TV dinners and fast foods

Peter Wu

18 Feb 2011

Over the past several decades, how we eat and therefore how our body absorbs nutrition are influenced by two things. There must be more but this is according to my observation.

One – the onset of TV. Families used to sit together at the dining table and had their meals together, free from any distractions. They chatted, they exchanged gossips, they laughed, they made noises, parents asked unpleasant questions, they fought, they yelled, but they (mostly) enjoyed the foods. It was family time and catch-up time. Did you see the satisfied look on people’s faces when they left the table? They may have the radio on but their eyes were always on the dishes in front of them, instead of darting between the foods on the table and the pictures on the TV. Families used to give foods their undivided attention. Not any more. Now, we eat our dinner in front of the TV. I do anyway. I blame the bloody Yanks for this, for popularizing the practice ‘TV dinner’. There are in fact complete ‘heat and eat’ dinner boxes you can buy from the supermarkets, called exactly that. Anyway, TV dinners have killed all the fun of dining at the dining table. It’s like eating at the mortuary.

Two - Fast foods. It was well-nigh impossible to get a seat at a restaurant in the Central District in HK in the 60s and 70s. Why the salaried-men and women of HK did not bring their own lunch to work beats me! Even when you got a table, you never ate in comfort. People who were standing behind you waiting to grab your table was completely dis-inducive to healthy the leisurely eating. Anyway, along came the fast food outlets which dispensed all manners of lunches in polystyrene boxes, to be taken back to the office or to Statute Square to devour. Before the arrival of the fast food joints, it was almost inconceivable for the Cantonese to eat out in the open, to wolf down their meals and, adding insult to injury, to eat from a piece of cheap, flimsy, white plastic shit like a beggar. There are two reasons why I say this:

First, Cantonese has the philosophy ‘while you may work hard to earn your keeps, you should eat it leisurely’. Fast food completely destroys this philosophy. You work hard, you eat fast seems to be the motto now. But this is not as bad as some Kwai Los who literally eat on the run.

Second, foods are meant to be savoured and enjoyed. The pace of life now means they are now being treated as a means to fill a gap – to quell hunger. So what’s the point of eating? You might as well buy a packet of pills which quell your hunger pang for several days, or go on a drip like those patients in intensive care who do not eat at all. That saves you the bother of queuing up for a lunch box, and having to eat it too. Seems hard work to me!

Anyway, the creation of fast foods has subconsciously planted into our heads that not only are they cooked fast, you have to eat it fast too. I think that must be detrimental to the way our body handles and processes foods.