Taking time to eat

The other day my wife was sitting at her desk when she realised that she was hungry. Because she was working from home she had the fortune of having a well-stocked fridge nearby. She cut herself a piece of bread and layered it with a couple of slices of smoked salmon from a plastic packet. She topped this with some avocado, and a few capers from a jar.

Then she sat at her desk again. She looked at her computer and was just about to begin eating while working, when she suddenly took account of what she was doing.

It struck her that if she ate like this, while engrossed in work, she would barely taste that open-topped sandwich. And, she would have no memory of it when she’d finished eating. It would be like she hadn’t had lunch at all.

So, she closed the lid of her laptop and concentrated on her food instead. She turned the sandwich around in her hand, so that she could see it from different angles. The bread was grainy and rough, and it varied in shades from a caramel interior to a cocoa-coloured crust. The loaf was made by refugees, from Afghanistan and South Sudan, she was told when she bought it from a market stall. The grain was harvested in summer, maybe this year, or maybe last year, and had come a long way on its journey to the city.

The salmon that rested on top was glistening pink. It had arrived by plane from another country. After hatching in a tank full of fresh water, the baby salmon lived in a series of vats alongside thousands of others for a year or more. Then, as a juvenile, it was transferred to an enormous floating sea cage. For another two years, as my wife went about her life at home, that salmon had swum back and forth and had gorged itself, until it was time to be killed, skinned, smoked and sliced.

As for the dull yellowy-green avocado, this came from the sub tropics. It had matured slowly over a season, and was picked still hard from the tree, ready to ripen at home. Meanwhile, those vinegary capers were like budding jewels from North Africa. They were harvested in the cool of early spring mornings, months ago, when my wife was getting on with her own life.

As she chewed, my wife realised that she was not just eating a simple sandwich. By concentrating on what she was doing, she had brought colour into her life, and texture, and smell. She was involved in processes, and places as she dined. She was engaged in living, instead of vacancy. She was consuming time itself.

If she had continued multi-tasking, she wouldn’t have done justice to the life of the salmon, or to the rest of the ingredients. Her lunch, and her own life, would have drifted away into non existence.

Image credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/flickr