Food hierarchy

Nothing surprises me about women’s treatment in Afghanistan anymore.

I've certainly read about men eating first and women and children getting the scraps in modern or fairly modern Afghanistan.

I know. I knew it happened but that picture shocked me.

That’s horrific

This obviously isn't from the West, but I've just been reading about this subject in a great book called "Mother Nature" and saw this picture of twins in Islamabad. You can guess which one is the girl.

Yes the fast breaking snacks in Ramadan have to be served pronto as quickly as possible so people can break fast then pray. But the main meal that’s served after prayers or the Eid main meal I have found gets served to the women first usually, or at exactly the same time. But I mean I can still imagine that in a lot of places and lots of Muslim families they do the penis portions thing too.

I've not experienced Eid but I've done the breaking of the Ramadan fast in Muslim countries. In places that aren't too devout, the food is already plated and ready for the sunset signal, which is a gun blast broadcast on TV and radio. The portions are often equal, or served family-style from big pots in the centre of the table so you can help yourself.

A Muslim work colleague has a domineering father who demands more food than anyone else, despite not working and generally being a nuisance. There is a cultural element to this, but it sounds like a very dysfunctional family too.

Oh to offer a different perspective when I have spent Eid with Muslim friends families the women and children always eat first and the men get what’s left. Even in the mosques I have been in South London the women are served their meal at Ramadan first as a matter of pride and chivalry because they have small children and breast feeding or pregnant mums.

I don’t know what it’s like all over the Muslim world but this is what happens in my community.

Mustang it was the same in my family, admittedly the men did work hard but so did the women, but it was a matter of pride to serve the menz all the best bits and biggest portions and then the mums would pick at their small plates or say they had eaten already.

I want to smack that Evelyn Waugh bloke now. Squish a banana right in his face. Assuming he is now dead though so probably wouldn’t be much use, but that’s so entitled and nasty.

In my experience eating like a bird is said as a gentle chiding but really in admiration for a woman. My mum, who I now think had an eating disorder of some type was a petite size 6 and admired for it, as in ‘oh poor Titania DM, she can’t eat with her nerves oh but she’s kept her figure’.

Also in my family any weight gain in a woman (me!) is commented on constantly, they just have to say something. Even when the weight gain is caused by pregnancy or illness. At meal times I would get, ‘are you eating again?’ I’m yes because it’s dinner time and everyone else is eating and I’m bloody hungry!

Auberon Waugh, journalist son of Evelyn Waugh, wrote something quite moving about this, and the end of rationing. Each child was allowed a banana from the first shipment, where he lived at least. His father took the bananas from Auberon and his sister and ate both of them with cream.

My DM grew up in a large family just after WW2. The food was dished out to the boys in the family first (although my grandfather apparently didn't take much). They would then either eat first or if my grandmother wanted everyone to eat at the same time (christmas dinner etc) the girls would sit on boxes/suitcases pulled out from elsewhere in the house.

I see what you're saying, DJ, but actually it's hard to disentangle in the case of my family history. One of my cousins and I have spent time trying to disentangle what went on in the context of "normal for society" versus "normal for that dysfunctional family" (my mum got the emotional abuse, her dad got the physical abuse, our other uncle got both). My mum and her siblings were deep in what I believe the folks on the stately homes threads call FOG - fear, obligation, guilt. And being abused was their normal as children. So it's far from clear that it would have been reported as something really out of the ordinary, even if it was out of the ordinary (think of the threads on the relationships boards where people post "my parents did xyz to me back in the 70s and I wouldn't dream of doing it to my children - is it just a generational thing, or were they bastards even by the standards of the time?"). All of that generation are now dead, so we can't find out for sure.

My hunch is that it was fairly normal, but varied in severity - see Lottie's point on "Round about a pound a week." My granddad consuming all the cheese ration for what must have been the best part of a decade (I think rationing ended in 1951 or thereabouts) was probably at the extreme end of things, but it would have been fairly normal for the man of the house doing the heavy lifting to get larger portions/better cuts/first go at the tea before it was watered down.

PricklyBall If it wasnt endemic then wouldnt it have been told to you as something he insisted on that was really out of the ordinary and outrageous?

Men used to get the first cup of tea out of the pot. That doesnt sound much, but women used to have to dry and reuse tealeaves. They also mixed them with other kinds of hedgerow leaves like blackberry to make them go further.

NB, that probably sounds like a small deal, "so, she didn't get any cheese, so what?", but remember that rations were pretty close to subsistence, and the cheese in the allowance was part of your protein for the week - so she was permanently down on protein week in, week out. I don't know how the portion sizes in general worked out.

