Manners maketh the man, says the old adage. Table manners certainly make the man and bad manners can make a very fat, unhealthy man. But in an age of fast foods, lack of parental care and authority and TV advertising that exploits the greed of youngsters, table etiquette is sadly neglected.

In any culture polite manners when eating food are always a matter of avoiding all appearance of greed by eating small or medium-sized morsels slowly and delicately. In this way the taste buds in the mouth are not immediately satiated and a moderate meal gives prolonged gustatory pleasure. Every mouthful of every item on the plate is distinctly savoured and one has no temptation to over-eat, and what is more the digestive system is not over-burdened.

Families used to sit at a table which was their mother’s pride. Children were taught the correct way to arrange the cutlery, plates and glasses. They were instructed how to hold the knives, forks and spoons(1) and how to use them according to the particular food. A plate of soup, for example, had to be tilted away from one, and the soup scooped up in the same direction, then being sipped not from the point but from the side of the spoon – in fact some better-off families would use special round soup-spoons. If the presence of meat obliged one to use both knife and fork, peas had to be eaten from the back of the fork. To scoop them into the hollow side would have caused eyebrows to be raised – something which probably no longer has the chilling effect that it once did. Incidentally, the increasing use of chopsticks is to be recommended. Unfortunately, the present tendency is to give children money to buy a sandwich, hamburger or pizza, often gulped down when they are shouting and shoving one another in the school bus or playground.

I did my military service in the years between 1945 and 1948, in the RAF (Royal Air Force), not I may add as a dashing Spitfire pilot but with an unromantic job in Middle East Headquarters keeping lists of registration numbers of military vehicles. My companions had been industrial workers or office clerks in civilian life. Their table manners might not have been quite up to the standard of the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at London Guildhall, but they were quite acceptable. Gross impropriety would certainly have been frowned on.
As I remember, in those days it was rare to see a child or young person who was fat or even merely plump. Half the boys one sees nowadays would have been mercilessly tormented, labouring under the nickname “Fatty”.

Polite table manners are important for their long-term effects. Digestive troubles do not appear immediately; more usually they come on slowly, the cumulative results of bad habits over many years, such as eating quickly, swallowing before the mouthful is well masticated, or not giving the food the mental attention that encourages the production of the digestive juices, starting with the saliva – no “watering at the mouth”!

Young people always tend to imagine that elderly people, with their exasperating health problems, were born old. They forget that they themselves are following the same road and will one day, please God, themselves be old. In an English monastery of the Solesmes Benedictine congregation there was a French monk, only middle-aged but barely able to walk even with two sticks. When young, he had been in the habit of not changing his clothes after working in the rain. When taken to task he would say contemptuously: “Vous les Anglais, vous êtes trop douillets, mais nous les paysans de la Frrrance…!”(2) But his being a tough French peasant did not prevent rheumatism from catching up on him. The same is true of the consequences of bad eating habits.(3)

Now the benefits of thousands of years of human progress are being suddenly thrown to the winds. The very word education has been downgraded to meaning little more than vocational training with some theory added. It no longer means means refinement of mind and character and good taste. The values of civilization so long fought for are being neglected if not actually despised. A whole atmosphere of culture and good breeding has been lost.

I was once told that the formation of good habits is now called scientifically “behavioural modification”. This expression sounds more appropriate to laboratory rats or white mice than to civilized members of society. Unlike the traditional vocabulary, it hardly presents a young person with the ideal of becoming a well-brought-up young lady or gentleman.

Food now is often devoured in haste and the lack of real enjoyment is compensated by increased quantity. Children eating on their way to school cannot give attention to taste nor can the highly-strung employee or businessman snatching at his sandwich as he clutches the wheel and drives to work with his eyes on the surrounding traffic.

In fact over-eating may be due to various factors such as stress or boredom. A religious superior giving a retreat to future priests in an order warned that for some clergy greed was a compensation for celibacy – and explained their well-rounded appearance! In any case, self-discipline, involving spiritual motives, care for good manners and vigorous daily exercise, is the necessary corrective. In every way, good manners restore beauty to our lives.

(1) Note a difference between the British usage and the American, particularly important when following instructions for taking medicine. In British usage, a dessert spoon is the one used for eating pudding or taking soup and a tablespoon is a very large spoon used for serving, not for eating.
(2)“You English are too soft, but we French peasants…”
(3)A common bad habit with long-term consequences now is turning music on very loud, so young people are becoming prematurely deaf. In middle age they are becoming stone deaf.

This appeared in NDU Spirit, issue 39, Spring 2007, publication of Notre Dame University, Lebanon.