I’d wonder sometimes if the whole thing really was my problem, as the kids insisted. “Grazing is good for you! All the experts say so,” Anni assured me between chomps of her Chicken Crimpy snack crackers. “In prehistoric times, that’s the way all human groups got their sustenance.” What? When Crimpy Chickens still roamed the earth? I was pretty sure the environment-of-evolutionary-adaptedness argument had little relevance to a food chain dominated by blue sports drinks and flavor [sic] packets. But it was also true that I’d grown up in a culinary Stone Age, where you sat down with your family for dinner every night and ate what was put before you, whether animal, vegetable, or (in the case of my mother’s dreaded Iron Man Casserole) mineral. Processed foods were few, and the whole idea of individually wrapped snacks was still a rough beast waiting to be born.
My kids cannot imagine a world without muesli bars, or cheese strings, or yogurt you squirt from a tube, or fruit you can roll into a single, cigarette-size cavity ripper. In my day, your mother was as likely to put a fun-size Mars bar in your lunchbox as she was to serve canned hash to the bridge club. We really did eat fruit for a snack, I used to try to explain to the kids when they were little—not because we loved fruit so much but because there wasn’t an alternative. “Poor Mummy! Couldn’t anybody flatten it for you?” they’d ask plaintively.
Sure, if we’d had Dunkaroos the world might have turned out to be a different place. But the point is, we didn’t have Dunkaroos. We just had to soldier on anyhow.
The rules we observed for meals were to blobbiness as basic training is to a Montessori school. This was especially true for the evening meal, which, in white, middle-class Anglo households, predictably consisted of meat, a starch, and two vegetables. On the dinner plate, as in one’s bedroom, there was a place for everything and everything in its place. (Only foreigners messed their food together in untidy piles.) As children, my sister and I even preferred to eat in a boundaried way: first the meat, then the carrots, then the peas, saving what we liked least for last, the better for poking into a potato jacket, or scattering artfully beneath a chop bone.
Eating in front of the television was not unheard of, especially on Sunday night, when Ed Sullivan was on. But it was a vice my mother disapproved of. “Too much upsetment,” she decreed (as if eating our tuna patties off a TV tray would cause us to run amok, ripping the plastic covers from the formal lounge with bared canines).
Was I nostalgic for all this? I was not. As a parent, I’d never wanted to bring back the halcyon days of casseroles held together with mushroom-soup mucilage and family mealtimes so rigid and ritualized you could practically hear your arteries harden. Lord knows, I had no appetite whatsoever for the whole meat-and-three-vegetables thing. It had been bad enough having to eat it. Having to produce it night after night would have really stuck in my craw. At the same time, I was determined to use The Experiment as an opportunity to combat the blobbiness epidemic that had overtaken our eating habits. I wanted to try to bring more structure to mealtimes, to put more energy into appreciating what we had on our plates. Or noticing it, even.
In a recent Australian study, four in ten mothers describe dinner as an “unpleasant experience,” with the meal usually ending in an argument. At the same time, 76 percent agree that sit-down meals strengthen their family’s communication (and possibly its vocal cords), according to a recent survey of more than 16,000 mothers nationwide. 1 Contradiction? Not necessarily. Maybe the experience of being together as a family is a bit like eating your spinach. As Popeye might have observed, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Like it or not—and clearly four out of ten of us don’t—family meals are consistently correlated with positive outcomes for children. And not just slightly positive outcomes. Ridiculously positive ones. Kids who eat family meals five to seven times a week get better grades, have a sunnier outlook on life, have significantly fewer problems with drugs, alcohol, or nicotine, and seem almost magically protected from developing eating disorders. They also—surprise!—have healthier diets. Recent research from the UK Department for Children, Schools and Family found a direct link between the frequency of family meals and high school leaving scores, while a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2008 uncovered a clear, inverse relationship between “eating together as a family” and risky sexual behavior. Weirdly enough, simply having supper together was as protective against unsafe sex as “doing something religious together.”2 Then again, maybe it’s not that weird.
