family meals: (verb) to sit down to eat with people who may or may not be genetically related to you, but whom you have worked with to prepare food from scratch (more or less), and will take time to engage with as you eat and clean up together.
I wonder if everyone has long-forgotten the days where family meals were often look forward to. The time when one can sit down in good company and taste the fruits of their culinary efforts. I wonder if too often we now rush through dinner just to get to our evening entertainment, and ignore the opportunity to let dinner to be our evening entertainment?
In my shared house, six of us — all in our 20s & 30s — gather once a week to cook and eat together. Naturally with our busy lives, it isn’t easy to schedule in, but it sets a grounding rhythm for us and makes a difference to the health and atmosphere of our little community. And it doesn’t stop here.
The return to shared meals, communal dining, and homemade food is encouraged now, and can even be thought of as one of the biggest trends in dining culture in the past year. Around town, long tables are popping up in restaurants and cafes. These tables encourage conversation with others, and feelings of neighbourliness towards those who were strangers before sitting down, and hopefully afterwards, friends getting up. So why should we fuss over this? Sit next to people we don’t know at these communal restaurants? Make time for dinner, when there are so many classes to take, meetings to attend, shows to catch, worthy projects to be involved in, emails to respond to?
- When eating out, or on-the-run, we tend to go for more fried foods, soft drinks, sweets, and fast foods, which are often higher in sodium, simple starches, sugars, and fats – things that our bodies are not designed to digest much of, where as…
- …When eating with family or friends at home, we tend to eat more vegetables, fruits, grains, calcium-rich foods, and more variety, which is the spice of life, the source of more nutrients, expands our worlds, and is generally delicious.
- When sitting down for a meal, we tend to have more in-depth conversations. Conversations, real live face-to-face ones, not text-to-text, build relationships, allow us to debrief our day and talk through stresses or challenges, build our social capital, and learn from each other.
- When we engage with others, we learn social skills – from table manners (where have they gone?) to conflict literacy (the kinds of things you can’t learn as easily with a screen).
- Preparing a meal at home, as compared to fast food, can cost less, uses better quality ingredients, and is a chance to learn new recipes and skills, including meal planning and safe food handling practices
- Cooking food at home tends to generate less waste, as we are more likely to use real (not disposable) dishes, serve ourselves reasonably sized portions, and save the leftovers for the next day
- Frequent family meals are associated with lower rates of unhealthy behaviors, such as overeating, smoking, excessive drinking, illegal drug use, and disordered eating
- Somehow, food just tastes better when you had a hand in preparing it, and love the ones you made it with
