need to explain that. But by the 1945 edition, she had to explain that luncheon was an informal midday meal and supper an informal evening meal, while dinner was always formal, but could occur at midday or evening.
Later editions, such as the 1960 edition edited by Elizabeth Post, standardized the times and dropped all the old traditions of formality. Lunch was formal or informal, but always at midday, and everyone ate it whether male or female. Dinner was formal or informal, but always in the evening. Supper was an optional meal, thrown in during late night balls. Timing had become more important than ritual; ritual became an optional and personal choice. Of course not everyone relies upon the Posts. Most people rely upon a hodgepodge of ancestral traditions and newer customs arising from modern life.
In our current century, we eat dinner any time from noon to midnight, and most people never have a supper. Like so many old rituals, once followed with iron-clad discipline, our meal times are now as fluid and changeable as the rest of our lives. Customs that persisted for centuries have disappeared in a few decades. Perhaps it is just the rest of us catching up to the upper classes, who became flexible long ago.
This article originally appeared in our October/November 2001 issue.
from http://v.mercola.com/blogs/public_blog/The-Fascinating-History-of-Dinner-Time-11823.aspx
This interesting article from History Magazine explores the evolution of meals from medieval to modern times.
No doubt you'll appreciate how wealth, in addition to the evolution of "modern technology," set the stage for people nowadays eating, for the most part, whenever and however they can spare the time, spurring the epidemic of obesity.
For the longest time, dinner was the primary and biggest meal, eaten in the middle of the day (anytime between noon at 1 p.m.) by working class folks and the wealthy, because artificial lighting was expensive and weak at best, forcing people to head to bed at sundown. Conversely, breakfasts were small affairs as were late-day suppers.
Wealth and technology, along with more peaceful times, emboldened people during the 1700s to expand their days into the night for business, parties, and various entertainments. The wealthy (who spent less time in governmental affairs and more on leisure) tended to sleep in more often, pushing that primary dinner time to as late as 6 p.m., with supper coming as late as 2 a.m.
As for the middle-class, the demands of work and longer commutes (does this sound familiar?) pushed dinner to the evening hours and created snacking times just to satisfy the hunger brought on by extended intervals between meals.
History Magazine----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
from http://www.history-magazine.com/dinner2.html
What Time is Dinner?
Sherrie McMillan looks at the evolution of mealtimes.
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| Supper Party by Gerrit van Honthorst depicts members of the upper class combining entertainment with the last meal of the day. |
The names of meals and their general times were once quite standard. Everyone in medieval England knew that you ate breakfast first thing in the morning, dinner in the middle of the day, and supper not long before you went to bed, around sundown. The modern confusion arose from changing social customs and classes, political and economic developments, and even from technological innovations.
Despite our stereotypes of big English breakfasts of sausages, kippers (sardines), toast, tomatoes, etc., big breakfasts weren't really common until the Victorian age. Breakfast before the 1800s was usually just toast or some variation of gruel or porridge, except when a lavish spread was offered to impress guests. The main meal of the day was dinner.
In the Middle Ages, great nobles ate the most formal dinner, around noon or one p.m. Their dinner was more than a meal; it was an ostentatious display, a statement of wealth and power, with dozens of servants attending in a ritualized performance. Cooking for this grand, daily show began hours in advance, and the preparations for presentation began at 10 or 11 a.m. The meal might take hours, and be eaten in the most formal and elaborately decorated chambers. Lesser nobles, knights and manor holders ate a far less formal dinner, but at the same time of day.
Middle-class tradesmen and merchants, however, had to eat a little later. Their day was bounded by work, not by feudal rituals. They couldn't leave their shops to see to their own dinners until clients and customers had gone off to their own. So merchants and traders would eat at one or two in the afternoon, and then hurry back to meet the afternoon customers. The middle-class dinner might be served by one or two servants and consisted of bread, soups, pies, and perhaps meats and fish. The dishes varied with the season, and from country to country.
