The Diners Were LYING! (down, that is)

Every so often, The Flamingo finds himself preoccupied with questions of great consequence. Not. Nevertheless, when a question bugs him, he will…not…rest until he has found answers. And shared them with you.

Why is this blog post different from all other blog posts? (Okay, other than the fact that it’s written by a flamingo.) Because it’s not about what you’re eating, but how you’re eating it. Which brings us back to my opening line that is, of course, a rephrasing of one of the four questions asked by children on the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, i.e. “why do we eat reclining, instead of sitting up?” The short answer is because Passover is about the Jews escaping slavery in ancient Egypt, and having gotten away, enjoying the privilege of eating like their former masters— i.e. horizontally– without being whipped within an inch of their lives for  doing it.

So what makes this more than an obscure cultural tidbit? Because it’s an echo of how things were done practically everywhere then, and for a long time thereafter. The ancient Greeks ate reclining, and so did the Romans. The Egyptians did it, and the Jews adopted it when they wanted to make a point about their former masters. For thousands of years, then, dining (as opposed to scrambling for whatever you could find and gulping it down before anyone else could take it from you) was distinguished by doing it horizontally.

The ancient Greeks fit two diners to a platform propped up on pillows, with their heads at opposite ends of the couch. And the sequence was pretty cramped, too; no drinks, food only (the drinking came later) so no wine with dinner. No ladies, either; it was an all-male supper club. The Romans untwisted their togas a bit on the no women part, but they ate recumbent, and like the Jews, used the occasion to make certain important points. For one thing, it was all about status; it wasn’t just about what you were served (although I hear the Romans had a fondness for flamingo tongues— nasty) but your position at the table. You see, the Romans, or at least the better-off Romans, set up three large couches in a “U” around the dinner table. The couches slanted upwards in the triclinium (or dining room) so that everyone’s head was raised above the table (making it easier to get at the food). The middle couch, where the host sat, faced out onto the central courtyard with its garden and fountains. The favored guests lay on the couch to his right and because everyone positioned themselves on their left side, the host could talk easily with his special company and enjoy the view at the same time. The not-so-favored guests were left facing away from the garden vista, with their host turned away from them, and since this made conversation more difficult they mostly got to look at their host’s dining room wall.

Okay, not so mono-cultural, but still pretty obscure. It does, however lead to my next question; if this is the way dining was done for thousands of years, why did it stop? I mean, plenty of people eat lying down on beds and couches in front of their TV, but they wouldn’t think of entertaining the in-laws that way. And, except for a certain South Beach restaurant, no one dons their best date clothes and heads out on the town to flop on a couch next to a restaurant table.

Well, that’s a flamingo for you— our brains are small but deep. I will continue to ponder this profundity and perhaps regale you with more pontification, later.

Wishing you all a happy and RELAXING long weekend!