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Concerned people, all of them amateur nutritionists, tell me I don’t eat enough – the right stuff, so they say. My reply is that I eat more than enough to keep skin and bone together. Body and soul haven’t parted company altogether! It was Mr Colman, of mustard fame, who said he made a fortune out of what people left on their plates. But not everyone’s like that, otherwise Mr Colman wouldn’t have become a multi-millionaire.
I’m not a glutton by any means, but it’s not the same as not eating enough. If I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t be around now. I’ve eaten most things, I suspect, since I was knee-high to a rice pudding. It was when I was a boy that I found I disliked school lunches. We had a cook who, when it came to healthy diets, was half a century ahead of her time. Chips were out, fried fish as well. We had steamed cod served with boiled potatoes and a paste that passed for wallpaper glue!
I remember the Flanders and Swann duo of ‘Drop of a Hat’ fame. They played and sang a song, ‘Eating people is wrong!’, from ‘The Reluctant Cannibal’, and I’d go along with that. In former days when I lived and dined out in places like Cape Town and Windhoek, I’d leave enough on my plate to feed the rest of the sub-continent, but all the waiters wanted to know was whether I’d like a ‘doggy bag’ for any animals I cared to keep!
But why, given that all of us generally eat more than enough, as doctors tell us? (We’re too obese, they inform us – so why can’t they say, we’re too fat?) So should we feel guilty about eating enough?
When I was a boy I ate as a boy. I scoffed everything my mother put in front of me – plate-sized Yorkshire Puddings, meat and potato pie, dumplings, the lot! But school lunches were my undoing! So here I am, old and chunky!
If I had life all over again, I would take note of what Molière, the French dramatist, said: ‘One should eat to live, and not live to eat.’ And St Paul was even more adamant when he offered this advice: ‘If any would not work, neither should he eat.’
Nemo malus felix!
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