About Feeding

In fact speaking of sharing and foodstuffs, just today I stopped for breakfast at a roadhouse style cafe. Okay, it was sort of a café, that is a road house… or a roadhouse that thinks it is a café… (however you interpret it, I’ll come back to décor disparities at a later time). On entering you couldn’t help but notice the tables were twelve feet long with benches on each side. Flashback to our dining table as kids.  Which was probably only eight feet long, but it did have a bench our father had made. The bench was necessary, since there was not enough space to have four chairs down each side of the dining table in our kitchen (eight children divided by two, four chairs each side). We of course, crammed in shoulder to shoulder on the bench. This was sat beside the trusty formica table (with an extension section) on which the many thousands of toffee apples for the different fairs and fetes were produced (see blog Sunday 13^th May 2012). Now, this is important. The order of sitting on the bench was of course fairly critical. Consider this ten mouths to be fed. Firstly; A quantity of food, being put into serving dishes and being placed on the table generally relative to the type of food in the dish. Potatoes (for example), usually went to the centre of the table. Any meat dish went towards father’s end of the table and any greens tended to be placed towards mother’s end. No particular reason? Maybe not.

Food then travelled in a clockwise direction, with Father (position 12 o’clock) serving the meat dish, passing it on. Position ten (11 o’clock) was not the best place to sit. You ended up with whatever piece of meat had been left by everyone else. Secondly Mother sat at one end of the table and father at the other. Either parent had a reach of approximately three feet in a sitting position and four feet, if they stood and leaned on the end of the table. A rapid corrective swipe, did not usually require the particular parent to stand, so, by measurement, obtaining a seat nearest to the middle of the bench, resulted in a less forceful contact if they should strike towards you. (naturally it was a better idea to favour the Mother’s end of the the table in the halfway point. It also meant there was a body between you and the end of the table (between you and the parents swinging arm), and, that at 3 o’clock or 9 o’clock, there was still a chance you could get something reasonable from the food available (3 o’clock being the better seat of the two of course). Then as the other dishes came around, we all became quite expert at quantities and measurements. Everyone knew that every other eye was watching how much they served themselves from any particular dish. Green peas were always the most popular vegetables, brussel sprouts (the tight little , tiny cabbage like sprouts) usually the least favourite. There is a favourite battle of wills story in the family between one of my sisters and father and where a 3am ‘still at the table refusing to eat them’ situation arose (the sister refusing that is).

(Continued tomorrow)