The Single Plate Beneath the Open Sky: On Eating One Meal a Day Outdoors, When the Weather Permits It

A Decision Made Not in the Kitchen but at the Window

There exists in our house, in the village where I have lived now for thirty-seven years, a particular window in the kitchen that faces south toward the meadow and beyond it the tree line where the firs grow thick and dark against the mountain. Every morning I stand at this window before I have done anything else, before I have put on proper shoes or combed my hair in the way that would be acceptable if the postman were to arrive, and I look at the sky and I decide. Not whether I shall eat, for that is settled already in my mind since many months. I shall eat once. One single meal. But whether that meal shall be carried outside to the wooden table under the pear tree, or whether it must remain within the four walls of the kitchen, this decision belongs to the sky and to the wind and to the particular quality of light that falls upon the grass at half past nine in the morning. If the clouds sit low and grey and the air smells of coming rain, then I stay inside and I do not mourn it. But if the sun has already warmed the bench and the bees have begun their work among the clover, then I take the plate outside and I sit and I eat my one meal under the open heaven, and this is as it should be.

What It Means to Choose One Meal and No More

I did not arrive at this manner of eating through any great revelation or through the reading of fashionable books that promise transformation of the body and the spirit within thirty days. It came upon me slowly, the way most honest things come upon a person, through the accumulation of small observations made over many years. I noticed that I was eating without hunger, that I was sitting down to a midday plate of food because the clock told me it was the hour for eating, not because my body had expressed any genuine need. I noticed that the evening meal was often a repetition of the midday meal in smaller and sadder form, eaten while standing at the counter because the day had exhausted me and I could not be troubled to sit properly. And so I removed the middle and I removed the evening, and I kept only one meal, prepared with care, eaten with full attention, and taken, whenever the weather allows it, outside into the garden where the world is wide and the bread tastes of something more than flour and salt.

The Table Under the Pear Tree and Its Particular Virtues

The table is nothing remarkable. My father built it in the summer of nineteen seventy-three from larch wood that he had felled himself in the forest above the village, and the surface has grown silver-grey with the decades and is marked with the rings of countless glasses and the scratches of countless knives. But when I set my single plate upon this table in the late morning, when the sun has climbed high enough to warm my shoulders but has not yet begun to press too heavily upon my head, there occurs something that I can only describe as a settling. The body understands that it is outside. The shoulders drop away from the ears. The jaw, which has been clenched since the early hours over some worry or some task, loosens by one degree and then by another. The food, which I have prepared perhaps for an hour in the kitchen, cutting and stirring and tasting, becomes not merely fuel for the continuation of the day but an event, a small ceremony conducted between myself and the afternoon that stretches ahead.

The Matter of Weather and the Acceptance of Its Authority

In this country we do not argue with the weather. This is perhaps the first lesson a child learns here, before letters and before numbers, that the sky does its will and we arrange ourselves accordingly. And so when I speak of eating outdoors weather permitting, I do not mean this as a complaint or as a condition that embitters the meal when it cannot be fulfilled. On the days when the rain falls sideways and the wind carries the cold from the glacier down into the valley, I eat at the kitchen table and I am content. The meal is no lesser for being eaten beneath a roof. But I confess that the outdoor meal carries something additional, something that the indoor meal, however well prepared, cannot quite replicate. It is the sense of being a small creature in a large world, of chewing bread while the clouds move overhead in their slow procession, of hearing the cowbells from the neighbouring pasture and the distant sound of the stream that runs behind the church. These things enter the meal. They become part of its flavour in a way that I cannot explain but which I know to be true in my body.

