Communal meals used to be all the rage when I was a kid. Even right up to the global outbreak of Covid, sharing was caring. Sure, there were ‘sneeze-guards’ at the all-you-can-eat buffet diners, but mostly, smorgasbords were common and cool, and tongs were preferred… but optional.
Now in our post-Covid world, people are more concerned about who’s-touching-what-where-when. Supermarkets are moving away from ‘help yourself’ chip-and-nut bars and cereal containers. And I suppose we’ll never see a chocolate-or-cheesy fondue set ever again. Anxiety surrounding the ‘double-dip’ was always a primal fear, but it would now be almost triggering to watch someone approach the melted meal with bitten-bread.
In Australia, the tub of orange slices disappeared from the soccer sidelines, and the lolly bowl at parties tends to now be filled with individually wrapped goodies rather than uncovered candy, or popcorn. Gosh, do you remember when people used to reach in and grab a handful of popcorn, eat it and then stick their grubby, possibly licked, fingers back in for more? Even I shudder.
(That said, I don’t know about where you live, but Halloween in Australia is becoming bigger and bigger, and somehow the public-candy-container seems to be one of the few things that has survived the post-Covid-panic.)
Back to fondue*. Have you ever had a party meal cooked on those little stoves? Do you remember how the room always had a chemical smell, and even the food tasted faintly like petrochemicals? Can you remember how the paper napkins always seemed perilously close to the open flame? Or the way that someone ‘dipping’ seemed to get ‘dunked’ as they lost their food off their fork with a messy splash that sent hot liquid food flying? Did you have ‘croutons’ which were really just slightly stale bread? Can you remember that feeling of community that came from a truly shared meal, the outdoorsy-living-dangerously-comradery that comes from hovering so close together around a naked flame? And did you feel incredibly sophisticated and cosmopolitan regardless?
The reason that I’m asking is that I saw a picture of a fondu set in an interior design book and I was hit with a wave of nostalgia that bordered on regret.
How the world has changed!
Growing up in the 1970s, we were one of the first people in our street to get a microwave and the neighbors came to watch my mum heat up a meal, as they worried about radiation sickness. Sadly, we were also one of the last to get a color TV. Years later, to watch movies on demand, my father bought Beta* (because it was better), whilst the rest of the world bought VHS*… and in the blink of an eye we were phased out. Later still, the expensive Personal Digital Assistants* we were given one Christmas also became redundant. I wrote my university essays by hand, waiting patiently to get access to the ‘computer-lab’ to type them out. ‘Faxes’ suddenly became a thing, and car phones the size of a house-brick. My first job in an architectural office involved running hand-made A0-sized drawings through the office’s “super expensive, special machine” to make duplicates to send to the construction site. This giant photocopier was so chemically-loaded it gave me perpetual headaches. And I remember the day, a year later, when my boss took me aside and asked me to try out this new way of drafting, complaining that Computer Aided Design (CAD) was probably a waste of money because “it was unlikely to take off”. I also remember setting him straight a week later, patting the computer lovingly and saying, “buy more!”
When I research migraine medications, I keep hearing, “look how far we’ve come in 40 years” – and it’s true.
The whole world really HAS changed SO much in a short amount of time (for better or worse).
And I really DO think the future of migraine medication will be amazing four decades from now. Possibly unimaginable. Don’t lose hope.
It’s just a shame that it’s unlikely we’ll be eating fondue with our meds any time soon.
Take care, Linda x
*PS – if you’re too young to know what some of these things are – “Google them”… or, since that’s already a bit old-school, perhaps I should really be saying; “ask ChatGPT”!!
The Mindful Migraine 
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