The Future of Family Dinners

Can I begin here by telling you how painful it was to type ‘dinners’ in the title instead of ‘suppers’? Living three hours away from home has taught me that the lunch/dinner, dinner/supper, and lunch/supper debate is very much based upon the region in which you live. While I prefer the lunch/supper combo (dinners are just really fancy meals, okay? It’s versatile and works in place of lunch or supper. Think about it.), ‘dinner’ tends to be the term people use more, so I went with it.

Anyway, in case you missed it, my sister, Claire, and I launched a podcast last week. Like this blog, it’s called A Farm Kid’s Guide to Agriculture. You can find a direct link up in the top menu under ‘Podcast‘ or find us by searching the iTunes podcast app. (Drop a comment below if you have another favorite app that we should submit our podcast to!) Our plan is to release weekly episodes on Wednesdays, and today’s the day for episode 002 to hit the airwaves!

Episode 002 is all about the future of food. We talked about space food, how awesome Aldi’s is, how cheap we both are when it comes to buying groceries, meal kits, eating out, and – of all things – deep freezers. I guess we can classify that as food preservation…We talked about food preservation. 😉

Something I’ve been mulling over since we recorded this episode is the idea of family dinners suppers. Claire and I are two of three sisters (there’s one between us), and we grew up eating supper at the kitchen table every night. Nobody could leave the table until everyone was done, including during the regular battle of wills, when we were forced to eat the same number of bites as our age of whatever food was on our plate that we didn’t like. So, to throw Claire under the bus, she had to sit at the table until she ate six bites of green beans when she was six years old. And birdie bites weren’t allowed. You get the picture.

Now, I wouldn’t say that I’m really that old at age 25, but I remember a lot of discussion when I was younger about family suppers being ruined because everyone was eating out all of the time or spending their meals at home in front of the TV or, *gasp*, those gosh-darned cell phones disrupting conversation at the table. Dining room tables mostly became a surface to drop items that didn’t have a home, like mail and stray papers.

I’ll be honest – I live alone and regularly eat meals on my couch in front of the TV or at my desk while scrolling through Facebook or reading the news. My table is covered in books and a sewing machine and other notions I’m using as I make my t-shirt quilt. But I attribute me not eating at the table to the fact that society thinks it’s weird for me to carry on conversation with my cats over the supper table, but I also don’t have roommates or family members living with me to catch up with over mealtimes. When I visit home, we’ll often go out for supper (*gasp*), but we’re all sitting around a table and have a good conversation catching up with each other. We probably wouldn’t have sat down to have that conversation otherwise.

It feels like things have gradually changed around the idea of family suppers. Ship-to-your-front-door meal kits are bringing ingredients and easy-to-make recipes to your kitchen. And it sounds like it’s encouraging families to spend time preparing the meal together and then heading over to the dining table to enjoy it together, too. There’s also a renewed interest in using fresh ingredients and making meals yourself rather than depending on the quick, easy-to-make or prepared foods you can pick up at the grocery store (I promise I’m not hating on frozen chicken nuggets and Hamburger Helper meals – I practically live on those). But, while everyone is busier than ever, I feel like it’s safe to say that we’re making time again for those home-cooked family meals. And maybe it’s because of the time saved by ship-to-you meal kits or grocery delivery services. We don’t have to spend so much time battling crowds at the grocery store or carefully planning out meals and can spend that time in the kitchen and around the table with family, catching up over supper.

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Like what you read here? Catch the whole podcast episode at the link below. Then follow us on Twitter at @ClaireWeinzierl and @FarmKidBlog.