When do we eat?

My family measures their life by time, not time as we usually see it in minutes and hours, but by the time we eat--breakfast, lunch, and supper.

I grew up in a very German household where your schedule worked around meals, not the other way around. It was always the same meal: meat (venison, beef, or pork), potatoes (mashed, hashed, fried, or baked) with the occasional noodle, and a vegetable (the last thing everyone put on their plate). My father, German like my mother, but with an Irish kick to him, always asked my mother every night, as we ate supper at the table that was leveled out with a magazine, before he had even finished his plate--"What is for supper tomorrow?"

Food was fuel in our house, not something you had time to enjoy unless it was dessert, but something you needed to do in order to move on with your day. "Full" wasn't a word we used in our house, "more" was.

Now I measure my day by the next meal. I'm always hungry. I could go for some of my mother's Swedish meatballs. (Not everything in our house was German.)