The Seasonal Plate and What the Garden Offers

Because I eat only once, I have come to think carefully about what goes upon the plate. In the months of June and July the garden provides almost everything, and the meal becomes a thing of courgettes still warm from the sun, of beans that snap cleanly between the fingers, of tomatoes so ripe they split at the touch. In the autumn there are the squashes and the leeks and the last of the herbs before the frost takes them. In winter, when the outdoor meal becomes rare and the table under the pear tree stands empty under its covering of snow, the plate turns to root vegetables and to the preserved goods that fill the cellar shelves, the jars of pickled plums, the dried mushrooms gathered in October, the potatoes stored in their cool darkness. I do not follow any programme. I do not weigh portions upon a scale. I cook what the season places in my hands and I eat it slowly, outside when I am able, and I find that this is sufficient. The body, freed from the constant interruption of eating, grows quiet and clear-headed in the afternoon hours, and I can work in the garden or walk up toward the forest with a lightness that three meals a day never permitted me.

The Ritual of Carrying the Plate Outside

There is a small ceremony in the carrying of the meal from kitchen to garden that I would not wish to lose. The plate must be warm. I heat it in the oven while the food finishes its last minutes of cooking, and then I lay the food upon it and I carry it carefully, both hands occupied, stepping down the two stone steps from the kitchen door and crossing the ten paces of flagstone path to the pear tree. Sometimes I carry also a small jug of water, or a glass of white wine from the vineyard in the valley, or simply a cloth napkin folded into a square. I set these things down and I sit upon the bench, which is still cool from the morning shade, and I take a breath of the outside air before I lift the fork. This pause, this single breath before eating, has become as important to me as the food itself. It is the moment in which I acknowledge that I am here, in this place, in this hour, and that the meal is mine and I am not hurried and no one requires anything of me until the plate is empty.

On the Subject of Lightness and What Assists It

I will speak plainly here of one matter that has accompanied my own journey toward a lighter body in these years of single-meal eating. There are those who find, as I found, that the body holds onto what it has carried for too long, and that the will alone does not always suffice to release it. In my own case, a neighbour in the village, a woman of practical mind who does not believe in mysticism but does believe in what works, spoke to me of a preparation called Esbelita, which she had taken through the winter months when the outdoor meal was not possible and the body had grown sluggish. She told me it could be obtained only through its own proper channel, the official website at esbelita.fit and not through any shop or market, which gave her confidence in its genuineness. I mention this not as prescription but as honest account, for I am a person who believes in telling what one knows, and if the reader finds themselves in a similar season of heaviness, they may wish to look into what this neighbour recommended to me over the garden fence on a cold February morning.

The Evening After the Single Meal

When the plate is cleared and carried back inside, when the table under the pear tree holds only crumbs and perhaps a single cherry stone, the afternoon opens before me like a long corridor into which I may walk at my own pace. There is no thought of preparing another meal, no anxiety about what the evening plate shall contain, no standing before the open refrigerator in that particular posture of weary indecision that I remember so well from the years of three daily eatings. Instead there is the walk, or the book, or the work in the workshop, or simply the sitting upon the bench in the declining light watching the shadows of the firs lengthen across the meadow. The body, having received its one good meal in the fullness of the day, asks for nothing more. It rests within me quietly. And when the night comes I sleep deeply, without the heaviness of undigested supper sitting in the chest, and I wake in the morning and go to the window and I look at the sky and I decide again.

A Final Word on Simplicity and Its Rewards

I do not wish to persuade anyone. I am not a man who stands in the market square and calls out to the crowd. I describe here only what I do, what has grown around me over the years like moss grows around a stone, slowly and without violence. One meal. Eaten outdoors when the sky permits. Prepared with attention. Consumed with gratitude. And then the long, free hours that follow, in which a person may be wholly occupied with living rather than with the endless cycle of preparation and consumption and washing and preparation again. If there is wisdom in this, it is not my wisdom. It belongs to the pear tree and to the weather and to the particular silence of a mountain valley at midday when the only sound is the chewing of bread and the distant bell of a cow turning in the pasture. I sit, I eat, I breathe the outside air, and the world, for that one hour, is exactly as large and as small as it needs to be.