School portraits / The Slow Eaters’ Society, one fall term · 2023
The Founder of Deerfield's Slow Eaters Was Too Busy to Attend
At a school where dinner is assigned, served and cleared on a schedule, a senior started a club for people who were still chewing.
Dinner at Deerfield Academy is not something you wander into. Family-style meals are served seven times a week. Round tables seat about nine students and a faculty member, tables are reassigned every four weeks, and students take turns as waiters: one arrives early to set the table and bring the platters, the second clears. Nobody eats until everyone is served. Food is passed around, not across. Whoever finishes a dish refills it. Favorite meals get applause.
I read this to my family. The youngest asked who claps at our house. Nobody, I said. She asked why not, and I didn't have a good answer, which is how most of our rules end up.
In November 2023 the student paper, The Deerfield Scroll, ran a feature about a problem built into all this efficiency. A senior had noticed his table was being cleared while he was still eating. The faculty member at the head of his table encouraged him to do something about it. So he founded the Slow Eaters' Society.
He then missed the first meeting, because he had work to do.
He had organized more time for everyone, and then could not find any for himself. I have done this with every family vacation since 2012.
The society ran into the system. Meeting before announcements made life harder for the second waiter, whose job was to clear and who would like to go to bed, so it moved to after announcements. When the four-week rotation moved the founder to a new table, the society moved with him. Members told the paper what they valued: company, and the time to finish.
The school's own website once ran a parent's account from 2019. Her daughter had nearly crossed Deerfield off the list because of the sit-down dinner. Too formal, too contrived, too much, and a table full of strangers. She went anyway and came around to it, mostly because of the strangers, some of whom were never in her class or her dorm.
At home, the middle one clears plates while people are still holding forks. I once timed him. The eldest, who eats as if each bite needs a permit, now waits until he leaves the kitchen to have dessert. Last week she told me she had founded a society. I asked how many members. She said one, and that the first meeting was going very well.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Slow Eaters’ Society, The Deerfield Scroll deerfieldscroll.com
- Deerfield Campus Life: Gather deerfield.edu
- Family Dinner at Deerfield deerfield.edu