The dish about family dinners

You could argue that a fresh homemade family meal is really a luxury -- an ideal that many families can not live up to -- either because both parents work long hours or good groceries are hard to come by in poorer neighborhoods while fast food is cheap and convenient.

My book does not speak to the truly poor in our country. If you don't have a supermarket in your neighborhood and you don't have a car, you're left to buy whatever you can at the 7-Eleven; and if you don't have reliable refrigeration, well, your goose is cooked. But I don't think that a simple, and I'm talking simple, homemade meal -- including things made with canned broth and canned beans, not all grown from scratch, high-end, organic food -- is a luxury for most people. I think it is a necessity.

You emphasize one-dish meals and profess a weakness for frozen pie crusts, store-bought spaghetti sauce, and canned fruit. In the age of the "alpha mom," do you think that perhaps part of the problem is that parents have unreasonably high standards -- and believe that a "good parent" cooks meals that are 100 percent organic, made from scratch, and artfully arranged?

Definitely. Parents think, "I can't produce the perfect Martha Stewart meal, so I'm not going to try." But I also think a lot of people are just not paying attention; for example, my mother lives in a very upscale neighborhood in New Jersey and at night there is a Mr. Wok delivery truck at every house. So, it's not that some people don't have the resources to do it, it's that they don't think it's important. My argument -- I guess the whole book -- is my saying, this is important, and it can be done. There are a million easy recipes out there.

You say in the book that you were expecting to find families where men did the cooking on a regular basis, but when you actually went out into homes those men simply weren't there. Why do you think women continue to be primarily responsible for making family meals?

Oh God, I don't know. I have no pretense that what I found would even qualify as a random sample, because a random sample might have some statistical validity to it. But I was surprised. I think a lot of women, at least from my generation, just sort of think of it as our job, and well, we just keep doing it.

What about kids -- did you find that they were involved with the cooking?

I interviewed this marvelous woman in Oregon, whose kids are now grown, but in her house, each child was responsible for two nights of meals -- so that meant four nights a week were already covered. If they weren't going to be there for dinner, they still had to provide the food or make a double batch the night before. They would make a list and the parents would do the shopping. As teenagers, they got really adventuresome -- they would try Thai and Indian food. The kids took it as a challenge. Parents tend to fall back on this idea that, "Oh, it's their job to do well in school," and I think that really kids' job is to be part of a functioning family.

There is a growing body of research that contends that kids who eat family meals on a consistent basis reap enormous physical and psychological benefits. There has also been shown to be a correlation between the family meals and improved academic performance. Frankly, it sounds like there must be something magic in the food. What are your views on those findings?

I'd hate to see people having dinner together because they think it's going to increase their child's GPA. It's easy to joke about it, but I cringe at the idea that some parents might be out there saying, "Eat, Billy, your grades are slipping!" I would hope that the motivation for sitting down together would be that you're a family, and now given our fractured schedules and busy lives we rarely get to be together in one place. I think for some families being in church provides that time. But you're not necessarily talking to each another, and that's what I like about meals -- they're a place to exchange vital information.

What do you think accounts for the benefits reflected in the studies?

There is something very soothing about sharing a meal. Just think about the phrase "having a place at the table." I think if you have a place at the table -- which can be extrapolated as a metaphor for your place in the world -- it helps you feel a little more grounded. What I found interesting -- and this is definitely true in my own family and in many of the families I visited -- was that most kids had to eat at a certain place every night. Even now, when I go back to my mother's house, I still sit in the chair where I always sat. So, I worry about kids who are eating standing up or next to the microwave -- where are they finding out how to fit into the world?

I'm sure there's a lot of basic social training that goes on at the table too.

Of course. At a meal, you learn to take turns and not to interrupt and you learn how to tell a story. And these are things that will hold you in good stead in the classroom and the boardroom as you grow up. There was one mother who told me she always asks her kids, "What did you say that was funny today?" So maybe the table is a place for us to hone our sense of humor too.

If the family dinner continues to leak out of American life, what else do we stand to lose?

We'll lose a fundamental pleasure, which is the pleasure of a good meal with people that we love. And I think that is very sad, though we may find something else -- some new ritual -- to take its place. But I don't think it's going to come from a computer or a television.

Kids learn who they are by sitting at the table, through family stories and even the traditions of ethnic foods. There's a lot of focus on parents' learning about their kids, but I think kids also learn an enormous amount about their parents at dinner. What they learn might not always be pleasant, but they figure a lot out about the family just sitting at the table.

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