Peasants broke off after six or seven hours of work in the morning to have dinner around noon. This was their main meal too, consisting of bread or porridge, peas or beans, perhaps with some cabbage, turnip or onions thrown in. Sometimes they had meat, fish, cheese or whey (a byproduct of cheese-making). Their meal was much like that of the middle class except there was usually less to eat, and little variety. They ate far more at dinner than at breakfast or supper.
Today many people find it strange that the biggest meal of the day once centered around noon, but it made great sense at the time. Artificial lighting such as oil lamps and candles were expensive, and provided weak illumination at best. So people went to sleep at sundown, because it's difficult to work and eat in the dark. The last meal of the day was a rushed affair, a quick snack before the lights (the sun) went out. The only exceptions were those who had to work at night, and the extremely wealthy and powerful people at royal courts. The wealthiest courts, like those of France and Burgundy might stay up after sunset, their grandly decorated halls illuminated by thousands of candles or torches. But they were unusual; most medieval people never witnessed such spectacles.
Traders and merchants, who sometimes had to stay in the shop to handle the last daylight stragglers amongst their customers, might close shop at dusk and spend the last hour or two of their day in candlelight or firelight. But they made it to bed as quickly as they could, to rise early the next day and open up their shops again. Only the extremely wealthy had candles to burn and could waste daylight hours sleeping in late. So supper, the third and last meal of the day, was usually eaten before the sun went down, or very shortly afterward.
The English knew the last meal of the day as supper, and it was a light repast, usually made of cold leftovers from dinner. People generally went to sleep soon after eating it, and did not like to go to bed on a full stomach any more than modern people do.
Most nobles and manor lords ate supper between four and six p.m. They might have entertainment afterward, unlike the lower classes, but even nobles usually went to bed before too many hours had passed. Peasants might have just the last of the day's bread for supper, eaten at sundown. Then they went to sleep, to be up and working with the sunrise.
And that was the standard schedule for centuries. There were some exceptions, of course. People at the wealthiest courts might stay up after dark, as already mentioned. They had plenty of money for things like candles and rush lights, and were used to the world revolving around their schedules, rather than the other way around. A king or a lord who was passionate enough about his pursuits to put off eating for hours while hunting would make his retainers and family wait too.
Some groups, like Parliament in England might meet in the morning and work until late afternoon, without a break. They would go to their homes for dinner at four or five or even six p.m. Their families generally had to wait for them. Supper would then be pushed ahead until eight or ten o'clock, or not eaten at all. Supper was considered an optional meal by the English, who often stuffed themselves so full at dinner that they could not eat again until the next day. Who today would think of skipping the last meal of the day? We are far more likely to skip the first or the second.
So these established meals were sometimes shifted around or delayed due to work, or simply due to the fact that the sun set earlier in autumn, thus supper was earlier. These factors could lead to a lengthy wait between meals.
From the Middle Ages to the age of Shakespeare, there are scattered references to occasional extra meals, called luncheon and nuntion or nuncheon. Nuntion was eaten between dinner and supper, and peasants were sometimes guaranteed nuntions of ale and bread on those days they worked harvesting the fields in the lengthy days of late summer and autumn, when sunset and supper came many hours after noon and dinner. Luncheon seems to have been eaten between breakfast and dinner, when dinner was delayed. Luncheon was taken mainly by ladies and was not a large meal. It was more of a snack on those days when they had to wait for a late dinner due to the political or sporting affairs of their husbands.
These late dinners became more and more common in the 1700s, due to new developments in culture and technology.
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| At first, only those able to afford candles could indulge in late final meals. The poorer classes ate while there was still daylight, and went to bed not long after dusk. |
Capitalism, colonialism, and then the industrial revolution were changing the world's economy. The tumultuous wars and revolutions of the 1600s had been part of a shift in power. Nobles were losing their status as independent powers as kings and central governments took more power for themselves. Fewer and fewer nobles were playing really strong roles in government. As new professional classes of politicians, diplomats and citizen armies began to occupy many of the roles nobles used to fill, nobles had more time to play. And with all the economic changes that were occurring, many people had a lot more money to spend.
