Meal-time

Consider yourselves lucky that I remembered: there is an explanation

to the obesity tsunami curently hitting North America. I am old enough to have

memories of what things were like before television, and they were

very, very different. Or rather television made things very, very different

from what they had been before.

Because, with television, it became nightime in the morning. And dessert time at 4

in the afternoon. And time for cereal all morning long. And everybody smoked: everybody 

who was anybody, except for maybe he catholic clergy. And it was okay to become blond. 

And laugh at your wife. And ride spaceships.

Before that time, one really accepted hunger as part of life. Indeed, thinking about food 

at non-meal times was pointless, and possibly sinful. That’s just the way things were.

Until advertisement came along. And cake mixes.

The child that I was remembers all that, or rather her ways of seeing things comes back to 

me in strange little moments. But it was all very long ago, before school even, for some of it. 

And as I learned to decipher those strange sounds of the English language.

Coming to you from New York. And those other places.

So I am really drawing on my pre-critical self - but oddly, on a much saner self - than

today’s loony intello.

Food only happens at meal times. Take it from me.