A Smoothie for Dinner

About a week ago, a friend of mine and I were hanging out at my house, and he asked me if I wanted to go to Brooks for dinner with him. I was feeling pretty tired and lazy, so I said, “I think I’m just going to stay home and make a smoothie for dinner.”

He looked at me incredulously. “You can’t eat a smoothie for dinner.”

“Why not?” I replied. “I’m not that hungry, and they’re pretty filling. Plus, I don’t feel like cooking.”

He paused. “But it’s not balanced,” he said.

“It has fruit, so plenty of fiber. And it will have plain yogurt, so a lot of protein. I could even put some spinach in if I wanted. And I’ve had plenty of grains today, so that doesn’t really matter.”

He wasn’t satisfied, but he could not fully explain why. “If you stay home, please just eat something else, too.”

Clearly, a smoothie did not fit the social conception of a “meal,” because it falls somewhere in the problematic realm of neither food nor drink, as described by Bisogni et al. As shown by the participants in Bisogni’s study, it seems like a meal needs to have both food and drink. Whereas snacks and drinks were very related to the physical state of the body, with snacks being referred to as “fuel” to quench thirst and assuage hunger, meals were more tied to social situations, being at home, and certain times of the day. Snacks also tended to be associated with more active activities as opposed to the sedentary activities of meals. So here I was, breaking the food-drink rule of a meal, eating by myself, consuming something that would allow me to continue active tasks such as cleaning, and consuming it purely for the fuel and nutrients of food. So, while the smoothie made physical sense for my body at that time, it did not fit any of the other requirements for a meal and was, therefore, an unacceptable dinner.

From this encounter and the reading, we can see how a “meal” means something more than just eating a large quantity of food. Participants described “large snacks,” which could not count as “small meals.” Additionally, some participants referred to a “second dinner” instead of an evening or late-night snack or big snack. How do labels, then, help us understand the meaning of our food episodes? If I had told my friend that I was going to skip dinner but that I would have a smoothie later, would his reaction have been different? It seems like the answer might be yes because the foods that we eat for meals seem to require more of a slow-down, and if I had admitted that my smoothie wasn’t a meal, it might have been more acceptable. My smoothie didn’t fit the slow-down approach of a meal, but it certainly fit the image of a drink or snack. For instance, we can grab snack foods with our hands; with meal foods, we must use utensils that enter our mouths, as noted by Douglas. Drinks we can take on the run; a plate of food we must sit down with. Snacks can be at any time of day; meals tend to be at times when the family can gather. So, even now when we might not do what we are supposed to at meals – slow down, socialize – we still hold onto the original food requirements for what makes a proper meal. It’s no mistake that meals have particular standards. As Douglas discusses, in the repeated patterns and analogies lie some sort of social meaning. We did not just choose arbitrary food rules so that we would know who was smart enough to catch on. The meal, its order, the space it takes place in, and many other factors reflect what the meal is supposed to be, what it is supposed to mean. And a smoothie, no mater how many varied, healthy things I put in it, just cannot be a meal.