If you want to go out for lunch on a Sunday, forget phoning a restaurant on the eve. “Eh, Misis, you need to phone by Wednesday to book for Sunday,” you’ll be told by all restaurants.

And they won’t be bluffing: by noon on Sundays, most restaurants on the island look like bulging canteens, with people crammed in adjacent tables, gorging on huge quantities of food in an all-encompassing din of adults arguing, children screaming, plates clinking and tills ringing.

The latest report by the Today Public Policy Institute, which slammed Malta as one of the fattest, laziest and most car-dependent nations on the planet, comes as no surprise to anyone.

The report, based on an analysis of international statistics, gives a very (damning) account of why the Maltese are so fat. However, it leaves out one crucial thing: the Maltese mentality of ‘tiekol barra’.

In the beginning, we mostly had a vegetable diet. Maltese families ate fish on Wednesdays and Fridays, vegetable dishes such as kawlata or soppa ta’ l-armla the rest of the days and red meat on Sundays.

Then came the 1980s and the need of asserting the social status: look- I’m-better-off-because-I can-afford-to eat-out (similar to the look-I-live-in-an-enormous-villa). So, naturally, everyone started aspiring to eating out, until, three decades on, we’re at a point where on Sundays we all flock to restaurants without even thinking why we’re doing it.

This, I believe, is one cause of our fatty problems: whatever happened to the Sunday lunch at home?

When we go en masse to restaurants, we are doing away with the very essence of the Mediterranean spirit: the family meal at home when you sit around a table, you chat, you discuss a problem, you laugh, you argue, you eat slowly, you digest better.

Oh, but can’t you do that in restaurant, you might ask? Hardly. It’s really not the same when you’re in a room with 100 other people listening in to whatever you’re saying. Moreover, in a restaurant you’re not dictating the pace of the meal: the waiters do and they are in a rush. You don’t get to wander in the kitchen and ask “can I help?”. The plate is plopped in front of you and you gobble up the food to the beat of the clatter around you.

We’ve lost our taste for food

But, you might say, it’s hard these days to find the time to cook huge lunches. We had 15 people over for lunch at home last Sunday and that includes a bunch of children (they love it: in this day and age of 1.4 children per family, friends are the new cousins). We did not have the time to spend an entire Saturday cleaning the fish or stuffing the turkey. Instead I went to Adam, a fishmonger-chef up the road in Mosta who came up with the clever concept of preparing gourmet fish recipes and all you have to do it chuck the elegant fish in the oven. Similarly we got the turkey from a delicatessen and we slow cooked it. Then we went to the farmers’ market and feasted on vast quantities of vegetables for a mere €15.

Of course, I am not saying let’s not go to restaurants ever again. There are some pleasant restaurants which are always consistently good and which don’t have the ‘canteen’ feel. Other rare gems – I can only think of Black Pig and Caviar & Bull – cook food you would never be able to conjure at home, making dining out an amazing food discovery experience. But of course, they are pricey, so they can only be an annual treat.

Which brings me to the point that sometimes I very much fear we’ve lost our taste for food. It’s like we get our pleasure not from the quality of what we eat but the quantity. Which is why we love those ugly, food mass meetings called buffets. “The Maltese love the feel of a bargain even when it comes to food,” a cruise ship captain once told me as he described how Maltese on cruisers pile food on plates like Eiffel Towers. It is what has earned us the label of “gluttons” and the description of “bulging waistlines” in the New York Times this week.

There is another problem: we associate eating out with going out. The ħarġa=food, so of course 100g of pasta won’t do: “Lanqas ħaqq ilbist pulit mzzz.” Whereas elsewhere in Europe going out is a different concept: people go to the theatre, to exhibitions, to football matches or to each other’s houses.

Having said all this, I think we should all aim for a collective New Year’s resolution to promote family lunches at home.

It used to be that Sunday was the day we went out after a week of staying in. The truth is that most of us are out and about all week, evenings and all, and Sunday is the only day we can stay in. So let’s have friends and family over and enjoy our life slowly – if anything it’ll make us less fat.

Happy New Year.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti