What is the biggest problem after a political rally, a public parade or any large gathering of people in a public place? Well, what else but the clean-up of all the garbage left behind by those attending, normally in the form of food packaging.
It doesn’t really matter what time of the day the event takes place, there will literally be tons of waste left behind from all the food served on the occasion. It could be a morning prayer assembly, an afternoon parade or an evening political rally. It may even be an early morning fun run. Round the clock, whoever the attendees, there will be lots of these waste left behind. Which means that if there is a lot or packaging, a lot of food was being served.
This raises the question: When do we actually eat during the day, and how many times do we eat? Well, from the evidence it seems we eat whenever we like, and as many times as we like. In fact, eating is so ingrained in our social fabric that we have a saying in the Philippines that, when translated, says something like “we have a good life when we can afford to eat three times a day.” Most of us are clearly beyond having good lives now, however, because eating three times a day is not only the norm, snacking a number of times in between those three meals is also standard practice for many of our countrymen.
I saw this in operation recently, when I attended a mass assembly and parade over the weekend. The march was expected to start around three in the afternoon, but participants were asked to gather around noon, as there were speakers and entertainers invited to grace the event.
Of course, practically all of the participants were served lunch by their organizers, not to mention given packs of snacks and candies to munch on while waiting for the parade to commence. It wasn’t such a long route, maybe around five kilometers all told, but surprisingly a large number of participants were lost to the many Jollibees, McDonalds and Mang Inasals that lined the parade route, never mind that it was less than five hours after most of them had been served lunch (and snacks) at the assembly area. In terms of caloric intake, most would have consumed upwards of 1,000 calories, while expending no more than 200 or 300 or so walking the parade route itself, which was quite slow-paced, and mostly stop-start given the traffic along the way.
Truth be told, this was already a good day as far as caloric intake and expenditure goes. Most days, many of us ingest the same amount of calories, and expend even less in terms of activity as we sit in our air-conditioned offices performing sedentary work. No wonder that as we noted in our previous piece, around one in three of us Filipinos are already overweight and obese, a trend that bodes not too well in terms of our future health outcomes.
It’s not anyone’s fault that eating the way we do has become the way it is. In fact, as I think about my own experience, I had my more than fair share of misconceptions that not until I was confronted with the science and evidence, I had always held to be true. Take the incidence of stomach ulcers for instance. Growing up, I was always told that this was caused by skipping meals and not eating frequently, and conventional wisdom was to keep on munching on something from waking to sleeping, so you were “protected” from getting stomach ulcers. Of course I know better now, but I still encounter a lot of people who think that this piece of health advice is something to be taken seriously.
If we looked back at how earlier societies ate, however, frequent eating was not always the norm.
“Breakfast as we know it didn’t exist for large parts of history. The Romans didn’t really eat it, usually consuming only one meal a day around noon, says food historian Caroline Yeldham. In fact, breakfast was actively frowned upon.” (“Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?” BBC, 15 November 2012).
So if ancient societies did not eat as frequently as we do now, when did the habit of frequent eating start? From the same source, it says that “... the middle and lower classes’ eating patterns were also defined by their working hours. By the late 18th Century most people (in Europe) were eating three meals a day in towns and cities...”
Ah, now it is becoming somewhat clearer. Our Spanish conquistadores, they of the affluent class, brought the concept of desayuno, almuerzo and cena to our shores when they came a-conquering, leading us Indios to aspire to their life of bliss as we gazed enviously at them lounging on their verandas, while we toiled in their haciendas under the scorching tropical sun. That’s clearly how the Filipino saying connecting the good life to eating three times a day came to be coined.
But then, how is it that looking at pictures and paintings of people in those halcyon (at least for the Spanish) days, most people were still looking lean and fit. And how come today, without changing our dietary frequency, we don’t quite look like they did, and appear to be well over-fed in comparison?
To borrow an analogy from a favorite professor of mine, “it’s an input, process, output” issue, my dear Watson. What were they putting into their mouths then, and what is it that we are eating these days? What kind of activities did they have to do in their day, versus what we occupy ourselves with in our day-to-day lives. And what were they producing in their workday, compared to what is expected from us these days?
Clearly, many things have changed between then and now. And yet, the way we think about food, and our practices around it have remained largely unchanged. Now, it’s probably the right time to think long and hard about how we should start to change our long outdated attitudes towards food.
More next week...