Order of the Eating Siblings

Some time in the past, someone suggested that rather than Order of the Eastern Star, OES stood for Order of the Eating Siblings because you simply cannot seem to have a Star event, not even a planning meeting, without food being served. And of course, food must be accompanied by at least water, coffee and tea, right? Now some events seem to allow for just light refreshments while other events seem to be set up to assure that the guests will have to be tipped on their sides and rolled out to their cars, like Violet Beauregarde in Willie Wonka after she gets turned into a blueberry. But even "cake and punch" never seems to be just "cake and punch," no, you have to have tea and coffee and perhaps nuts and chocolates on the table and perhaps some ice cream or some jello or some cookies, just a few, or some brownies or . . . . I think that being in charge of refreshments must be harder today than it was decades ago, for lots of reasons. For one thing, it used to be that when a lady volunteered to say, be the dining room chairman for a regular meeting night, she had a couple of days to shop and cook and bake. Most of the ladies did not work, so everything was home made, which is also cheaper, and since most ladies cooked and baked regularly, they had a full kitchen and all the necessary tools and space to do the job. Looking at houses, it sometimes seems to me like the newer the house, the smaller the kitchen. I know that when I am trying to cook or bake, I would probably kill small furry animals for an extra couple of cabinets to store stuff in my kitchen and another two feet of counter space. Lots of ladies work now and luckily, we've made the transition from home made to store bought pretty well and few people, if anyone, complain when you bought instead of baked the cookies. But bought stuff is more expensive and you want to buy it closer to the event, so the shopping has to be done one or at most two evenings before the meeting, which puts on a bit more of a time constraint. Also, people used to just eat what you fed them. We knew so much less about health and food choices that you didn't have so many complications like you do now. People didn't worry so much about healthy, so for light snacks, you served a lot of cake and cookies and pies and ice cream and who doesn't love those? It also used to be that if you were doing a meal event (we had two of them this weekend, a lunch and a breakfast), you provided perhaps a salad and an entree and a dessert and people ate it and it was all good. Everyone raised their kids to eat what was put in front of them and like it, darn it! But the times, they are a'changin'. Now, you have to make sure that there are vegetarian options and sugar free options and I have religious restrictions too, and by the time you add all the other allergies and dietary restrictions people have, you are either serving an entire menu of food items or someone is going to starve to death. What a grief! I am constantly impressed and amazed at what a good job people do at putting together a menu of items where everyone can at least eat something. These event chairs must be pulling their hair out to get the menu done, but they do a phenomenal job of succeeding. I am probably one of the toughest people to feed, between not eating sweets, olives, mushrooms, eggplant, avocado, black beans, pork or shellfish, but I have almost always found something to munch on wherever I have gone, so my hat is off to every person who has added another clump of gray hairs to their head trying to come up with a meal menu. One thing I really enjoyed last year that I hope carries forward is that last year we had a bunch of Grand Officers who were diabetic or on a diabetic diet and so the snacks had more cheese and crackers and salami and fruit items instead of all the sugar and it was wonderful. I love cookies and cakes and such, but they are really bad for me and with the healthy snacks, I can enjoy them without guilt. I have just now finally finished losing all the weight I gained in my first two years of this journey, about seventeen or eighteen pounds I picked up as Grand Warder and Grand Marshal, and I really don't want them back, so I hope that there are more healthy snacks in my future. Next week I will be in Yorba Linda, Yucca Valley and Riverside.