MANNERS MAKYTH MAN?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 355, 12 April 1946, Page 20

MANNERS MAKYTH MAN?

(Written for. "The Listener’ by DR.

MURIEL

BELL

Nutritionist to the Health Department)

ners. And some of them have done us no good. Why should it be manners not to soak up the gravy on your plate when you know that it contains a considerable portion of the B vitamins that came out of your meat during the cooking? , Why again, leave behind the egg-yolk which has all/the vitamin A of the egg and which is a bigger contributor of vitamin D than any othe: of cur food-stuffs-leaving it simply because it is unmanageable except through the assistance of a piece of bread. A statement was made not IJnng ago by a dentist that the use of a knife and fork has done a great deal cf damage to the teeth, in that these implements have done away with the exercise to the jaws, and massage to the teeth, attendant on biting and tearing our food. The children are probably more right than we are when they pick up the chopbone in their hands, perhaps to the shame and confusion of their elders. Why should asparagus be selected as the thing that we are allowed (or even expected) to take up in our fingers, while we are often supposed to spear unmanageable foods with our fork, sometimes with ruination to the clean tablecloth? Yes, and that very clean .table-cloth has been the cause of many derangements in the feeding of children. When B« first, man makyth man-

the one-to-two-year-old wants to feed itself, much gets plastered on the cloth and round the face, as the up-to-date Plunket book Modern Mothercratt so tellingly depicts. To feed the child oneself instéad of letting it go through this rather piggy stage is simply inviting feeding difficulties with the child by giving it a sense of frustration. We all like to see clean table-cloths --and indeed they all help, along with the vase of flowers to aid digestionbut there should be some other way devised for keeping them clean when the infant is learning the co-ordination of movements that wil! lift food accurately to the hole in the face. The food left on your plate "for manners" is a strange survival of a custom which in these tames is badly out of place, but which had as its basis the thought that you should never allow your hostess to think she hadn’t given you enough. The converse-that it is extremely rude to leave some on your plate if you have helped yourself-is..more fitting in these times of world shortages of foodstuffs. Manners should have the basic thought of putting the golden rule into practice and should be shorn of their false gentility. To-day it seems anything but "doing unto others as ye would that they should de to you" to waste food when people in the world are hungry. We need an anti-waste campaign, particularly against the custom of throwing away the ends of the loaf when the world is short of cereals.