3Dinner
ELINOR OCHS AND MARGARET BECK
On the eve of Thanksgiving 2010, USA Today gave celebratory prominence to a recent Pew Research Center survey finding that 89 percent of Americans reported that they will gather to have Thanksgiving dinner with their families, as if, after all, at this quintessential family moment, eating together continues to matter to American society. It reported, for example, that “Barry Antonelli, 37, of Baileyton, Tenn., says he, his wife, and four young kids will drive to Baltimore this Thanksgiving because being with his father for the holiday has always been ‘real important’ to him.”1
Meanwhile, the French publication Philosophic Magazine dedicated its entire December 2010 issue to the provocative cover theme “La Famille est-elle insupportable?” (The Family, Is It Unbearable?), with articles on the pervasiveness of irksome extended family dinners, undeniable Oedipal tensions, and a philosophical disdain for familial suppression of individual creativity. A representative comment expressed the idea that “la famille était une réalité biologique formalisée par le politique” (the family was a biological reality formalized by politics).2
Did USA Today and Philosophic Magazine capture two different cultural ideologies of family mealtimes? Yes and no. Like the French report, U.S. surveys, news outlets, and blogs find cracks in the image of the contemporary American family as a cohesive, engaged social unit. Most notably, the media lament the decline of family dinnertime and implicate the overscheduled lives of working parents as somewhat responsible for this moral slippage. Twenty-first-century American parents, for one reason or another, appear to be unable to prioritize the ritual of family dinner. The USA Today survey disclosed, for example, that only 50 percent of families said that they eat together every day, 34 percent a few times a week, and 14 percent rarely or never.
To discern possible cultural differences it is useful to look more closely at the reasons that American and French family members give for why it is so difficult to gather as a family and share a meal. Philosophic Magazine reported that the French public harbor an acute sardonic awareness that family gatherings, especially meals, seethe with tensions arising from the twin desires for attachment to and freedom from a family that one can never completely renounce. In this accounting, family gatherings inherently evoke feelings of ambivalence. Alternatively, Americans cling to the ideal of family commensality as an elixir for personal and societal ills (e.g., children's vulnerability to drugs, smoking, and obesity) and as de rigueur for kindling children's school success.3 Many parents regret that for pragmatic reasons they cannot routinely prepare and enjoy a meal together as a family. They cite busyness—workplace obligations, children's extracurricular and school activities, and scheduling conflicts—as occluding this opportunity.4 Some strive to create alternative sites of family involvement, as suggested in Lisa Belkin's insightful New York Times article, “The Pangs of Family Mealtime Guilt.”5
Yet the CELF study reveals that the busy lives of family members outside the home are not the only culprit in the saga of the American family dinner. Even when all members of a family were at home, eating dinner together was a challenge in many households. Why?
Two less acknowledged reasons for why family dinners were a challenge for the CELF families stand out: (I) convenience foods filling refrigerators and cupboards supplied individualized snacks and meals for family members; and (2) family dinnertime often gave way to intergenerational conflicts surrounding children's food choices. The consumption of preprepared convenience foods, many of which are packaged as individual meals, stand alongside busy schedules as a root factor in undermining dinner as a family event. The “story” of the decline of family dinners that emerges from the CELF study begins in the supermarket with large-scale purchases of packaged convenience foods. The story continues with these convenience foods flooding the home space. We systematically documented where convenience foods were located, how they were consumed as snacks, and how they were prepared and eaten as dinner dishes. We noted who in the family ate dinner, with whom, for how long, and where. Researchers also examined parental scrutiny of children's food preferences.6 We indicate the ways in which families buy, prepare, eat, and talk about food have cumulative effects on the social vitality of dinnertime.
Tensions between individual and family desires that the French press reports wreak havoc on family gatherings find expression as well in the Los Angeles CELF households. Children resisted parental biddings to eat dinner with them, and children's individual food wants conflicted with parentally imposed food selections.7 In some households, the ubiquity of microwaveable, individual-sized, packaged snacks in the home undermined children's interest in even coming to the dinner table, much less their willingness to eat what had been prepared for them. In these households, parents’ insistence that children eat the foods that were on the table was undermined when children asked for one of the individual meals stored in the refrigerator or freezer that they knew could be easily popped into the microwave and in minutes be ready to eat anywhere in the house. To gain further insight into the story of family dinnertime in Los Angeles we invite you to look over the shoulders of the CELF ethnographers who photographed and video recorded the moral life of food at home.
