Somewhere between the bombardment of Lebanon and the collapse of the fourth test, the Office for National Statistics published its 2006 United Kingdom Input-Output Analyses Report.
The report ‘shows how ONS tracks the movement of goods and services through the economy as part of the process of balancing the components of the National Accounts’. It is unlikely to be on many holiday reading lists.
Yet, in among the graphs that show the changing UK economy, the report recorded one real watershed. For the first time in history, we in the UK are spending more money eating out than eating in.
The value of households’ spending on eating out doubled between 1992 and 2004, reaching £87.5 billion, thus exceeding money spent on food and drink consumed at home.
This is something to celebrate. Restaurant food is now accessible to more people than ever before, even if many of us still display a depressing love for the kind of place that offers cut-price burger and ‘12-bits-of-chicken for a quid’.
But it is also something to perturb, and not just for of the health impact of junk food.
Few acts are more sacred than eating. In the UK, we are already isolated from the sheer miracle of food – the breathtaking variety, colour, texture of even the most basic of our ingredients, not to mention the patient, exhausting work of growing, tending, nurturing them.
The less we eat in, in particular the less we invite others to eat food we have prepared, the less sensitive we become to the hallowed act of the meal at home.
Playing host is a supremely Godly act. We open up our homes and our resources to others, tendering to them something of ourselves, offering them sustenance, hospitality and friendship, seeking their betterment and ours.
Small wonder that Jesus marked the end of his earthly life and the start of his resurrection one with meals.
Sampling and celebrating tastes beyond those that most homes can offer is indeed a blessing for which we, the privileged global minority, must give thanks.
But we must not forget the sacredness of the act in which a host receives us, nourishing us and humanising us in a moment of pure grace.
Nick Spencer
