Belgium - At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala

At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

Belgium

Charlotte De Backer

The people in the photo in this entry are a typical young Belgian family having a meal on an average weekday. Charlotte surprised them on an ordinary day at the end of the workweek with a visit around dinnertime to see what they were eating and how. This way, she was able to get an accurate glimpse of daily life and weekday meals in Belgium.

The family in this picture consists of Sofie, Tom, Emma, and Victor. Sofie is a good friend of Charlotte’s and a magnificent cook. She and Tom care a lot about healthy foods, home cooking, and knowing where the food on their plate comes from. They grow some vegetables and herbs in their city garden. During the weekends they often help out at local farms, together with their kids, Emma and Victor. This way, the children learn where food comes from at an early age. Both Emma and Victor are fond of food too. They are picky, which is not unusual at their young age, but have learned to give all foods a try and only judge after having taken a bite. This family represents a well-educated young family from a higher-than-average social class, living in the city. Their eating habits may well represent the eating habits of single parents and lower-social-class families as well, as many people in Belgium have always cared about healthy food and home cooking and increasingly do today. The fact that they live in the city does set them apart from families living in the countryside. Both groups of people cook and care about food, but in the past decades the awareness about sustainable food consumption has grown among city people and not so much among people living in the countryside. The latter also tend to stick more closely to a classical Belgian meal consisting of meat, vegetables, and potatoes, while city people tend to be more adventurous in their food choices, partly due to the fact that they also live together with people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

As can be seen from the picture, this family is having stir-fried vegetables with noodles today. When Charlotte asks Sofie for the recipe, she looks confused, as this meal does not come with a recipe other than “I just tossed together all the leftover vegetables from our weekly vegetable package with some curry, coconut milk, and cooked noodles.”

To understand what Sofie is talking about, we will decipher their meal and any other average meal on a typical weekday in Belgium today. We will start with the planning and cooking, turn to the consumption of the food along with all the social activities surrounding a meal in Belgium, and finish with the cleaning of the table.

Albala

A Belgian family of four enjoys a meal scrambled together from vegetable leftovers. It is important to them to prepare fresh meals from scratch, even after a full day of work and school. Dishes are placed centrally on the table, and foods are shared. The children take the lead in serving everyone. (Courtesy of Charlotte De Backer)

PLANNING AND COOKING A SIMPLE WEEKLY FAMILY DINNER IN BELGIUM TODAY

Cooking a meal from scratch on a weekday is no exception in Belgium. Although time spent on cooking a meal has declined, cooking is still strongly embedded in Belgians’ daily rituals today (Daniels et al., 2012). It is a tradition that young people inherit from their parents and grandparents (De Backer, 2013). It is not an easy task for many, given the fact that most families consist of either two working parents or a single working parent. Most people work full-time or at least four days per week. An average workday ends between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., and most people still need to commute 30 minutes to 1 hour before they arrive home. Consequently, having a family dinner with all members may not be a daily option for everyone, yet still an average Belgian family takes the effort to make this happen at least three to four days a week. It may be a daunting task, especially for those who do their grocery shopping on a daily basis. However, many people in this country aim to concentrate their grocery shopping on Saturday. Saturday is the busiest day for food shopping, and this is partly due to the fact that supermarkets close between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. on weekdays, and smaller food shops even close at 6:00 p.m. And all shops are closed on Sunday except for some smaller local stores, night shops, and local food markets. Food markets in Belgium are usually very small, with a couple of dozen of stalls. When they are bigger, they include a lot of nonfood stalls as well. Food markets may be organized on weekdays or weekend days. In general they are not at all comparable to the farmers’ markets in the United States, where food can be bought straight from the food producers. In Belgium, food traders in between the production and consumption process occupy food markets. It more or less ends up in an open-air space where small shops open up their business temporarily. They are popular among older generations but do not attract a lot of young people except when genuine farmers’ markets are being organized, which only happens a few times a year, when local producers come to promote their produce in a small organic market in town. On these exceptional occasions, young families fill the scene and hope that these markets will become embedded in a weekly tradition some day. Up until now, most young families plan their weekly groceries on Saturday, and supermarkets become very busy. Alternatives to the weekly trip to these overcrowded supermarkets are on the rise and include online shopping, weekly fruit and/or vegetable bags, and home-delivered ready-to-cook packages. Online shopping can nowadays be done at most supermarkets. You place your order online, and a day or more later your groceries are ready to be picked up—a convenient solution at a small extra cost. Observing the people lining to pick up these groceries in the past few months, Charlotte noticed that it is a man’s task. Young children, eager to help load the groceries into the trunk of the car, often accompany their dad.