These developments and others, such as the enclosures of the 1700s, the end in England at least of the devastating wars of the 1600s, the lessening of plagues, and also the fact that nobles had been brought under control by the kings of England and France led to more settled conditions, as nobles were no longer conducting their personal and local wars.
The nobility and gentry became a class of leisure and began to spend more time in the cities, where they had parties and entertainment night after night. They had, or at least most of them had, no more work to do.
The middle class grew at the same time, due to growth in mercantilism, trade, crafts and manufacturing. This growth also took place in cities. Rising wages led to more purchasing of goods, and the cycle continued.
People had more money, and in the cities at least, more goods were available, including candles and lamps. People began staying up later with the better lighting, and many of them didn't have to get up so early in the morning anymore. There was also more to do at night. The 1700s were a time of entertainment as well as enlightenment. Theaters and operas were suddenly available on a wider scale in cities like London and Paris, with most performances at night. In Shakespeare's time they had usually been in the day, in sunlight. Now they were in enclosed halls, illuminated by hundreds or thousands of candles and lamps. These were not just affairs for the upper class, either; middle and lower class people went in large numbers.
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| Artificial lighting allowed for later mealtimes. In Fritz Syberg's Supper, a working-class family sits down to a meal of porridge with the clock in the background reading 8:25. |
With these late hours for entertainment and parties, and with more artificial lighting, many people in the cities began going to bed later and rising later in the morning. Mealtimes were pushed back as a result. In London, by the 1730s and 40s, the upper class nobles and gentry were dining at three or four in the afternoon, and by 1770 their dinner hour in London was four or five.
In the 1790s the upper class was rising from bed around ten a.m. or noon, and then eating breakfast at an hour when their grandparents had eaten dinner. They then went for "morning walks" in the afternoon and greeted each other with "Good morning" until they ate their dinner at perhaps five or six p.m. Then it was "afternoon" until evening came with supper, sometime between nine p.m. and two a.m.! The rich, famous and fashionable did not go to bed until dawn. With their wealth and social standing, they were able to change the day to suit themselves. The hours they kept differentiated them from the middle and lower classes as surely as did their clothes, servants and mansions.
Some upper-class individuals did get up earlier, children for instance and sometimes their mothers. By 1800 the dinner hour had been moved to six or seven. For early risers this meant a very long wait until dinner. Even those who arose at ten a.m. or noon had a wait of anywhere from six to nine hours. Ladies, tired of the wait, had established luncheon as a regular meal, not an occasional one, by about 1810. It was a light meal, of dainty sandwiches and cakes, held at noon or one or even later, but always between breakfast and dinner. And it was definitely a ladies' meal; when the Prince of Wales established a habit of lunching with ladies, he was ridiculed for his effeminate ways, as well as his large appetite. Real men didn't do lunch, at least not until the Victorian era.
It was not exactly what we would consider an effeminate meal, however. There are records of society ladies taking luncheon at inns in this period, drinking cider, ale and beer with their lunch, something we don't normally think of "ladies" as doing.
Since the middle classes were still eating dinner in midday for the most part, they had no room for luncheon in their day. But that was changing.
The Sack Lunch
The middle- and lower-class day was still bounded by work, as it always had been with most people still eating on the medieval schedule. In the late 1700s and the 1800s, that began to change with the development of factories and then trains and streetcars. People began to work further from home, and the midday meal had to become something light, just whatever they could carry to work. The main meal, still usually called dinner, was pushed to the evening hours after work, when they could get home for a full meal.
So, many people in the middle and lower class began to eat dinner in the evening as the nobles and gentry did. But they did so due to the demands of the workplace, not because they were up all night at parties. And many of them retained the traditional dinner hour of noon or one on Sundays, when they were home from work. Many people still do today.
All these changes occurred first in London and took years to affect even the upper classes in the country. The further away from London one went, the greater difference there was in meal times, with rural Scotland lagging far behind, still eating dinner in the early afternoon at the end of the 1700s, when Londoners were beginning to dine at six or later. The situation paralleled that in France, where even Parisians had eaten dîner by four p.m. in the 1700s, but at five or six in the early 1800s, with souper at one or two in the morning. The rural populace, however, long persisted in eating dîner at midday and souper in early evening.
