July 2003

Eating Out

Portable meals and the region’s terrific variety of attractive picnic venues make summer meals a moveable feast

by Bill Burnham

Ahhh, to picnic.

Spurred by bright sun and clear blue skies, we get the urge to take outdoors a meal that would normally fill a kitchen table to overflowing. We stuff it into containers of various sizes, round up the kids, find a blanket, dig out plastic forks and spoons from the junk drawer, fill a cooler with ice and set off for a shady spot under a tree or alongside a lake or river, there to do battle with a host of insects hungry for both us and our food.

It doesn’t have to be that difficult. Honest.

Where did this idea of eating outdoors come from? The word picnic, according to Webster’s, is “a pleasure outing at which a meal is eaten outdoors.” It’s widely believed to be a derivation of the French term pique-nique, which is probably derived from piquer (to pick), and nique (a trifle).

For the rest of this story, you can order the July 2003 issue of Hampton Roads Monthly magazine.