Parties and Feasts

Another generalization: most Indonesians, certainly if they are past thirty, have known hunger at one time or another—not necessarily starvation, but the nagging feeling of being always a bit short on quantity or variety of food. Here in London I see advertisements enticing tourists to attend mediaeval banquets, but the point of a banquet in the Middle Ages was presumably that it might be your last square meal for several months. Today, even the older generation in Britain, who must have known hardship in the 1940s, don’t seem to get that uninhibited sensual delight from eating that is the privilege of those who know that hunger, or at least monotony, is never far away.