At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

The Family Dinner: An Introduction

From our vantage point in the 21st century, it is easy to look back and imagine the concept of family dinner as a natural, inherently good, and perhaps even necessary part of life. For Americans, the dinner table is central to our most revered traditions and is enshrined in Norman Rockwell’s iconic image of Thanksgiving dinner, where everyone is happy to be together as a giant turkey is presented at the table by family elders. There is a perception that this is how families are supposed to be and how they always have been since time immemorial, and this applies equally to all cultures on Earth. It seems that there is something fundamentally human about sharing food within the family unit—that we would never have evolved as social beings, never even survived as a species, had not our first priority been feeding children and family members, a simple biological necessity. Without families eating together there could be no communities and no political order, and if life were even possible under such conditions, it would be unbearably solitary.

This habit of thinking stems ultimately from Aristotle, who viewed the world as it is and assumed that because something functions well to achieve its ends, it is therefore natural and necessary. For him, the subjection of women, the enslavement of inferiors, and the patriarchal family unit itself are all indispensable parts of how we succeed as humans. This same logic assumes that the erosion of any part of our social arrangements is likely to threaten the entire system. Taking this theory to the extreme, we might even conclude that much of what is wrong with the world today stems from our not eating together as a family anymore.

Sitting at the table for dinner, we learn manners, discuss our aspirations and fears with those close to us, and learn to communicate, negotiate, and behave as political beings. We learn to help others through the habitual setting and clearing of the table, washing dishes, etc. Without the family table, it seems possible that these positive behaviors and values would fail to develop, leading us to wonder if the breakdown of society could be connected to the demise of the family dinner.

There is no denying that people must be fed to survive, but whether this has always universally been in the context of the family unit, let alone at a table, is not so clear. Early humans appear to have moved in small bands that cooperated in hunting, shared food among a few dozen people, reared children together, and even enjoyed sexual relations freely among the band. Some anthropologists speculate that we were originally more like our peaceful ape cousin, the bonobo, than the aggressive chimpanzee. Sharing food among the roving band was the only way to survive, but the social arrangement was nothing like the monogamous coupling or family that we imagine to be natural. This was merely the new social arrangement of humans after the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. The question remains, though, can we thrive as a species eating and living as solitary beings? However we define the social and reproductive unit, is a quality life without a family dinner even thinkable? Years ago in a short seminar taught by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, we were presented with this quandary. The readings included two books he had authored: The Forest People, about the Mbuti with whom Turnbull lived, and The Mountain People, about the Ik of Uganda whom he studied some years later. The former were perfectly functional, happy, lovable people who shared everything and thrived as hunter-gatherers. In fact, for impressionable undergraduates, the Mbuti way of life seemed infinitely preferable to our own. The story of the Ik was not so happy. For purely political reasons they were unable to range widely across their traditional territory to hunt and forage, and their entire society fell apart; people became solitary, stopped sharing, and ate alone. Many died of starvation, especially children. The lesson, although not put so simply, was that humans are in constant interaction with their environment, resources, and fellow humans. Disturbing any crucial element of their means of living can bring disaster to the whole society. One crucial element was indeed sharing food.

One might argue that in settings where people live in a delicate balance with their natural resources or in extreme climates such as the desert or the Arctic, life is more precarious, and various social arrangements are merely adaptations to these extreme situations. Thus, we have thriving bands in the Congo, harems in the Middle East, and a wide array of social arrangements that enable people to survive. But today in modern society, adults certainly can live alone, eat alone, and thrive as autonomous solitary units. A 2014 study by the NPD Group found that 57 percent of all eating occasions among Americans take place alone. Gran­ted, many of these events include snacking or eating lunch at the work desk. But 27 percent of all households consist of a single person, wherein most meals are solitary. The study also found that 32 percent of all dinners in the United States take place alone. Whether these figures have any bearing on the global situation cannot be determined, but suffice to say that the concept of family dinner has been in decline. Whether this is important or should somehow be reversed is another question entirely.

There are various angles from which one can approach this question. First, there are purely aesthetic considerations. In some cultures, a long relaxed dinner with others can be an essential part of the good life. The French believe that good wine, good conversation, and good food should be priorities in daily living. Meals should be eaten slowly in order to fully appreciate and experience the tastes and flavors. Alternatively, the great gastronome M. F. K. Fisher once wrote that eating alone can be the highest form of culinary pleasure. There is no conversation to distract you, no hedging your opinion based on your dining partner’s reactions, no trying to impress with your knowledge. You can simply focus on the food—its texture, aroma, flavor, and feeling in the mouth. However, Fisher’s high-end solitary experience is not really comparable to the quick meal eaten mindlessly in front of the TV. Interestingly, the TV and computer screen do constitute a kind of technological company, giving the impression that a solitary meal is shared among others. Fascinatingly, in Korea to give the impression of commensalism, there are popular websites on which you can watch people eat. You could argue that it is explicitly a form of sharing when people post pictures of their meal on social media, which often earns words of praise and encouragement. This practice might actually reveal a prime function of eating together: to talk about the food and give praise to the person who has cooked the meal to feed others. The pleasure in eating is therefore more than mere gastronomic sensation; it is also a positive social event and also extends equally to the family members or company who have the distinct pleasure of knowing that someone went out of her or his way to provide for their sustenance. It becomes especially meaningful when the meal is more than routine, such as including a special ingredient or involving a particularly difficult cooking procedure. The labor expended is congealed in the object produced, which is literally consumed, creating a bond between people that simply cannot be purchased.