It’s not the “postcode effect” either (where socioeconomic class is the underlying determiner of advantage). Researchers in study after study have controlled for demographics and the findings remain. Rich or poor, middle class or underclass, highly educated or barely educated, families that eat meals together are dishing up a smorgasbord of advantages for their kids.
These facts are hardly news—although the media love nothing better than to give parents a serve on the topic. Or mothers, more accurately. In most accounts, the demise of the family meal is attributed to the usual suspect: feminism—or, as it is more decorously described, “women’s participation in the workforce” or “the dualearner family.” The implication is that when mothers work, families, like chickens, go free-range and slightly feral. Yet in Australia—where the full-time workforce participation of women with children is much lower than it is in the United States and the UK—a mere 11.42 percent of mothers report that their children usually eat at the family table. Remember, too, that we are talking about where and how family members eat, not about who (or what) is doing the cooking. The effect is exactly the same, whether it’s a roast with all the trimmings, a stir-fry with fourteen intricately diced and unpronounceable vegetables, or burgers and fries eaten straight from the wrapper.
Instead of blaming mothers who work outside the home, maybe we should be looking more carefully at the media at work within it. Researchers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that families with “multiple communication devices” were less likely to eat dinner with other household members, and they also reported less satisfaction with their family and leisure time.3
The speed with which digital devices have invaded our domestic lives has left sociologists and other family researchers with virtual egg on their face, scrambling to keep pace with change. Reading research that is more than two to three years old is like traveling in a time capsule. (The dangers of “chat rooms?” “Online bulletin boards?” Who even knows what those terms mean anymore?) Even today, studies of the impact of technology on patterns of family food consumption focus almost exclusively on television—and this despite the fact that TV’s market share is in steep decline among older children and teenagers. These findings are still worth examining—not only for what they tell us about TV per se, but for what they suggest may be true about screen time in a general sense.
Eating the evening meal in front of the TV, according to research conducted by the Nestlé Corporation in 2009, is almost twice as common as eating at a dining table.4 The big question is, Does it matter?
Nutritionally, the answer is yes—although not by a huge margin. In a University of Minnesota study of five thousand middle and high school students, researchers found that teenage girls who ate alone typically consumed fewer fruits, vegetables, and calcium-rich foods, and more soft drinks and snacks, than girls who ate with their parents. They also took in 14 percent more calories. (As I’ve said, plenty of other research confirms that family meals protect girls against eating disorders.) The effects were similar, though less striking, for boys. Yet researchers noted that, compared with not eating family meals at all, eating meals together in front of the television was definitely associated with better eating; kids of both genders showed “high intakes of total vegetables [and] calcium-rich food, and greater caloric intakes.”5 Did socioeconomic class have anything to do with it? You bet it did. As might be predicted, more affluent families were less likely to report TV viewing during meals. But the general patterns held even when d
emographics were taken into account.
Overall, researchers concluded that “watching television during family meals was associated with poorer dietary quality among adolescents. Health-care providers should work with families and adolescents to promote family meals, emphasizing turning the TV off at meals.” A study of families with preschool children, titled “Positive Effects of Family Dinner Are Undone by Television Viewing,” found . . . well, I guess it’s pretty obvious what it found.6
What about the psychological payoffs of the family meal? Does TV reduce the resolution here as well? A study published in the journal Young Consumers in 2008 argued that parents practically have a duty to capitulate to kids’ demands for TV-enhanced meals. Mothers and fathers who refuse to do so, the authors argued, risked creating “social distance” within their families. “By joining her children at the television,” a mother has the opportunity to engage with them while developing “a common interest,” they noted, adding that “this communication can be seen as a way of maintaining love and relatedness in the family.”7 I hope I am not being cynical when I observe that Young Consumers is a journal devoted to “responsibly marketing to children.”