Adding to the family oral histories, my mother was a girl/teenager during WWII and the post-war rationing that followed. The entire family of five's cheese ration used to go into her father's sandwiches to take to work.

(Though in this case, the plural of anecdote isn't data because he was an abusive bully in all sorts of ways, so this needn't be indicative of a systematic thing. Left my mother with terribly disordered eating patterns, because the food she didn't get and the parental love she didn't get all got tangled up in her mind, so that for her whole adult life food became associated with emotional comfort.)

Sorry I should say been seen more what @TitaniasCloset we lived and worked on a dairy farm and I easily on weekends and school holidays did as much if not more than my male counterparts and the men still had first dibs and then again at leftovers. There was many times I went hungry due to the “men need more attitude” obviously realistically they do need a higher amount of calories but that’s not what this was just about. It was definitely a pecking order thing.

Ava iv seen this kind of thing , first hand.

A very detailed source on family income, food, all other expenditure and outcomes in terms of child mortality, in working class families in Lambeth in the Edwardian era is 'Round About a Pound a Week' by Maud Pember Reeves.

In that case, men were certainly given the 'treats', termed 'relish' like a bit of bacon with their breakfast, or some fish with dinner. They were given more food and feeding them enough was a priority, because the family income depended upon their ability to work, mostly not in heavy manual jobs but they worked long hours and many walked miles to and from work, so were at home only to eat and sleep.

Children and women did next best and there was a lot of very basic food e.g. bread and marg, bread and dripping. (There's a whole section on how the do-gooding researchers tried to persuade them to make porridge, as a more nutritious, cheap breakfast - which explains in detail why it's not actually cheap or easy if you've no milk, only one pan and limited fuel and water).

The charts plotting various results are fascinating. What stands out is that the factor correlating to high infant and childhood mortality is quality of housing. Cramped, windowless rooms allowed infectious disease to take hold more easily. Families who prioritised better housing over funeral insurance, clothes and even better food, had better survival rates (that's a very crude summary).

The other really interesting and resonant thing about the book is that it was an investigation into the truth behind the governing class's ideas about how the 'only just managing' WC spent their money. The stand-out result was that the men were a lot less selfish than people assumed.

There was an assumption that WC men spent lots of money on drink and could easily afford more comfortable lives for their families if they just managed their money better - in part based on comfortable MC people doing 'living off minimum wage for a week' style experiments but failing to account for their pre-existing capital, like nice housing, clothes etc. In fact, the men barely drank at all, at most once a week, as they handed over the bulk of their wages to their wives, who then budgeted extremely carefully.

So in that case - and it was a very carefully selected group; no-one in desperate poverty, or with a higher than 'scraping by' wage - there was an accepted level of selfishness amongst men (e.g. if they gained tips through their work they'd keep them for treats and drink, even if they amounted to 5-10% of household income and could have made a difference to the family budget, shoes for a child, pay off short-term debt etc). But, what really comes across is that everyone worked relentlessly hard and did so for the whole family.

So, while I don't doubt the sense of the OP and would be interested to see other examples from other times, places and social segments, the lived reality hasn't always been at he worst end of the selfishness scale by any means.

I can well believe it. My Mum is one of five and often talked of how the majority of food money would be spent on her Father. A man expected meat daily and the kids got what was left; usually not meat. She says they used to hover near him hoping he’d give them some and the kids dreaded school holidays because at least at school they got FSM so were sure of one good meal a day. This was in the midlands back in the 1950s.

I’d be really interested to read more if anyone can point me in the right direction.

Eating like a bird is a compliment? I don't think so. Usually it's the opposite - with the implication the woman should eat more.

Still a thing in India

Crap my thought process is westernised....

Still a thing in India www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41148492

This matches what my older female relatives told me. My Mum was considered the rebel of the family, she was one of 10 children, all older brothers. She was taken in and raised by an aunt.
When she married into my Dads family, the women were slaves to the men. They would eat first, then the kids would be fed, then the women would get whatever scraps were left over.
When they cooked a family meal, she'd use portion control to hold an entire chicken back for the women.

In the past in Austria, women weren't even allowed their own plate; they had to eat from their husbands. Obviously a good wife wouldn't let their man go hungry so they pretended to eat like birds. (thats always been a complement for the way women eat.)

Because of my mothers example I always assumed that was a polite fiction, and women would actually eat behind the scenes in private. But I was in an antique shop recently and there was a rack of Victorian womens button boots; they were around a size 3.