Can We Reclaim Family Dinner?

In an essay in the Chicago Tribune, Barbara Mahany imagines a scenario in which we all sit down at dinnertime with our families to eat home-cooked meals and chat about the events of the day. In today's world this idea is, she writes, "radical. Really, really radical."

At the moment, according to a study she references, a bit more than half of American households eat dinner together, which actually represents an uptick due to the grumpy economy.

But that surprisingly high number hides a not-so-idyllic reality; a third of those homes do meals in shifts, and in close to 40 percent of the households, the TV plays during dinner. In 4 percent of these homes, a computer is operating right next to a diner's dinner plate. This is hardly the "family dinner" of yore.

Mahany believes it's time to reclaim that cherished tradition of the past. Making time to prepare, serve and join together to eat this meal is an exacting discipline, but one with myriad rewards.

"Family dinner is one-stop shopping for health and wellness," Lucinda Scala Quinn told Mahany. Quinn is co-host of PBS' "Everyday Food" show and executive food director for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. "It's a day-in-and-day-out commitment, and there aren't rewards all the time. But when you see it, not all the money in the world could buy it."

I'm all for it, but the question remains: It is possible to convince the American people that this is a project worth taking on? And even if everyone buys in, do these busy households have the time for such slowing down?

Family dinner thrived in an era when women typically stayed at home, charged with the task of putting exactly this type of meal together every day. Now that most women work outside the home, can we expect families to replicate such a time-consuming tradition?

My answer? If this were a priority, people would find a way to do it, whether that would mean cooking five meals on Sunday and freezing them, joining with other families to pool time and resources a few nights a week or simply honing an automatic process for whipping up a catalog of quick, healthy meals.

It's the same with many of our other eating challenges. We know how to eat right, for example — focus on fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains — but for some reason we can't bring ourselves, collectively, to maintain healthy diets.

Well, we also know how to do family dinner. The question is, can we bring ourselves to do it?

Photo: eyeliam via flickr