The
Importance of Eating Together
Family dinners build
relationships, and help kids do better in school.
By Cody
C. Delistratry in The Atlantic
After my mother passed away and my
brother went to study in New Zealand, the first thing that really felt
different was the dinner table. My father and I began eating separately. We
went out to dinners with our friends, ate sandwiches in front of our computers,
delivery pizzas while watching movies. Some days we rarely saw each other at
all. Then, a few weeks before I was set to leave for university, my father
walked downstairs. “You know, I think we should start eating together even if
it’s just you and me,” he said. “Your mother would have wanted that.” It wasn’t
ideal, of course—the meals we made weren’t particularly amazing and we missed
the presence of Mom and my brother—but there was something special about
setting aside time to be with my father. It was therapeutic: an excuse to talk,
to reflect on the day, and on recent events. Our chats about the banal—of
baseball and television—often led to discussions of the serious—of politics and
death, of memories and loss. Eating together was a small act, and it required
very little of us—45 minutes away from our usual, quotidian distractions—and
yet it was invariably one of the happiest parts of my day.
Sadly, Americans rarely eat together
anymore. In fact, the average American eats one in every five meals in her car, one in four Americans
eats at least one fast food meal every single
day, and the majority of American families report eating a single meal together less than five days a
week. It’s a pity that so many Americans are missing out on what could be
meaningful time with their loved ones, but it’s even more than that. Not eating
together also has quantifiably negative effects both physically and
psychologically.
Using data from nearly three-quarters
of the world’s countries, a new analysis from the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that
students who do not regularly eat with their parents are significantly more
likely to be truant at school. The average truancy rate in the two weeks before
the International Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test
administered to 15-year-olds by the OECD and used in the analysis as a measure
for absenteeism, was about 15 percent throughout the world on average, but it
was nearly 30 percent when pupils reported they didn’t often share meals with
their families.
How
then do we eat better, not just from a nutritional perspective, but from a
psychological one as well?
Children who do not eat dinner with
their parents at least twice a week also were 40 percent more likely to be
overweight compared to those who do, as outlined in a research presentation given at the
European Congress on Obesity in Bulgaria this May. On the contrary, children
who do eat dinner with their parents five or more days a week have less trouble
with drugs and alcohol, eat healthier, show better academic performance, and
report being closer with their parents than children who eat dinner with their
parents less often, according to a study conducted by the
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
There are two big reasons for these
negative effects associated with not eating meals together: the first is simply
that when we eat out—especially at the inexpensive fast food and take-out
places that most children go to when not eating with their family—we tend not
to eat very healthy things. As Michael Pollan wrote in his most recent book, Cooked, meals eaten outside of the home are
almost uniformly less healthy than homemade foods, generally having higher fat,
salt, and caloric content.
The other reason is that eating alone
can be alienating. The dinner table can act as a unifier, a place of community.
Sharing a meal is an excuse to catch up and talk, one of the few times where
people are happy to put aside their work and take time out of their day. After
all, it is rare that we Americans grant ourselves pleasure over productivity
(just look at the fact that the average American works nearly 220 hours more per year than
the average Frenchman).
In many countries, mealtime is treated
as sacred. In France, for instance, while it is acceptable to eat by oneself,
one should never rush a meal. A frenzied salad muncher on the métro
invites dirty glares, and employees are given at least an hour for lunch. In
many Mexican cities, townspeople will eat together with friends and
family in central areas like parks or town squares. In Cambodia, villagers spread
out colorful mats and bring food to share with loved ones like a potluck.
In her book Eating Together, Alice Julier argues
that dining together can radically shift people’s perspectives: It reduces
people’s perceptions of inequality, and diners tend to view those of different
races, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds as more equal than they would in
other social scenarios.
It hasn’t always been the case that
Americans don’t prioritize eating together and eating slowly. In 1950,
Elizabeth David, who was recognized as the sort of soul-stirring American
culinary evangelist du moment, as perhaps Alice Waters or David Lebovitz is
today, published A Book of Mediterranean Food. She wrote that great food
is simple. She proposed that meals didn’t have to come from fancy or trendy
restaurants, and that enjoying basic meals with loved ones makes for the best
eating. In one particularly salient passage, she writes:
“In the
shade of the lemon grove I break off a hunch of bread, sprinkle it with the
delicious fruity olive oil, empty my glass of sour white Capri wine; and
remember that Norman Douglas once wrote that whoever has helped us to a larger
understanding is entitled to our gratitude for all time.”
Her equation for physical and
psychological well-being is easy: Eat simply and eat together.
For the average American family, who
now spends nearly as much money
on fast food as they do on groceries, this simplicity is not so easily
achieved. Perhaps the root of this problem is cultural misperception.
In America, it seems snobbish to take
time to eat good food with one’s family. The Norman Rockwell portrait of the
family around the dinner table now seems less middle-class and more haute
bourgeois, as many families can’t afford to have one parent stay home from
work, spending his or her day cleaning and cooking a roast and side of potatoes
for the spouse and kids. Most parents don’t have time to cook, many don’t even
know how, and the idea that one should spend extra money and time picking up
produce at the supermarket rather than grabbing a bucket of Chinese take-out
can seem unfeasible, unnecessary, and slightly pretentious. It’s understandable
to want to save time and money. It’s the same reason that small shops go out of
business once Walmart moves into town; but in this case it is not the shop
owner who suffers, it is the consumer of unhealthy and rushed meals.
How then do we eat better, not just
from a nutritional perspective, but from a psychological one as well?
“To eat is a necessity, but to eat
intelligently is an art,” said the 17th-century writer François de La
Rochefoucauld. What “intelligence” means in the context of eating is debatable.
There are those who obsess over their food—where it is sourced, if it is
organic, the nebulous desire for culinary “originality”—who are known in the
U.S. as “foodies” and in France as generation Le Fooding, both of which are
the hipsters of cuisine, moneyed and sometimes picky. But this doesn’t seem
quite like “intelligence” as de La Rochefoucauld meant it.
Perhaps to “eat intelligently,” one
needs only to eat together. Although it would be nice to eat healthily as well,
even take-out makes for a decent enough meal, psychologically speaking, so long
as your family, roommates, or friends are present.
It’s incredible what we’re willing to
make time for if we’re motivated. (Although we often end up just a bit too
squeezed to make it to the gym in the morning, we can still find time to go to
the movies after work.) Perhaps seeing eating together not as another
appointment on a busy schedule, but rather as an opportunity to de-stress, a
chance to catch up with those whom we love then, could help our children do
better in school, get in better shape, and be less likely to abuse drugs and
alcohol. Eating together also led children to report better relationships with
their parents and surely relationships between adults can similarly benefit.
On our last night before I left home to
return to school, my father and I went out to our favorite hometown restaurant,
a Sichuan place where we always order the same thing: Yu Xiang Qiezi for me,
Black Date Chicken for him. But even after 60 years of life on this planet and
countless dinners here, he still could not properly hold a pair of chopsticks.
“Let me help,” I said, and after a little resistance, he obliged me. “See you
have to hold this one perfectly still,” I said, motioning to the chopstick in
my left hand, “while you move this one to pick up your food.” The waiter came
with another bowl of rice on which he would try. He nodded. “I think I’ve got
it,” he said, delicately holding the chopsticks between his fingers. “The
chopsticks each have an individual role, but in order not to drop your food,
they have to work together. Right?” I smiled. “Exactly.”
Cody C. Delistraty
is a writer and historian based in New York. He has worked for the Council on
Foreign Relations, UNESCO, and NBC News.
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