There is nothing inherently better about food that is shared at a communal dinner table. However, when people do eat together, there is a tendency to cook from scratch, spend time preparing food, and eat at the table. Quite the opposite, there is a tendency toward eating prepared and convenience food when eating alone and often not at the actual table. Eating alone can also lead to mindless consumption. This means much more than simply consuming without giving much thought to what you eat. It involves a kind of ethical detachment from food as an object simply to provide calories, energy, and a little taste. In 2013 it was announced that a product called Soylent would provide all the nutrition one would need in powdered form, and instead of ordinary meals one could remain in front of the computer and simply drink a few shakes a day. One can only imagine what effect this would have on the teeth, being unused. More disturbing was the very idea that this could free you from having to eat with others. Getting necessary nutrients would become mindless. The great farmer/poet Wendell Berry, in an essay titled “The Pleasures of Eating,” speculated that in the future we would simply be hooked up to tubes that feed us directly from the factory without our having to think at all. That’s only one small step beyond Soylent.

De-Skilling: Introduction

With the proliferation of convenience foods, there was a fear that housewives, for they did most if not all the cooking, were forgetting basic skills once mastered by their moth- ers or grandmothers. Cake mixes, which gave the appearance of cooking since one had to add eggs and oil, were an easily identified culprit. Those who depended on them could no longer make cakes from scratch, which were perceived to be healthier and cheaper. The time saved, so the manufacturers convinced consumers, was more important than any pleasure or reward from having baked the cake oneself. Actually, there is little concrete evidence that housewives did have extensive cooking skills or even that there were housewives, so to speak, since many women worked outside the home. The idea of de-skilling has nonetheless been a powerful tool in the rhetoric argu- ing for the breakdown of the family unit.

Soylent is simply an exaggerated example of what has already happened to our food supply. Most people rarely have any idea of where ingredients come from, what chemicals may have been added, what pesticides have been sprayed on the ground, or what kind of environmental and social effect our food practices may have. The effects of our food habits are all hidden, despite the mandatory nutrition facts labels that purport to inform us. The more processed the food, the less we really know about it and the more vulnerable we become to corporations whose principal goal is to make a profit. Hiding the ethical ramifications of highly processed food and, of course, getting us to eat more and more of it has led to one of the strangest situations in human history: we spend less on food than any civilization that has ever existed and yet we eat more in aggregate than any civilization has before. Malnutrition and obesity exist side by side.

There is no guarantee that a family meal would make us any more cognizant of our food choices from an ethical standpoint. But at the very least, having to shop for ingredients, cook them, and actively think about what will taste good is good for us, leaves less of a footprint on the environment, and makes us engaged as consumers. Better yet, it makes us mindful eaters. When we are forced to weigh various considerations such as cost, freshness, and impact on health, as we do when preparing food for others, we tend to make better choices. Unfortunately, the move toward processed food eaten while on the go is one that much of the Western world has been taking over the past century, and it sometimes feels as though there is little hope of turning back the clock. Every day these rushed, unhealthy habits are spreading around the globe. We see culinary traditions, much like indigenous languages, vanish every day. Part and parcel of the industrial mode of food production and feeding is to expand to new markets, ship food farther, and make it quicker and more convenient to consume. This means that people will eat together less often, meals will become episodic and perfunctory, and the kind of anomie we see pervading much of the developed world will infect the rest. This is not to say that there is no hope. Nor is it particularly helpful to command people to get in the kitchen and force families to sit down for dinner. It is more productive to look at the root causes of dinner disjuncture. Obviously, our daily commutes and work schedules are a major factor in the decline of the dinner table. In the post-World War II suburban communities spread across the United States, commuting parents left for work early and got home late. Family dinners were reserved for special occasions, while on weekdays children often ate alone in front of the TV. Parents’ hectic schedules today are only half the story, though. Years ago, after-school activities were just that: they took place at school, and there was a bus to take children home by dinnertime. This rule seems to have disappeared, as sports, music, theater, and a vast variety of children’s activities take place in the evening, making a sit-down dinner impossible. How do we combat the elements of modern-day life that seem bent on impeding a family meal? One solution might be to cultivate cooking as an activity pleasurable in itself. People watch a lot of food programs on TV. Magazines and cookbooks sell really well. But study after study shows that each year people spend less time in the kitchen preparing food. We need to focus more on teaching basic skills rather than cooking as competition. We need to value time spent in the kitchen as a creative outlet, not as a chore to be hurried through as painlessly as possible. Everyone has to eat, so why should food preparation be marginalized as something less important than work or other activities? For a great part of the world, simply getting enough food regardless of the way it is eaten is a more serious challenge. There are grave inequities in the distribution of food across the globe that overshadow the minute details of the dinner table. Nonetheless, the question of whether people eat together is crucial for every household, from the most opulent to the most meager. Sharing food is undeniably an essential part of being human, as the entries in this book amply demonstrate.

Ken Albala