Our dining tables: Our duties, demeanor and responsibilities
Vaatupura A. Jayaprakash

Food and family life go together in all cultures. Down the ages generations have evolved themselves more out of their own food cultures than out of anything else. Their eating habits have inscribed in them indelible marks of social values, duties and responsibilities which got incessantly promoted at their dining circles. It has been so until recently.

Lately, there developed a great attitudinal shift in this connection, and present generation has evolved a new food culture. This new attitude has started costing our social and family values dearly, and the most visible impacts of this crazy consumption psychosis is not just the medical uncertainty we find at our five star hospitals but it is the abysmal character and behavioural disorders we find in our new generation.

Our dining times of lore have silently given way to eating sprees at food courts and junk joints. We carry home alien dishes; we hangout and savour sandwiches, French fries, McDonalds, KFCs, pizzas and suck up those aerated cokes and colas. Coupled with these are our 24/7 working environment which leaves precious little to be expected of our new generation. They are what they wolf down. Junk.

Since our society is not so generous to accommodate a junk culture for long, it is time we looked at the finer side of this change in food habits and its impact on our character and behaviour. How we prepare our food, the way we eat that food, the times we eat it and who we eat that food with etc. have got much more to offer us by way of behaviour and character. This is a very rare process through which individuals get groomed themselves up to the expectations of the family and society they belong to. See how that grooming exercise works:

· A full-fledged kitchen is the laboratory that records and maintains the health indices of a given family.
· All the ingredients that go into the making of a traditional dish are components of a course of medicine.
· The hands, along with the mind and its mood, that prepare the dish leave a rare taste to it, and it is unique for every kitchen and the family it belongs to.
· It is not the quantity that matters when we eat at our family diner, rather it’s the quality with a tinge of love and likes that matters.
· Father, mother, sister, brother, some elders, like grandparents or relatives, together with a few occasional guests would make every dining an exclusive experience.
· When we eat food like this three times a day fairly unfailingly for quite sometime, we not only follow a balanced diet, but also we imbibe in our children a great sense of belonging, sharing, understanding, and above all a deeper sense of character and behaviour peculiar to our family and the culture.

It is, I repeat, it is this sense or the sensibility that we lose out when we go for an alien food culture. Besides the medical calamities our new generation comes to hit at eventually, we are losing out on our own ‘foodholds’ which have been evolved out of centuries. One day it would go extinct, and the coming generation would have to depend solely on a foreign food culture. Naturally, the new generation will come to have a character and behavioural order alien to our native culture and family values, contrary to our duties and responsibilities.

If ever we could identify a single human activity that has caused abysmal fall in social, family, personal duties and responsibilities, it is this: our fast disappearing family dining experience. Therefore, there is urgent need for reinventing our ethnic food culture so as to expect our new generation to be showing better signs of behaviour and character and respect for values that are indigenous to our make and of course our demeanor.