On the other hand, if television helps bring teenagers to the table, it may be worth a look. Even researchers at the University of Minnesota conceded that “adolescents unhappy with family relationships”—i.e., the kids who arguably need parental contact the most—“may be more likely to participate in family meals if the TV is on and conversation isn’t the main focus.” One subject, seventeen-year-old Christina, complained that a media-free dining experience was just too boring. “It’s fine at the beginning when Dad asks what we’ve done at school” but it quickly “gets boring without any music on or anything. If you eat in front of the telly, you have something to occupy your mind.”8
Yet if conversation isn’t the magic ingredient that gives the family meal its transforming power, it’s hard to know what is. If eating dinner in silence in front of Wheel of Fortune qualifies as a “family meal,” what about all those breakfasts we used to bolt in the car on the way to school? Did they count too? After all, we were all gathered in the one spot. It just happened to be moving at thirty-five mph. Some experts have suggested that the real secret to the family meal is simply that it gives parents a daily opportunity to “visually assess” kids for potential problems. Others concede that its power, while undeniable, remains mysterious—possibly even unknowable.
In 2008 pediatrician Katherine E. Murray found that family meals and family nutrition both declined significantly in households where teenagers had a television in their bedroom—and almost two-thirds of her sample did. They also engaged in less physical exercise, consumed more soft drinks and fast food, and read and studied less. Girls with bedroom TVs, public-health researcher Daheia Barr-Anderson found, spent almost an hour less a week in “vigorous activity”—extreme channel-surfing excepted—and ate an average of three family meals a week or fewer, compared with just under four meals for other girls.9 For male teens, physical activity wasn’t affected but school performance was. Grades for boys with TVs in their bedrooms were 10 percent lower than peers without TV. And boys, interestingly, are more likely to have their own televisions in the first place.
Among the multitude of things the family-meals literature doesn’t tell us is whether the benefits increase arithmetically with time—if twenty minutes around the dinner table is beneficial, are forty minutes verging on miraculous?—but heading into The Experiment, it seemed safe to assume that more of a good thing was probably going to be ... well, a good thing. Because we had always been a family that ate meals together, and did so without the benevolent assistance of television, I was looking to The Experiment as a way of extending the experience in both quantity (time spent) and quality.
Admittedly, we were coming off a pretty low base. I would definitely have put up my hand along with the 40 percent of Australian mothers who find mealtimes unpleasant AND the 67 percent who believe they are good for us anyhow. Most nights, I’d put a fair amount of effort into preparing a meal. Nothing lavish—like most teenagers, mine are allergic to lavish—but in the main nutritious, balanced, and quasi-palatable. When they were little, I scurried around making special child-friendly dinners. In fact, our nightly fare was not unlike the Kidz Menu at a down-market family restaurant: i.e., heavy on the chicken nuggets and carrot sticks, light on the line-caught trout and mushroom rillettes. These days, the experts tell you this is exactly what you shouldn’t do. Children should be offered adult food from the git-go, and if they don’t like it, let ’em eat multigrain bread.
But I have to say, though my kids’ palates were definitely stunted, not having to engage in force feeding meant that most of the time I enjoyed our meals together. Still, as the children got older, I did begin to worry. Would they reach adulthood squirting ketchup like crack-crazed graffiti artists and removing the “crust” from their fish sticks on grounds of “spiciness”? Somehow or other, they eventually moved on. Today they are able to enjoy most foods, with one or two limitations. Anni doesn’t like meat. Bill doesn’t like vegetables. And Sussy isn’t really into cutting things up, or for that matter chewing. But hey. You can’t have your Thai fishcake and eat it, too.
Going into The Experiment, my main concerns about our family mealtimes were: first, low appetites on account of the ridiculous amount of after-school snacking (sorry, “grazing”) going on, most of it in front of a screen; and, second, speed-eating. The latter was a term I learned much later, in doing the research for this book. It was a relief to find there was an actual word to describe the practice that had been poisoning the ambience at our family meals, like an over-boiled head of cabbage, for years.
