Dinner used to happen at midday
DINNER has never meant the evening meal. It means the main meal, and for most of English history that was eaten in the middle of the day, when there was daylight to cook by and a long afternoon's work still to come.
Factory hours and cheap lighting pushed it later and later, until the big meal landed after work and something lighter filled the gap at noon. Large parts of Britain never made the switch, so the same meal is lunch in one town and dinner in the next, and schools go on serving school dinners, staffed by dinner ladies, at half past twelve.
The fork was thought to be sinful
Europe managed without one for a very long time. Food was eaten with a KNIFE, a SPOON and three fingers, and the FORK arrived from Byzantium into Italy around the eleventh century as a foreign affectation.
It was not welcomed. A Venetian noblewoman who ate with a small golden fork was denounced by churchmen for vanity, on the grounds that God had already provided everyone with fingers; when she later fell ill, this was reported as the obvious consequence. Forks did not become normal in England until the seventeenth century, and were still considered slightly ridiculous when they did.
Your plate was once made of bread
The medieval trencher was a thick slab of stale BREAD, four days old so that it would hold together, laid flat on the TABLE to take the meat and the sauce. Everything soaked into it during the meal.
What happened next depended on the household. In a generous one the gravy-soaked trencher was collected and given to the poor at the gate; in a hungrier one it was eaten; in a rich one it went to the dogs. Wooden boards and then pewter replaced it, but the word survived, and a trencherman still means someone who can put away a very large dinner.
Hunger runs on a timetable
Feeling HUNGRY is only partly about an empty stomach. The body learns when meals usually arrive and starts getting ready in advance, so appetite tends to rise at the accustomed hour whether or not much has been eaten. A long-haul flight leaves people ravenous at three in the morning for a fortnight afterwards.
The rumbling is a separate business altogether. Those noises come from the gut sweeping itself clean between meals, and they happen just as loudly on a full stomach. They are simply easier to hear when there is no FOOD in there to muffle them.
Laying the table is arithmetic in disguise
Cutlery is laid outside-in, so each course brings you one step closer to the PLATE — a rule invented for banquets and now mostly of use in explaining why a restaurant gives you four forks. The FORK sits on the left because most people keep the KNIFE in their right hand.
Handing out one PLATE, one CUP or GLASS, one SPOON and one NAPKIN for each person is a genuine mathematical operation, matching two sets item for item, and it is the idea that counting is built on top of. A four-year-old laying the TABLE for BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER or a SNACK — with MILK, BREAD and an EGG to follow, and a verdict of YUMMY afterwards — is doing arithmetic before anybody has mentioned numbers.