Nobody ordered a tower of anything.

Nobody needed to, because nobody was ordering for an audience, and nobody was ordering on someone else’s tab.

It was, I came to think, the cheapest meal I had eaten with that family in years and also the richest, and the fact that those two things could finally be true at the same table was the whole measure of how far we had come.

Remove the audience and the subsidy from a family dinner and a strange thing happens: people order what they actually want to eat, in the quantities they actually want to eat it, and the meal becomes a meal again instead of a performance with a victim built into the seating.