The Psychology of Food

I dated this guy in high school who used to start each meal by piling as much food onto his plate as humanly possible. I remember the first time we ordered a pizza, he opened the box and took out two connected slices, deposited them on his plate, and then proceeded to grab another two slices and stacked them on top of the first two. I stared at him in quiet disbelief before politely asking him what the freak he thought he was doing.

"Um, getting pizza?" he replied. (This is, of course, just a general idea of what was said. It's an interesting memory, yes, but I'm not in the habit of perfectly memorizing every single converation I ever have to be recalled ten to fifteen years later)

"You're going to eat four slices all at once?!" I think at this moment I was suddenly questioning the relationship.

"No," he responded simply, "I'm going to eat them one at a time."

It should be noted that during this entire exchange I was still looking at him like he was an insane person. Because he was. Normal, sane people take their pizza slices from the box one at a time, maybe two if the box is going to be placed somewhere other than where you're eating and you want to avoid having to get up a whole bunch of times. It was at this point that he explained that in his family, they had four boys, and if you didn't claim your food right away, it might end up on someone else's plate. It wasn't even that they didn't have enough food to go around... they did. But it was a competition. In fact, in this particular incidence, he might not even want all four slices of pizza, but he took them, just in case.

(You know, in case his 97 pound girlfriend might gobble up the rest of the pizza and leave him empty handed. *rolls eyes*)

It's kind of a pointless memory, except for the fact that this was the point in which I started to become interested in the psychology behind the way people eat food. This is something that has fascinated me for years. I have all sorts of theories about my own eating habits, but that's maybe a little more than I want to share in a public setting. I think I'll save my self-analysis for my children's future therapists.

I bring this up because this morning Wayne and I were discussing this very subject during breakfast. It's a well-known fact within certain circles that the Tomlinsons eat their meals at an inhuman speed. Seriously, they sit down for a family dinner, and it's done in five to seven minutes, max. Honest to goodness, Thanksgiving dinner (what we can all agree is the premier meal of the year), they can stretch it out to maybe fifteen minutes, tops. The story goes that, before I came along, my sister-in-law's husband Tom would always be left alone at the table to finish his meal while every one else was up cleaning the dishes, turning the game back on, etc. Tom has always said that he's grateful that I joined the family so he has someone to eat with. In their defense, it should be noted that my in-laws do not throw food back, shovelling it in like a crowd of backwood heathens. They all have excellent table manners and eat in a perfectly polite and acceptable way. Just at super-human speeds.

What has always bugged me about this is that I cannot for the life of me figure out why they do this.

This was brought up this morning as Wayne finished the last bite of his waffle while I, having started eating at the exact same time, was still only 1/3 of the way through mine. Wayne joked, adding a theatric sniffle for dramatic effect, that maybe they all eat really fast because growing up they never knew when there was going to be food on the table again. *rolls eyes, once again*. While that's SO not true, it's not a bad theory,psychologically speaking. The only other one I'm working on is that, for some unknown reason, my mother-in-law would beat the children with a stick if they took too long at the table. When I suggested this to Wayne he simply deadpanned "Yes. Yes, that's it."

So, until I can come up with something better, I'm going with that one.