The Meal is Over

"Then, when the meal is over and the last dish eaten, there will be no trace of the ugly occasion."

'The meal is over' is a phrase that i had learned from a dearly departed friend of mine. She, as I, had struggled with a love of food. We loved every kind of carbohydrate under the sun... bread, rice, potatoes, and some of the less popular grains such as barley, farro, oats, and wheat. We also liked the starchy vegetables such as peas and corn.
We were gluttons. The meals that we ate in the 80s and 90s were enough to feed two (or possibly three) people. So how did we ever survive? I brought with me some tools of the weight reduction trade; measuring spoons, measuring cups, and a kitchen scale. Even during the ancient times of the disco and post-disco era, food nutrition was made available. It wasn't mandatory until about 1990, but nutrition could certainly be found in most of the common foods of the time.
So we became conscious of what we ate. We had salads with two meals a day and we included ingredients such as watercress, cabbage, and spinach as well as the usual carrots, celery, tomatoes and mushrooms. We ate steamed fish such as orange roughy, red snapper, Dover sole, halibut, or sea bass. Our chicken choices were breasts with the skins removed. We ate foods in the dairy groups; cheeses and yogurt and we looked at beans, legumes, and pulses.
The foods were measured and by doing this we were able to determine how much protein we were taking in. We could also count the carbohydrates. This wasn't done with high level calculations and the numbers were added daily.
These days we have a MyFitnessPal application that lets you scan food labels or that has an enormous data base of most foods on the planet. The micro-nutrients are tabulated and presented based on the percentage of their consumption. Fancy-schmancy.
But one of the key elements of the food consumption was not so much the grace before meals (neither of us had that practice), but rather the end of the meal. We would conclude by stating, "The meal is over," in case anyone was thinking that there might be room for pie. And then we would say a word or two of thanksgiving. Even though we had disposable income back then, we were always thankful for being able to eat well.
I continue this to this day.