Having Dinner Early

There's nothing more interesting than the issues of food in every continent. When starvation issues recede, then people become a lot more judgmental and critical about food, sustainability and preparation methods. There's the entire world of food writing. All we do is talk about food, take photos of it, and the entire social media feed can revolve around a meal. Hahah. Yeah, this blog too, is guilty.

When food is enjoyable, and we can appreciate it, it is thoroughly satisfying. It was a fun read and I found myself grinning at a few lines- 'The Underrated Pleasures of Eating Dinner Early' by Lauren Collins, published in The New Yorker on May 21, 2019.

Ask about dinnertime and you’ll end up hearing all about a person’s upbringing and her current family situation, her workload and her waistline, the intimate dynamics of her life. The when of a meal can be as important as the what. Each has its own rituals: weeknight dinner, weekend dinner, family dinner, gala dinner, Sunday dinner, birthday dinner, TV dinner, pre-theatre dinner, progressive dinner, pancake dinner, picnic dinner, winner winner chicken dinner. While we’re ranking things, the best dinner is early dinner.

I eat two meals a day. A light lunch, and a heavier dinner. I've been doing this combination for all my life. The timings of lunch and dinner might differ, but this has worked well for me so far. As a result, the stomach is trained for these sort of portions, and I get indigestion when I over-eat. Whatever intermittent fasting is, I seem to have done it since I was a kid. I must have been one of those strange children who never got nagged to have breakfast. Not having breakfast didn't make my IQ points drop or stunt my growth. 

As I get older and bedtime shifted earlier, I prefer eating earlier too. Unlike my youth when midnight suppers were all the rage, I can't go to bed now with a full stomach. It hinders sleep quality. Oddly, man's parents can't seem to eat early. They eat at 8.45pm/9pm or 9.45pm. Our stomachs couldn't deal with these timings, so we put our foot down and told them that if we are to have dinner together at all, it would be at 7.45pm (and lunch would be at 12.45pm). I love an early dinner at a restaurant. It's easier to secure reservations. An early dinner at home meant that I don't have to rush through the cleaning up, and when I'm done (even with laundering the kitchen cloths), it's 8.30pm. Either way, it leaves us with seemingly extra time in the evening for other leisurely pursuits. 

However, on nights when we go out to gigs, performances and various shows, we would have to nibble on pre-show bites, and after that, sort out a light supper. Or I can eat at 5 or 6pm, and call that dinner. No more food after that unless it's a tiny sandwich. These two weeks saw some crazy meal timings with both work and evening SIFA shows and all. I eschewed the usual meal hours, and ate small portions when the stomach is hungry. That would be six tiny meals a day.

Still, I would argue that a pleasure subtler than the post-cinema steak and cocktail is the pre-cinema steak and cocktail—six, say, for a seven-thirty showtime. Better yet is the early steak and cocktail with no plan in sight other than to sit in a clean and quiet house, watching the light fade as you listen to the dishwasher sloshing. Despite its connotations of denture-friendly fare and penny-pinching, early dinner is the most decadent meal there is. You’re familiar with dinner and a movie? Well, how about dinner and a movie and a bath and a book and sex and rearranging your whole spice drawer if you feel like it? Early dinner is great in a restaurant, too: getting a reservation is no problem, the dining room is clean and fresh and running smoothly, nobody at the table is worrying about her meeting the next morning. The relative emptiness of the room nurtures a conspiratorial feeling, energy and relaxation in perfect balance. Five o’clock is when the real gossip goes down—make that two Martinis! (Never mind that early-bird specials developed, in part, as a way for restaurants to make up the revenues they were losing during Prohibition.) You can drink them guiltlessly—according to medical professionals, eating early brings a number of health benefits, from weight loss to better sleep to lower rates of certain cancers. Leandra Medine, of the blog Man Repeller, has written that one of the attributes of early dinner is that “you wake up sprightly as fuck.”