“We define speed-eating as a fast rate of movement or action when young people put food into the mouth, chew and swallow, in order to finish their food as fast as possible. This can be interpreted as an attempt to escape from parental and teacher control at mealtimes,” I read in an article exploring “the realm of food consumption practices as a political arena.”10 My kids were demon speed-eaters, but I interpreted it more as an attempt to escape back to messaging, Facebook, and Dune.
The Experiment proved this to be a very powerful hypothesis.
With no more attractive prospect to lure them from the dinner table, the children did not exactly learn to linger over cigars and brandy. But at least they stopped inhaling their food and bolting for the nearest digital foxhole. We did slow down, all of us, and, over time, we did engage in more meaningful dinnertime dialogue. But then, given our prevailing standard—“So how was school?” “What?” or “Why aren’t you eating your peas?” “What?” or “What’s the deal with the Carbon Trading Scheme?” “Who?”—that wasn’t hard. Overall, I would estimate that we probably increased our face time at the dinner table by 15 to 20 percent, in both quantity and quality. That was pretty good, I guess—but still less than I’d expected. I’d pictured us like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, engaging in spirited but civilized debate, our faces aglow with family feeling and an excess of giblet gravy. The truth was, we were still more likely to bicker over who got the Hannah Montana glass.
There were unexpected gains elsewhere on the bill of fare. Deprived of his early-morning downloads, Bill started spending more time at the breakfast table. He didn’t initiate a lot of conversation. But he did eat a lot more eggs, and spent an impressive amount of time reading the sports pages. I’m not sure it improved family communication, but it made me smile to see him tented importantly behind the pages of The Australian, like somebody’s father. Sussy, too, eventually started to make unscheduled appearances at the breakfast table. “Do you want oatmeal?” I’d ask. “Eggs? Toast? Juice? A smoothie?”
“No, thanks,” she’d croak gruffly, gulping her tea. Then I’d serve whatever it was I was making for Bill, anyway, and she’d eat every bite. It was sort of the opposite of demand feeding—more supply feeding, really—and I wished I’d started it fourte
en years earlier.
At the most basic level, The Experiment forced us to notice food more—just as we noticed music more, and sleep, and each other. Before, eating had been a side dish. Now it was the main course, or at least one of them.
Our approach to cooking changed too, especially for the girls. They’d started out as reasonably competent cooks, but by the end of The Experiment they were capable of turning out entire meals with ease. More important, they wanted to. Bill, alas, responded by growing even lazier in the kitchen. This was especially true once he got a job and enough pocket money to supply his bubble-tea habit. On the other hand, The Experiment did ignite his interest in the barbecue, in the true, albeit slightly cringeworthy tradition of the Aussie male.
Our shopping habits morphed in intriguing and unanticipated ways too. Before, I’d often shopped for groceries here and there, dashing up to the supermarket or deli on a need-to-nosh basis. Now, the Saturday morning shopping trip became an essential weekend ritual. Pre-Experiment, I’d always shopped alone. Now Anni came with me, eager to help plan meals and to steer me tactfully toward more adventurous choices of yogurt and cookies. (I am the sort of person who can, and in fact has, eaten the same brand of chocolate chips for twenty-three years.)
Once the reality of the global economic downturn started to bite, we determined to become better recession shoppers, and the child who once told me she’d “never actually been hungry” even got interested in planning meals. The chore of shopping for a family became more palatable, less of a burden and more an event—even an opportunity to bond. It also made me aware of how incredibly rigid my grocery choices had become. I found myself taking daring steps. Buying dishwashing liquid with the passion fruit scent, or paper towels stamped with different unidentifiable pictures. And who could forget the egg-ring incident?
The Winter of Our Disconnect Page 23