Cookbooks

Most people around the world for most of history never needed a cookbook or recipes. They learned to cook directly from family members. There were manuscript cookbooks in ancient and medieval times, but they were largely written for professionals as an aid to memory. The book as a means of teaching cooking was invented with printing, and the first printed cookbook appeared in the 1470s (Platina’s On Honest Pleasure). From that time to now, people, increasingly literate, have used cookbooks to explore new recipes, ingredients, and techniques and expand their culinary horizons. The digital age may change all that, as interactive forms of education will help people learn through seeing, hearing, and experiencing instruction rather than receiving it via the written word. Today we are in a transitional period, and cookbooks are still among the most viable sectors of the publishing industry, but that may change in the future.

Next, increasingly people opt for weekly fruit and/or vegetable bags, the equivalent of what in the United States is called a community-supported agriculture box. These can be collected once a week at a central pick-up spot, and often families open up their garage once a week to become a collection point for people in their neighborhood. These bags are most often part of a food co-op system whereby local producers are merged together. Therefore, the fruits and vegetables bought via this system are local and seasonal, which also motivates many young families in Belgium today to opt for this. The family portrayed in this picture makes use of this system. Every week they collect a bag of fruits and a bag of vegetables from a collection point near their house. The food co-op they are part of also offers extra foods that can be ordered online: cheeses, bread, and some meat. Using this system, Sofie and Tom can save a lot of time on shopping for fresh produce. As with most of these systems, they cannot choose their weekly fruits and vegetables, but what they will receive is announced on the food co-op’s website a few days in advance. Moreover, the benefit of this system for Sofie and Tom, and many other families, is that it relieves them from the weekly and daily burden of planning a meal. By opting for these packages, someone else plans which foods will be served on the table in the upcoming days. Often these food co-ops will hand out some recipes, so families only need to follow the instructions to cook a fresh meal based on fresh produce. Very comparable to this system and taking it even one step further are companies that deliver packages of ingredients for cooking dinners. These packages may or may not include meat and can be ordered for one person up to a family of five or more for only a few days a week or every day of the week. There are many options, and whatever you choose, your package is home-delivered on an evening during the week. The number of companies offering this service is rapidly increasing, and even though it comes at an extra cost, these boxes are becoming very popular. Many of Charlotte’s friends and colleagues opt for this system, and all laud the fact that they no longer need to waste time thinking and planning what to serve and are being freed from the weekly trip to the overcrowded supermarket. In addition, these boxes offer healthy balanced meals, and many customers even lose some weight or at least feel healthier when switching to this system.

Incidentally, the stir-fried meal from this picture is vegetarian. This family does eat meat but not on a daily basis. Cutting down on meat to become flexitarian or vegetarian is heavily promoted in Belgium, and one of the campaigns promotes “Meatless Thursdays,” asking people not to eat any meat on Thursday. Several schools engage in this project, and families pick up on it too. In practice, people schedule vegetarian meals on different days of the week. Sofie admits that it often happens toward the end of the week, to cook up any leftovers from the vegetable package. Stir-fried meals or quiches then become a quick solution to avoid leftovers. The ready-to-cook boxes also tend to schedule vegetarian meals toward the end of the week because of practical reasons: fresh fish and meat in Belgium only last for a few days and can best be consumed early on in the week when the box is delivered.

The meal in this picture was prepared by Sofie. It is not uncommon in Belgium today for women to take the lead in everyday cooking practices (Daniels et al., 2012; De Backer, 2013). Men cook too not only on special occasions but on weekdays as well, but this still seems an exception rather than a general rule. In some families men do all the cooking, but again these are the exceptions. In an average Belgian family, women still do most of the daily cooking.

“AAN TAFEL!” (“TO THE TABLE!”): DECIPHERING THE FAMILY HAVING A MEAL TOGETHER

In this picture, the children and parents eat together at a dinner table in the kitchen. Having dinner at a dinner table is standard in Belgium. Eating in front of the television is an exception to this rule, and most families will have their children seated at the dinner table until they have finished their plate and been excused from the table. As a result, children sometimes eat faster to be able to have time to watch television or play video games, and in some families children even seem to skip meals to have time for media consumption, but these are exceptions (Van den Bulck and Eggermont, 2006; Custers and Van den Bulck, 2010). Generally, and especially in families with children who can stay up later than 8:00 p.m., the sound of “Aan tafel,” which can be translated as “Dinner is ready,” being shouted through the house announces the start of an almost daily ritual: the family being seated around the dinner table together.