This caused much confusion and grumbling over differences in meal times when the British or French traveled between city and country. The main dinner meal could be eaten anywhere from five to eight hours later in the city than the country, by the start of the Victorian era. Indeed, with all the changes in dining times and customs, you might think the Victorians would have taken a breather, and stopped changing things, letting them stabilize again. They didn't.
More Meals
Indoor gas or oil lighting came to many homes in the 1800s. It was getting easier and easier to stay up in the evening. By the 1840s dinner had been pushed back to as late as eight or nine for the wealthy, with many of them spending days shopping or working in a city, then spending hours taking the trains to their homes, that were now being built in distant suburbs. People once again grew hungry in the long interval that was now eight hours between new lunch and late dinner. And women once again led the way in mealtime inventiveness. Tea with biscuits and pastries had been popular since the 1700s as a refreshment to serve visitors. Now ladies began taking tea and snacks of light sandwiches and cakes around four or five in the afternoon, regardless of whether or not they had visitors. At first they had this snack in relative privacy, in their boudoir or private sitting room. But by the 1840s they had established afternoon tea as a regular meal in drawing rooms and parlors all over Britain.
The middle and lower classes in Britain were quick to adopt this new meal when they could. Tea came to fill the same role that had once been met by lunch, filling in long hours before a late dinner. But it never caught on in the US. In fact many of the older customs of eating persisted in the US, to the confusion of many.
Not in North America
Just as the local situations of time and place explain the development of new customs in Britain, they also explain the relative lack of them in the US. Many English immigrants to what is now the US arrived before 1776. At that time, most English people still ate dinner between noon and two, and supper at sunset. Luncheon was not yet established as an everyday, regular meal, and afternoon tea would not be invented for nearly 70 years. Immigrants brought with them the customs of the time. Canada, with relatively more British immigration in the 1800s and 1900s, tends to have more similarities to current British customs, at least among English-speaking Canadians.
North Americans stayed on their farms longer too, not moving to cities and taking part in the Industrial Revolution as early as had the English. So the US retained the old mealtimes longer. In the early 1800s, upper-class Bostonians were still eating breakfast at nine a.m., dinner at two p.m., and supper at eight, earlier hours than their counterparts in London. Their two o'clock dinner was the time for entertaining guests, and showing off the silverware and fancy foods. Their supper was light and simple, for family and the most intimate friends.
Luncheon as a regular daily meal only developed in the US in the 1900s. In the 1945 edition of Etiquette, Emily Post still referred to luncheon as "generally given by and for women, but it is not unusual, especially in summer places or in town on Saturday or Sunday, to include an equal number of men." She also referred to supper as "the most intimate meal there is...none but family or nearest friends are ever included." Only hash or cold meat were to be served at supper; anything hot or complicated was served at dinner. In her first edition of Etiquette, in 1922, Post had seen no need to explain that. But by the 1945 edition, she had to explain that luncheon was an informal midday meal and supper an informal evening meal, while dinner was always formal, but could occur at midday or evening.
Later editions, such as the 1960 edition edited by Elizabeth Post, standardized the times and dropped all the old traditions of formality. Lunch was formal or informal, but always at midday, and everyone ate it whether male or female. Dinner was formal or informal, but always in the evening. Supper was an optional meal, thrown in during late night balls. Timing had become more important than ritual; ritual became an optional and personal choice. Of course not everyone relies upon the Posts. Most people rely upon a hodgepodge of ancestral traditions and newer customs arising from modern life.
In our current century, we eat dinner any time from noon to midnight, and most people never have a supper. Like so many old rituals, once followed with iron-clad discipline, our meal times are now as fluid and changeable as the rest of our lives. Customs that persisted for centuries have disappeared in a few decades. Perhaps it is just the rest of us catching up to the upper classes, who became flexible long ago.
This article originally appeared in our October/November 2001 issue.
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