A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece that invited parents to kill the family dinner. The author described the rise and fall of the family dinner in her home. The rise included finding inspiration to cook from gourmet magazines, learning to cook tagines, then becoming the family cook for 20 years before deciding it wasn’t worth it. Now, her family has the freedom to eat simple dinners at different times and in different places. I get the sentiment. The heightened expectations for family cooks that 60-second reels (full of esoteric ingredients like juniper berries and sumac) combined with the soul-sucking demands of modern parenting would make anyone shrink back. But tossing the time at the table with your kids out with the sumac seems like tossing out the baby with the proverbial bathwater. Let’s keep the family and simplify the dinner.
An Abbreviated History of Family Dinners
Family dinners are likely an ancient ritual that began long before families had tables–or even roofs. They were likely a communal effort to bring lifesaving nourishment to the community members in ancient societies. Some would argue that cooking with fire is what makes us human since the energy, sterilization, and brain power that accompany cooked food provide not only energy and health, but the capacity to form language and build cultures.
As people settled into agrarian societies, shared meals remained a cornerstone of family and community life. Some cultures have big lunches. American dinners typically occur after chores or work are complete for the day. But all cultures have some formal gathering of the family or broader community. At its best, these communal meals are not only a time of reprieve and nourishment for the body. They are also a time when we easily default to building the interpersonal connections that humans so desperately need.
A series of social, economic, and industrial changes occurred in the middle of the 20th century. These changes impacted all aspects of family life, including the family dinner. For many families, food became more convenient through the rise of family-friendly restaurants and factory-processed foods. This made cooking faster and easier. At the same time, the pace of life was speeding up as both mothers and fathers moved into the workforce. Families settled into faster-paced, more leisure-focused suburban lifestyles complete with televisions, individualism, and declining civic institutions. You might think these changes would have empowered us to make dinner easier. After all, we had less time and easier food. But it didn’t. Family dinner was officially on the chopping block.
Keeping the Family in Family Dinners
By the time TikTok and Instagram normalized complex dinners prepared across multiple days by both trad wives and gourmet chefs, there was already a group of worn-out parents hardly get the hyper-processed chicken nuggets into the oven fast enough. It seems like families fall into two silos these days. There’s a group yearning for the old days and old ways where women grind their own wheat in homemade linen dresses. On the flip side, some families revel in underachievement. Their chaos-induced inertia is almost a comedic art form that provides relief for all of us as they recount it.
And then there’s the in-between reality where the vast majority of us live. We want our kids to be healthy and psychologically stable. But we’re also tired and not sure whether a complex family dinner has a high enough return on investment. I would argue that it probably does.
We tend to obsess over the grades, peer effects at school, and the political environments our children exist. But it’s these things, these small things, these everyday routine things that really matter. These routines are the consistent thread that weaves in and out of the fabric of the disparate pieces of our lives. They bring everything and everyone together. It’s how we send each other off to bed at the end of the day. It’s how we welcome each new morning. It’s in the coming together from our different locations, the intuitive eye contact we make as we tell our stories from across the table, the waiting as the other fills their plate before passing the serving bowl, that we find our place and our people.
It’s the simplicity of these everyday ancient rituals that bring comfort, certainty, and a rhythm to our life. It doesn’t matter what you eat. It matters that you eat together. Put that brine away. Make a sandwich. Put it on a paper plate (compostable if you wish). Sit down. Pause. Look each other in the eye and tell the story of today to the people on the other side of the table who would love to hear it.
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