Parents and children are seated around the table together in this picture. As mentioned earlier, this is a daunting task to achieve if both parents work and often work late. Therefore, this may not happen every day of the week, but most families try to make this happen most days of the week (Mestdag and Vandeweyer, 2005; Mestdag and Glorieux, 2009). In Belgium, the time spent at the table together has declined in past decades from about an hour to about half an hour (Mestdag and Glorieux, 2009). Then again, half an hour a day is sufficient for families to catch up on what happened that day. It used to be the case that people ate in silence, as our grandparents can still recall. Nowadays, however, family meals are moments to talk about what happened at school or at work and to exchange other information that needs to be shared with the entire family. Of course, these family conversations might as well take place during other activities, but no other activity enlightens a conversations as much as a meal. It is part of Belgium’s tradition that having a meal is about so much more than the intake of your calories. Having a meal stands for being in good company, having a good conversation and a good laugh as well. Mealtimes are very much still the social glue in Belgium today, both at home and at the office.

When this picture was taken, the meal was used as an opportunity to teach the children about food practices in different cultures. The meal could broadly be labeled as “Asian,” and the children were given chopsticks to eat like Asian people. Emma was quite keen about this, although Victor was not convinced about the “unpractical” utensils and quickly grabbed a fork again. They both knew that in Asia food sharing is a common practice, and they explained to Charlotte how people sometimes even eat out of one bowl, which they demonstrated with great enthusiasm. The scenery soon became quite hectic, with the children picking food out of the bowl and each other’s plates, but Sofie and Tom did not mind. This way they playfully learn something and eat their vegetables too, they joked. Moreover, it is also typical for a Belgian meal that all food is placed centrally on the table, and portions are served. It is not necessarily the cook who needs to serve the food. In this family everyone serves everyone. There is only one rule: you never serve only yourself but always serve other people first. This food-sharing practice is part of a typical Belgian food culture whereby dishes are shared with multiple family members. “Eten wat de pot schaft,” which can be translated as “Eat what is being served,” is an expression that signifies a typical Belgian dinner. A person eats what is being served, whether he or she likes it or not. The person who prepared the meal invested a lot of time, energy, and caring into preparing the dinner, and by eating the foods, one expresses gratitude for all this effort. Moreover, by sharing food people are primed into thinking about fairness, equal portions, who is being served first, and so on. And Belgian young adults who report that they often consumed food this way as children tend to score higher on a self-report altruism scale compared to young adults who said they didn’t often eat this way as children (De Backer et al., 2015). The latter, of course, implies that not all families in Belgium share home-cooked meals on a frequent basis. True, there are exceptions. People eat out or opt for convenient ready-made meals to be consumed at home in Belgium (Daniels et al., 2014). One of the benefits of eating out or ordering ready-made meals is that families can cater to individual preferences: a salad for mom, macaroni and cheese for the kids, and a steak with fries for dad—all are possible. It would be crazy to try to prepare all these different meals to cater to the individual preferences of each family member. And still, some Belgians do seem to be that crazy. Some parents do prepare different home-cooked dishes for their children. These so-called children’s meals can range from simply being some bread with fillings (sweet or savory) to warm meals liked by children, such as macaroni with ham and cheese or other popular pasta dishes. Most families who eat this way include one of the parents working late, so children are served at an earlier hour than their parents. One of the parents will cook a very simple meal for the children around 6:00 p.m., and together the couple will cook a different meal for themselves when the children are asleep. Another common option in families with young children in Belgium is that the parent who gets home first will eat some leftover foods from the day before with the children and cook a fresh meal when the children are asleep. This is how Sofie’s family survived the first years with their kids, finding a way to be able to make fresh home-cooked meals that could be served at different times of the evening.

In this picture everyone is drinking water. Water is a healthy choice for the children, and the Belgian government promotes having water with food. Soft drinks are kept for special occasions or when having a drink outside the house. Adults drink water with their food as well, but most will also have some wine or beer. The choice for wine or beer often depends on what is being served. Fish is traditionally accompanied by white wine, most other dishes are accompanied by red wine, and only a few dishes are served with beer traditionally. However, serving beer with food is on the rise in Belgium. It has a strong and long-standing tradition of being a beer-brewing country, where hundreds of different beers are found. Yet until recently, beer was served in bars, at parties, as an appetizer, or at other occasions in between meals. People had snacks with beer, but it was not that common to serve beer with a main dish. This changed when a few well-known Belgian chefs started to serve beer with their menu, and beer-food pairings became trendy. This is a smart choice, because with all the beers being produced in our small country, the options for pairings are plenty. Among the easiest beer-food pairings are dishes made with beer, which have traditionally always been served with beer. Recently voted the most typical Belgian dish, best liked by most Belgians today, is stoverij, which can be translated as “Belgian stew.” The recipe is below, but be careful in selecting the beer: good-quality Belgian beer is a necessity; if you trade it for a cheaper beer, the recipe will fail.