FOOD STOCKPILING
To gain some perspective on the abundance of food in the CELF households of Los Angeles, we briefly turn to another food-loving society, namely, Italy. Italian families tend to have smaller refrigerators (with smaller freezer sections) than are found in most U.S. kitchens. Italian middle-class families typically do not have second refrigerators or freezers. It is hard to tell if refrigerator size organizes grocery shopping habits or the inverse, but Italian families characteristically purchase food more frequently (often daily) and in smaller quantities than was typical of the CELF families in Los Angeles. While neighborhood grocery stores abound and super-sized markets are becoming increasingly popular, they are usually located on the outskirts of Italian towns and are not (yet) ubiquitous. It is common for Italian families to purchase many of their everyday food items at bakeries, fruit and vegetable vendors, butcher shops, fish markets, and open markets.
In contrast, Los Angeles families manifested a different set of food shopping habits. The omnipresence of hypermarkets in Los Angeles prepared CELF researchers to document food purchased in large quantities and packed inside large refrigerators. Despite these expectations, however, we were awed by the sheer abundance of food stockpiled in homes.8 Parents purchased food in massive quantities. Enormous boxes and plastic-sealed packages of items of the same kind filled kitchens and spilled over into utility rooms and garages. Enormous cases of soda, fruit drinks, and alcoholic beverages occupied floors, shelves, and the tops of refrigerators. Food items came in multiples and giant sizes—from pancake mix and cereal to popcorn.
Figure 3.1. Kitchen refrigerator with freezer.
Los Angeles family refrigerators were brimming with food. The freezer compartment in American refrigerators is capacious and often has a separate door, as seen in figure 3.1. Some families owned a second refrigerator or a freestanding freezer, usually located in the garage. Kitchen refrigerators were dominated by large bottles of juice drinks, soda cans, and multiple gallon containers of milk. Individual-sized containers of flavored yogurts and other packaged fruit treats were often stacked inside as well. Refrigerator doors were lined with bottles of ketchup, mustard, barbecue sauces, salad dressings, syrups, and other condiments, along with tubs of margarine, butter, and cream cheese. Refrigerator bins often contained “sandwich fixings"—slices of prepared meats and cheeses—for the children's lunches. In some refrigerators, small quantities of fresh fruit and greens could be found. The second refrigerator was mainly used to hold surplus sodas, juice drinks, and beer that could not fit inside the kitchen refrigerator.
The freezer compartment in kitchen refrigerators and stand-alone freezers in garages allowed busy parents to preserve a large quantity of food items over extended periods. When the authors of this chapter were growing up, freezers were used primarily for three items: raw meats, vegetables, and ice cream. The freezers in the homes of the twenty-first-century families in the CELF study contained raw meats, vegetables, and ice cream but were often buried under an avalanche of frozen convenience snacks and meals, especially individual-sized, preprepared items that can be microwaved. Because they were packed in large boxes and purchased in great quantities, these food items were bulky and occupied a lot of freezer space. For example, the freezer shown in Figure 3.1 is filled with boxes of frozen pizzas, tacos, fish sticks, chicken strips, frozen yogurt bars, and sugar-free popsicles.
The hyper-consumerism of these convenience foods, especially their bulky packaging, explains in part why American families “require” large freezers, sometimes more than one, in their homes. Beyond the size and number of freezers and refrigerators, however, the cornucopia of convenience foods stored in family homes played an important role in the viability of CELF family dinners.
RIPE FOR THE PLUCKING
In some CELF households, parents made sure that their children were supplied with raw fruit, vegetables, and nuts to eat as snacks after school and on weekends. In other CELF households, packaged foods piled in refrigerators, freezers, cupboards, and elsewhere were “ripe for the plucking,” that is, ready and waiting for children and other family members to eat. In these homes, snacking involved simply opening a package and consuming its contents. Some children asked permission before snacking (Son: “Can I have a Fruit Roll-Up, and can I give Justin one too?” Mother: “Yeah, sure"). Other children were encouraged to open the freezer or refrigerator, choose the snack they wanted, and, in some cases, microwave frozen food for themselves.9 In one household, a mother who worked late afternoon and evening shifts filled a large thermal container with ready-made snacks for the kids to grab when they returned home after school.
What was culturally striking across the households was the abundance of individual-sized packaged foods for children. Figure 3.2, for example, shows a shopping bag full of small packages of cookies, designed for a child's school lunch bag or afternoon snack. The individual packaging itself facilitates a child's consumption of the food item, as there is no need to take, pour, or cut a portion from a larger quantity. In addition, each package holds the child's own portion, obviating the need for napkin or plate. Some child-oriented yogurts and fruit purees, for example, can be squeezed directly into the child's mouth.
Figure 3.2. Individual-sized packaged cookies.
The commonplace practice of providing individually packaged snacks for children was noted during our health interviews with parents. During the interview we asked them to open the kitchen refrigerator and talk about its contents. On one occasion, Rhoda Anderson, a working mother, peered inside the freezer compartment and pointed out snacks that her children like to “grab”: “And there's some frozen yogurt that they grab in here. There's also some more candy. And sometimes they grab that.
That's what's in the freezer.” Individualized snacks were purchased for each child. Rhoda explained, “Laura loves ((pause)) these applesauce things that you just kind of squirt it in your mouth. . . . And Laura likes—Molly—they like, um, Go-Gurts. So it's like a yogurt thing that you just squeeze. . . . It's kind of fun.” Rhoda supplied each child with a “fun” snack that was thought to be relatively nutritious—fruit in “applesauce things” and milk in Go-Gurts.
Snacks were part and parcel of refueling children after a long, hard day at school and beyond. Everyone knows, however, that eating snacks has consequences later on in the evening when dinner is ready. Consider, for example, what transpired between Susan Marsden and her eight-year-old daughter, Courtney, at dinnertime. Susan had brought home take-out food from a local restaurant for the whole family to eat, but Courtney, watching television and eating a snack, was not interested in joining them:
| SUSAN: | Hey lounge lizard. | |
| COURTNEY: | (Hello). | |
| SUSAN: | YOU want, um,—want something to eat? | |
| COURTNEY: | No. I don't like [name of restaurant]. | |
| SUSAN: | I didn't get [name of restaurant], and what are you eating now? Goldfish again? | |
| COURTNEY: | ((Nods)) | |
| SUSAN: | SO what do you want? Salad and a quesadilla? | |
| COURTNEY: | ((Shakes her head)) | |
| . . . | ||
| SUSAN: | Come on. ((pause)) What do you want to eat, I'll make you something to eat and then we're turning off the TV, Courtney. | |
| SUSAN: | What do you want to eat? | |
| COURTNEY: | I don't want anything. | |
| SUSAN: | YOU don't want, um ((pause)) a salad or an apple or ((pause)) what. | |
| COURTNEY: | ((Shakes her head)) |
In this exchange, Susan started out in a lighthearted manner but soon became alarmed that her daughter was eating “Goldfish again,” suggesting this snack was habitual. After volunteering to prepare for Courtney what she would like as an alternative to take-out, Courtney responded categorically “I don't want anything,” affirming this once again when her mother proposed some food options. This exchange is emblematic of the state of dinnertime for many families in the United States: children prefer to munch on a snack of their own choosing while engaged in a separate activity of their own choosing, such as watching a television program, rather than join the family around the dinner table.
A similar scenario transpired in the Roland-Santos household. Five-year-old Pablo voiced reluctance to eat chicken nuggets or a fish stick that his mother offered him for dinner. Even after his mother, Ann, quietly directed him, “Eat your dinner,” he still hesitated. His mother then put forward an explanation: “I know you're probably not very hungry because you ate lots of pizza.” In response Pablo minimized the amount of pizza he had eaten but finally admitted to also eating an entire package of Cheetos, a cheese-flavored cornmeal snack, earlier in the day.
| PABLO: | I—I only ate one piece of pizza and—and like one—and one piece of Cheetos. | |
| ANN: | Only one piece of Cheetos? | |
| PABLO: | I mean, only one Cheeto. | |
| ANN: | Only one Cheeto? | |
| PABLO: | I only ate—all of the Cheetos in the pack. |
After a few more unsuccessful attempts ("Mommy, I don't really feel like all of this"), his parents changed gears and came to the realization that Pablo was simply not up to this endeavor ("Are you done? Oh, you're so tired").
HOME-COOKED MEALS
Convenience foods occupied an important place as ingredients in the dinner meal itself.10 The arrival home from work, school, and extracurricular activities was a particularly challenging time of the day for family members. As reported widely for working families across the United States,11 CELF mothers assumed an especially heavy domestic set of responsibilities after returning home from work. They tended to arrive home about two hours before their spouses12 and, like mothers elsewhere,13 managed the multiple tasks of helping with homework, dinner preparation, and readying children for bed, among other household tasks.14 Under these circumstances, many of the parents sought to streamline dinner preparation.
Margaret Beck documented exactly what families ate for dinner.15 At first she was surprised that an impressive 73 percent of the weeknight dinners were “home-cooked"! That is, they were prepared by a family member at home. These home-cooked dinners did not include take-out or delivered restaurant food. Mothers (sometimes with assistance of other family members) prepared over 90 percent of the home-cooked meals.16
When Beck looked more closely at the ingredients that constituted “home-cooked” dinners served during the workweek, however, another picture emerged.17 Most of these meals contained preprepared convenience food items. In fact, only 22 percent of the so-called home-cooked weeknight dinners were prepared with little or no convenience foods. That is, only a fraction were made primarily from fresh or raw ingredients. This percentage is lower than reports based on surveys,18 perhaps because CELF researchers relied on direct observation rather than self-reports.
What did these dinners look like? Main dishes included, for example, chicken nuggets (frozen, cooked in oven), chicken and dumplings (made with Chicken Helper commercial mix), Trader Joe's orange chicken (frozen, cooked in oven), and ribs in barbecue sauce (commercial, microwaved). Accompaniments were french fries (commercial, frozen, cooked in oven), mashed potatoes (commercial, microwaved), cornbread (Marie Callender's mix, cooked in oven), biscuits (commercial roll of dough, cooked in oven). In one household, the home-cooked dinner consisted of individualized meals: (1) hamburger meat (defrosted in the microwave, then cooked in a skillet) mixed in ramen noodle soup (commercial, cooked on stovetop) for the parents; (2) chicken and Rice-A-Roni (leftover, heated in microwave) for the daughter; and (3) chicken noodle soup (canned, cooked on stove) for the son.
The home-cooked meals took an average of 34 minutes of hands-on time and a total of 52 minutes to prepare (Figure 3.3). As the term suggests, preprepared “convenience” foods should take less time to prepare than cooking from scratch with fresh or raw ingredients. Heavy reliance on commercial food did reduce hands-on time significantly, but the difference was only 10 to 12 minutes.
Moreover, there was no significant difference in the total cooking time for dinners made primarily from convenience foods and those made primarily from fresh ingredients or a combination of fresh and some or limited convenience foods. This finding suggests that relying mainly on commercially prepared foods for dinner does not actually save a great deal of time for busy parents. As Davies and Madran note,19 the preference among some adults for preparing convenience foods may be motivated by perceived time pressures, while the preference among other adults for cooking fresh or raw ingredients may be based on a moral orientation to meals as both enjoyable and important events.
Figure 3.3. Preparation time: Cooking from scratch and preprepared foods.
CELF dinners included a range of one to seven dishes. Interestingly, dinners made primarily from fresh ingredients typically contained three or fewer dishes, for example, a protein, a starch, and a green vegetable. Only 18 percent of dinners made from scratch consisted of more than three dishes. In contrast, 52 percent of dinners relying on heating up packaged commercial foods consisted of more than three dishes. As we will see below, dinners from scratch with fewer dishes were communal meals, with family members eating the same dishes. Alternatively, dinners with numerous dishes correlated with individual family members eating different dishes. The higher number of commercial dishes corresponded less to a “breaking bread together” type of dinner and more to an atomistic version of this meal. The stockpiling of individual-sized convenience foods in freezers allowed parents to prepare a separate meal for a family member. At the start of dinnertime, some children requested that a parent get up and heat a commercial food not on the table that was more to his or her liking.
EATING TOGETHER AND APART
So what did dinnertimes look like in the CELF households? Did family members eat together or apart? To address these questions, we analyzed the two weekday dinners and one weekend dinner that CELF researchers video recorded.20 Across thirty households we documented the extent to which family members ate at the same time and/or in the same place. Sometimes all family members ate together at the same time and place. Sometimes a family member was not at home, but the rest of the family ate together. At other times family members ate in staggered fashion at different times (beginning to eat at least ten minutes after others started to eat) or scattered in different rooms of the house.
On the communal side, 77 percent of the families ate dinner together on at least one evening during the study. When everyone was at home during the week, 59 percent of the fifty-eight dinners recorded were eaten together as a family. When one or more members of the family were not at home during the week, 67 percent of the dinners were eaten together by the family members who were at home.
Alternatively, only 17 percent of the families ate dinner all together across the three days of recording, and 23 percent of the families never ate all together. In 50 percent of the households, a family member, usually the father, was not at home at least one evening. In 63 percent of the households, family members ate at different times (i.e., began eating more than ten minutes after others were already eating) or ate apart from one another in different rooms. Of the fifty-eight weekday dinners recorded, 41 percent were fragmented in this way.
How does one weigh the social and moral import of these observations? For those who have written off family dinnertime as a relic of the past, the CELF findings that families still eat together at home during the week is a pleasant surprise. For survey researchers who paint a rosy picture of young children eating a home-cooked meal together with their family based on children's self-reports,21 it is sobering to find that eating at home may frequently be temporally or spatially disjointed, as exposed by the ethnographic lens of the video camera. When a child reports in a survey study that he or she had dinner at home, it cannot be assumed that he or she is sharing a meal face-to-face at the same time with the rest of the family. Indeed, fragmented dinners at home may be salient in many twenty-first-century U.S. families.
Could there be a link between the kind of meal eaten for dinner and the extent to which CELF family members ate apart or together? The short answer is yes. To address this question, we matched the contents of dinner meals with each family member's time and location at dinnertime. In 68 percent of the weekday dinners that were eaten at different times or in different rooms, family members ate meals made entirely or mostly of convenience foods or dishes brought home from a restaurant or take-out. In contrast, in 76 percent of weekday dinners eaten all together, family members ate meals prepared mainly with fresh ingredients.
Although heavy reliance on convenience foods does not predict a scattering of family members at dinnertime, their individual packaging and low-skill (but not significantly less time-consuming) preparation may encourage family members to eat at different times and places, even when the whole family is at home. The expectation that individual-sized convenience foods can be heated up and eaten apart by a family member whenever or wherever was apparent late on a Sunday afternoon in the Marsden household. Thirteen-year-old Darrin asked his mom to heat up his convenience meal right away for him to eat. When his mother, Susan, countered that she wanted him to eat his “special dinner” together with the family, Darrin was bewildered.
| DARRIN: | Where's my dinner? | |
| SUSAN: | ((Gives Darrin “the look")) hhhh ((Taps a pan)) In that special pan right there. | |
| DARRIN: | Special? | |
| SUSAN: | Your special dinner. | |
| - - - | ||
| DARRIN: | Could I have my dinner now? | |
| SUSAN: | NO,you're eating with us. | |
| DARRIN: | I know that's why I said could I have my dinner now. | |
| SUSAN: | We're all sitting down together. We don't get to sit down and eat very much . . . |
Like other children in the CELF study, Darrin assumed that “you're eating with us” meant eating his individualized meal at home regardless of where in the house the eating took place. That assumption was evidenced when his mother had to make explicit, “We're all sitting down together,” and lamented, “We don't get to sit down and eat very much.”
EMOTIONS AT DINNERTIME
Children may prefer to eat on their own for any number of reasons, including in order to avoid conflicts over their eating habits.22 Parents and children in the CELF study frequently entered into food negotiations, complete with bargaining, enticements, and threats. Some parents insisted that children eat certain foods considered healthy. Dinnertime, for these families, became a match of wills.23 Many parents dwelled on the nutritious value of food items and expressed appreciation for the meal. In contrast, children, especially at the start of dinner, often expressed their distaste for the food prepared for them.24 When some children were called for dinner and saw what they were to eat, they complained.
In these dinnertime tussles with children, parental confusion over nutrition was evident.25 At the start of one family dinner, eleven-year-old Sandra asked to have some of the pink lemonade that her parents had placed on the table for themselves. Her parents pressed her to drink a glass of milk first. Sandra refused. Her mother offered an alternative: “If you are not going to have milk, you can have string cheese.” But Sandra had a counterproposal: “I'll have a Go-Gurt.” Her parents agreed to this compromise. They likely did not realize, however, that alongside the healthful ingredient of milk, each Go-Gurt contains more sugar per ounce (4.89 grams) than does that brand of lemonade (3.6 grams) or even Coca-Cola (3.25 grams).26
Similarly, during the Dorbin family dinner, eight-year-old Josh did not want to eat a “meatless meatball.” His mother, a vegetarian, used a confused logic of nutritional value to change his mind, ending with a full admission of ignorance.
| MOTHER: | Eat at least one of these. | |
| . . . | ||
| because it has your vegetable | ||
| and protein in it. | ||
| I mean your protein. | ||
| Or your vegetables. | ||
| Or something. | ||
| FATHER: | Or all of those things. | |
| MOTHER: | I don't know. |
Parents the world over want their children to eat healthy meals, yet many middle-class parents in the United States focus children's attention on the nutritional properties of a food item to the extent that they forget about developing their appreciation of its taste. In contrast, middle-class parents in Italy frequently direct children's attention to the pleasurable qualities of food. Looking in on family dinners in Rome, Elinor Ochs and her Italian colleagues found that parents described different foods using emotion-filled language forms.27 Instead of talking about a piece of meat with the plain word pezzo (piece), they used the word pezzettino (an appealing morsel). This language infused kinds of cheeses, pasta sauces, and other dishes with sentiments. We do not wish to imply that food standoffs between parents and children are confined to the United States.28 We do wonder, however, if parents’ vocal preoccupation with savory foods as what children must eat for health reasons, instead of talking about these foods as delicious and what children want to eat for pleasure, may amplify the potential for power plays between generations.
It may be surprising to learn that children's reluctance to eat dinner is tied to parents’ choice of convenience foods as meals. Children in middle-class households in the United States are sometimes fussy eaters. Here we point out that preprepared meals in CELF households were not exempt from children's standoffish relation to food. Children commonly voiced their dislike for some ingredient inside a preprepared convenience meal for dinner, as illustrated in the following dinnertime excerpts.
On not liking sauce in preprepared spaghetti dinner:
| JAKE: | I told you I don't want spaghetti sauce. | |
| . . . | ||
| I don't like these noodles. | ||
| . . . | ||
| MOTHER: | Okay then don't eat them but that's what's for dinner. |
On not liking vegetables in packaged soup:
| MOTHER: | Oh, you took the celery out too? | |
| ADRIAN: | Mm hm. | |
| MOTHER: | Oh. | |
| FATHER: | I thought you liked [celery. | |
| MOTHER: | [Adrian. | |
| ADRIAN: | I don't like it in it. | |
| . . . | ||
| ADRIAN: | I DON'T want carrots. | |
| MOTHER: | Go wash your hands. | |
| ADRIAN: | I'm taking out all the stuff I don't like it. |
On not liking mixture of cereals in bowl for dinner:
On not liking sauce on pizza:
| ANNA: | Mom, ((pause)) So can I eat it up to there? I don't like all of the sauce like right here ((pause)) | |
| so can I eat it up to there? | ||
| . . . | ||
| MOTHER: | That's fine I— | |
| ANNA: | NO for real Mom can I eat it up to here? | |
| MOM! | ||
| MOTHER: | YOU don't have to eat the crust. | |
| ANNA: | NO ((pause)) see that's what I'm talking about. . . I—I mean I don't like the crust and I don't like this part. | |
| But Mom see that red sauce and that red sauce that's the part ((pause)) | ||
| [I don't like all the red sauce. | ||
| MOTHER: | [Eat around it Annie | |
| ((pause)) | ||
| you've eaten it before. | ||
| ANNA: | NO– | |
| MOTHER: | I'm going to give you one chance to do it | |
| I'm not going to negotiate with you and ((pause)) fight over this. |
On not liking premixed salad dressing:
| FATHER: | Oh I love this salad ((pause)) okay ((pause)) this is good | |
| LAURA: | I hate the dressing | |
| FATHER: | Yeah yeah ((pause))—this is sort of like ((pause)) daddy style [so: | |
| LAURA: | [It's gross! | |
| MOLLY: | It's gross! ((pause)) Yuck. |
In these circumstances, convenience foods reveal their decidedly inconvenient affordances. As prepackaged items, convenience foods make it difficult to modify a dinner dish to accommodate the taste of a family member. For example, it is difficult to withhold an ingredient, as one might do in a meal prepared from scratch. Even when bottles of condiments are used as salad dressings or sauces, they contain premixed spices in preset proportions that cannot be easily modified for the palates of particular family members. These properties of packaged foods play a role in configuring dinnertime as a site in which children's individual tastes and wills reckon with the morally infused expectations of their progenitors.
DINNER AND FAMILY LIFE
Anthropologists have long noted that sharing a meal is a universal opportunity for strengthening the ties that bind a family.29 CELF researchers were heartened to find that most of the families in our study ate dinner all together at least once across the week of our observations and that when a family member was not at home most dinners were eaten together by those who were at home. These figures indicate that the desire to “break bread” together continues to be valued in many households.
Yet a sizable portion of the dinners (41 percent) were eaten in fragmented fashion—with family members eating whenever and wherever even when they were all at home in the evenings. Whether or not family members ate together could not be explained away by work schedules, as the number of hours CELF parents were at their jobs did not influence their presence at dinnertime.30 Some fathers who worked long hours managed to come home to eat with the rest of the family while some fathers who worked fewer hours did not. Getting family members within earshot of one another to sit down at a single location and time was too much of a challenge in some households. What is going on?
Family members in other societies sometimes eat at different times.31 In some communities high status persons eat first and then others follow. In other communities family members eat opportunistically when they have finished their labor. Yet in these circumstances eating is still commonly a social activity. Other family members usually are there to converse with whomever is eating. What was striking about the fragmented dinners in the CELF families was that family members eating these meals were often only briefly in social contact. Most (67 percent) of the shortest dinners (less than fifteen minutes) were eaten by family members at different times or places at home. Most (92 percent) of the longest dinners (more than forty-five minutes) were eaten all together around the table as a family.
CELF family members, of course, did find other moments to communicate with one another. Yet the whole family was rarely home at the same time on weekdays. Generally, children returned home first, followed by mothers and then fathers. Even when at home family members were hardly ever all together in the same room; in some CELF households, family members were never all together in the same space at the same time.32 Family life at home mostly transpired in dyads (e.g., a parent and a child) or individually in separated spaces. One of the very few moments when CELF family members were observed to gather, however briefly, was dinnertime, making it even more important as a locus of solidarity and communication about events, problems, and moral perspectives.33
Pulling together the threads of our observations, it appears that two practices may undermine the valorized family dinner. First, the prevalence of convenience foods became the silent partner in constituting the ephemeral condition of family dinnertime. Convenience foods flooded the home environment in the form of individual-sized, easy-to-prepare snacks and meals packaged in portable containers. These foods encouraged children to eat at will and apart. Surprisingly, they did not significantly reduce the burden of hands-on food preparation time, saving only ten minutes for the multitasking working mother.
The heavy reliance on convenience foods in some families may instead indicate either a lifestyle preference or lack of skill in purchasing and cooking basic foods. Convenience foods have been the bane of those concerned about childhood obesity. Yet both relatively healthy and high calorie convenience foods may have an impact on the social quality of family mealtimes. Dinners dominated by convenience foods may disassemble the family body. Heavy reliance on convenience foods in some households clustered with fragmented, rushed dinners, whereas meals prepared mainly with fresh, raw foods clustered with longer dinners eaten all together as a family. Convenience foods did not even escape the fussy tastes of children, who sometimes recoiled at the fixed combination of ingredients in a preprepared pasta or taco.
Second, dinnertime as a site of family connectedness was sometimes squandered when food became a locus of control at the dinner table—by parents issuing confusing health imperatives and children trying to withdraw to eat something else and somewhere else. And here we return to the opening theme of this chapter: in contemporary postindustrial societies like the United States and France, family meals are the Petri dish where personal and shared tastes and identities are cultivated together, and their cultivation can be relatively seamless (rare) or fraught (common). Taste is, ultimately, a sensual, private experience that is shaped by public, moral scrutiny, creating a lifelong tension between children's desire for freedom and their desire to affiliate with their parents, including how they value food and the ritual of dinnertime.
NOTES
1. Klinck 2010.
2. Lacroix and Legros 2010, 56.
3. See Baselon 2008; Neumark-Sztainer et al. 1990; Patrick and Nicklas 2005; National Center on Addiction Abuse at Columbia University 2010; Weinstein 2005.
4. National Center on Addiction Abuse at Columbia University 2010.
5. June 14, 2007.
6. Paugh and Izquierdo 2009.
7. Such familial battles of wills are not restricted to American families; Aronsson and Gottzén (2011), for example, analyze a Swedish family dinner conflict around a child's food decisions.
8. Arnold et al. 2012.
9. Garro 2011.
10. Beck 2007.
11. Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Christensen and Schneider 2010; Hochschild 1997; