Eating dinner as a family puts priorities of the home in order

Marialisa Calta, author of Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the Modern American Family, talks about saying "no" to overscheduling and why family meals really make a difference.

I>Q. Given the hectic schedules many families have today, the family dinner ritual seems like something of a relic. Wouldn't reviving the family dinner really mean drastically reworking the way modern families live their lives? A. Absolutely. We're overscheduled to an insane degree and I'm speaking of myself and my family too - my younger daughter did three sports for a while, every season. It's crazy, and you have to say no to some things. You have to prioritize, and most of all, you really have to plan. Even if you are not a planner, you have to make yourself get organized around food. Q. Making home-cooked meals every night seems like a big task. Why is it so important? A. Because with our crazy schedules, when do we ever really get to be together as a family? You may spend a lot of time watching your child on the soccer field, but to me, that is not the same quality of time as sitting across a table, looking your children in the eyes - as a friend of mine says, "Seeing if their pupils are dilated ..." - and having a conversation. Q. In the beginning of your book, you quote Marion Cunningham, author of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, as saying, "We're living a motel life..." Is that the idea you're referring to - that as families we're constantly moving in and out, orbiting one another, but never meeting? A. Exactly. I think that meals area time when families can really learn about their connections. One of the mothers I interviewed said, "My kids have had to learn that even if they've just had a fight with their sibling, they still have to sit next to them at the table." That's important. Q. For parents who are away from their kids all day, is the family dinner a place where they can monitor the kinds of food their kids eat and act as healthy models of adult diet and behavior? A. Exactly. The fact is your kids still have to eat, one way or another, whether or not you cook. They're going to eat, and you're going to eat - so I figure, you might as well do it as well as you can and do it together. Q. Given the growing concern about children's poor eating habits, do you think perhaps the government, as well as the family, should take the initiative and teach kids how to prepare food? Maybe home economics should be reintroduced into the standard public-school curriculum? A. The government would probably do best to provide healthier meals for hot lunches and help schools keep soda and fast food franchises out of the lunchroom. But I hate to advocate for sweeping government expenditures when there's so much else to worry about. You could argue that a fresh homemade family meal is really a luxury - an ideal that many families cannot live up to - either because both parents work long hours or good groceries are hard to come by in poorer neighborhoods while fast food is cheap and convenient. But I don't think that a simple, and I'm talking simple, homemade meal - including things made with canned broth and canned beans, not all grown from scratch, high-end, organic food - is a luxury for most people. I think it is a necessity. Q. You emphasize one-dish meals and profess a weakness for frozen pie crusts and canned fruit. Do you think that perhaps part of the problem is that parents have unreasonably high standards - and believe that a "good parent" cooks meals that are 100 percent organic, made from scratch, and artfully arranged? A. Definitely. Parents think, "I can't produce the perfect Martha Stewart meal, so I'm not going to try." But I also think a lot of people are just not paying attention; for example, my mother lives in a very upscale neighborhood in New Jersey and at night there is a Mr. Wok delivery truck at every house. So, it's not that some people don't have the resources to do it, it's that they don't think it's important. Q. There is a growing body of research that contends that kids who eat family meals on a consistent basis reap enormous physical and psychological benefits. A correlation has been shown between the family meals and improved academic performance. Frankly, it sounds like there must be something magic in the food. What do you think accounts for the benefits reflected in the studies? A. There is something very soothing about sharing a meal. Just think about the phrase "having a place at the table." I think if you have a place at the table - which can be extrapolated as a metaphor for your place in the world - it helps you feel a little more grounded. What I found interesting - and this is definitely true in my own family and in many of the families I visited - was that most kids had to eat at a certain place every night. I worry about kids who are eating standing up or next to the microwave - where are they finding out how to fit into the world? Q. If the family dinner continues to leak out of American life, what else do we stand to lose? A. We'll lose a fundamental pleasure, which is the pleasure of a good meal with people that we love. And I think that is very sad, though we may find some new ritual to take its place. But I don't think it's going to come from a computer or a television. Kids learn who they are by sitting at the table, through family stories and traditions. There's a lot of focus on parents' learning about their kids, but kids also learn an enormous amount about their parents at dinner. What they learn might not always be pleasant, but they figure a lot out about the family by sitting at the table. - - - This article is republished with permission by Catholic Online from the Catholic Digest (http://www.catholicdigest.org), a Catholic Online Preferred Publishing Partner.

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Republished by Catholic Online with permission of Catholic Digest (www.catholicdigest.org), a Catholic Online Preferred Publishing Partner.