NEVER TAKE AWAY A BELGIAN’S PLATE TOO SOON: CLEANING AND LEFTOVERS

When people have finished their meal in Belgium, they often sit around the table for a while with dirty plates and dishes still in front of them. Moreover, Belgians feel appalled if their plate is taken away too early. Taking away the plates is equal to taking away part of the pleasure. With your plate still in front of you, enjoying the aftertaste and the good conversation is as important as having the meal. Then, when do you take away the plates? It is hard to answer this question; one needs to feel when the moment has come. Often this happens when the conversation becomes less lively, when the glasses and bottles are getting empty, or when the time has come to serve the next part of the meal. While it used to be the mother or the host who did all or most of the clearing back in the old days, nowadays the entire family helps to clear the table. Parents and children will put dirty dishes in the dishwasher or the sink and help clean everything.

On special occasions a dessert will automatically follow the dinner, but even on weekdays families might have a small sweet snack at the end of the meal. Sofie’s cabinet is always filled with some good-quality Belgian chocolate. A small sweet treat at the end of the meal is also used to make sure the children will finish their plate or at least have tried everything that was on their plate. The adults might have a cup of coffee or some alcohol with this final treat to celebrate the end of the meal and the start of the rest of the evening.

Stoverij (Belgian Stew)

For +/− 4 people

2.2 pounds beef, cut into pieces

2 onions, sliced into rings

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

¼ cup flour

1-3 bay leaves

+/− 2 cups good-quality dark brown Belgian beer (e.g., Leffe, Orval, Westmalle)

Slice of brown bread with strong mustard

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar (or replace the slice of bread with 2 slices of gingerbread, the Belgian peperkoek)

Butter to bake

1.Season beef with salt and pepper in a bowl; add flour and toss to coat. A quick and easy trick from my grandmother: throw everything in a clean plastic bag and shake well.

2.Cook the beef in butter, and do this in small batches; the meat needs to be crisp and brown on the outside and may still be raw on the inside.

3.In a Dutch oven or large cast-iron pan, cook the onions in butter very slowly so they do not burn.

4.Add the meat to the onion, and add the bay leaves.

5.Pour the beer over the meat so that all the meat is covered with beer.

6.Put the bread and mustard on top.

7.Bring to a boil and then simmer for 2-3 hours without a lid, stirring occasionally.

Serve either with boiled potatoes and freshly made applesauce or with home-cooked fries and a salad.

FURTHER READING

Books

Scholliers, P. Food Culture in Belgium. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2009.

Van Waerebeek, R., and M. Robbins. Everybody Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook. New York: Workman Publishing, 1996.

Articles on Cooking Habits in Belgium

Daniels, S., I. Glorieux, J. Minnen, and T. P. van Tienoven. “More Than Preparing a Meal? Concerning the Meanings of Home Cooking.” Appetite 58(3) (2012): 1050-1056.

Daniels, S., I. Glorieux, J. Minnen, T. P. van Tienoven, and D. Weenas. “Convenience on the Menu? A Typological Conceptualization of Family Food Expenditures and Food-Related Time Patterns.” Social Science Research 51 (2015): 205-218.

Articles on Family Meals in Belgium

De Backer, C. J. “Family Meal Traditions: Comparing Reported Childhood Food Habits to Current Food Habits among University Students.” Appetite 69 (2013): 64-70.

De Backer, C. J., M. L. Fisher, K. Poels, and K. Ponnet. “‘Our’ Food versus ‘My’ Food: Investigating the Relation between Childhood Shared Food Practices and Adult Prosocial Behavior in Belgium.” Appetite 84 (2015): 54-60.

Mestdag, I., and I. Glorieux. “Change and Stability in Commensality Patterns: A Comparative Analysis of Belgian Time-Use Data from 1966, 1999 and 2004.” Sociological Review 57(4) (2009): 703-726.

Mestdag, I., and J. Vandeweyer. “Where Has Family Time Gone? In Search of Joint Family Activities and the Role of the Family Meal in 1966 and 1999.” Journal of Family History 30(3) (2005): 304-323.

Articles on Media Interfering with Meals in Belgium

Custers, K., and J. Van den Bulck. “Television Viewing, Computer Game Play and Book Reading during Meals Are Predictors of Meal Skipping in a Cross-Sectional Sample of 12-, 14-and 16-Year-Olds.” Public Health Nutrition 13(4) (2010): 537-543.

Van den Bulck, J., and S. Eggermont. “Media Use as a Reason for Meal Skipping and Fast Eating in Secondary School Children.” Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics 19(2) (2006): 91-100.