Weekends and food

"Ancient cultures like those of the Mayans and the pagans saw time as a wheel, their lives repeating in stages, ever turning. The Judeo-Christians decided that time was actually linear, beginning at creation and moving toward end times. This idea stuck—and it’s way more boring than a wheel." Katrina Onstad

I'm retired, my husband is retired, all my friends are retired (well almost all) so why do I still build my weeks, at least partly, around the weekend?

Why am I thinking about this? Well I am trying to keep my new year's resolution and arrange dinner parties (in this case a lunch), and guess what - I am sticking to the weekend as the appropriate time for this. But why? It really doesn't matter what day I choose. My time should be circular, like the Mayans and Pagans, Buddhists too? - or at least monotonous and yet, in my head, I still have a picture - well a sort of plan or diagram of a week with a flat, monotonous middle bounded at each end by a more solid and taller bar of two days. It's actually very hard to explain but I do have a kind of mental physical picture - that I just cannot shift, even though notionally every day is now equal.

It's certainly true that most days I am not actually sure what day it is until I think about it. There are events here and there but they are not necessarily associated with a particular day - although some are - Italian lessons, film society films, book groups - particular programs on the television. But really every day is potentially the same. Of course not every day is the same but it could be.

"The sun truly rises and sets over twenty-four hours. But the week is man-made, arbitrary, a substance not found in nature. That seven-day cycle in which we mark our meetings, mind birthdays, and overstuff our iCals—buffered on both ends by those promise-filled 48 hours of freedom—only holds us in place because we invented it." Katrina Onstad

And we still do it when it is no longer 48 hours of freedom. We (we retirees that is) have freedom all the time.

Briefly - the weekend came about because of two different causes - religion and overwork. On the seventh day God rested after having finished creating everything and so a day of rest became part of the Judeo/Christian religions. The actual day varied and still does, but, interestingly, this is changing because of the influence of the Western working week of Monday to Friday. Nevertheless there are parts of the world where the official weekend is different to ours.

"Previously, workers tended to complete their work organically, in accordance with natural laws: the sherman’s tasks beholden to the tides; the farmer’s to the seasons. But with industrialization, clocks now determined the task, and the measure of productivity was how much labor could be wrung out of a worker over a period of time. Time had a dollar value, and became a commodity, not to be wasted. " Katrina Onstad

In the mid nineteenth century workers in the north of England were able to squeeze a half day on Saturday out of their employers. And then they binged in the free time and took Monday off to recover.

"They were paid on Saturday, and stuck in church on Sunday, so they stole that Monday to burn through their paychecks and have some fun." Katrina Onstad

And so eventually they were also given the whole of Saturday as well to avoid the absenteeism of Mondays. Mind you I think that probably still continues. The Depression helped in all this because there was not enough work to go around and so a shorter working week was introduced. Hard to go back to a longer one after that.

There are also parts of the world where the weekend doesn't exist at all - even in the west. To retirees and farmers and others whose work depends on natural cycles of time rather than man-made ones, there is no weekend. When we were in Italy a few years ago we visited a small family run Parmigiano Reggiano cheese-making facility. It was just a husband and his wife and they worked 365 days a year. There were no weekends - or even holidays. The cows were milked every day and the cheese had to be made every day.

To the few primitive societies that still exist there also is no weekend. The need to find or raise food is the same every day. To those people who work in 24 hour jobs such as hospitals, police, entertainment, mothers, maybe even retail now, the weekend is a moveable feast as they work shifts and change their days off. (And there are many more such professions and jobs of course.) And more and more of them as we spend more time eating out and shopping and going to films and plays and other entertainments.

"a contradiction that sits at the heart of the weekend as we have come to know it: It’s both a time of rest and a time of consumption." Katrina Onstad

"the mission of production—and business—is to “create the wants it seeks to satisfy”—and the weekend is the time of satisfying wants." John Kenneth Galbraith

And increasingly as people work more and more from home and online, the weekend for them is moving and transforming.

But what has all this got to do with food? Well I think the shape of the week in my head, and the subsequent impulse to keep to weekends for dinner parties, lies in the structure of my childhood weeks. Some of it was nothing to do with food - washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, school Monday to Friday, but some of it was definitely to do with food. There were certain patterns we stuck to - the Sunday roast, Shepherd's pie on Mondays to use up the leftovers from Sunday, fish on Fridays - not that we were excessively religious in my house, but we did stick to fish on Fridays. I can't remember the other ones but I do know our meals tended to follow a weekly routine. And so in my head the weekend is the time of plenty, of celebration and not just because there was no school or no work but because the food was a bit more flash.

It's obviously an ingrained habit that I just have to kick.

I have quoted Katrina Onstad extensively in this post. She has apparently written a book called The Weekend Effect: The Life-Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork and the Quartz website had a long excerpt from it. It was very interesting. Have a look.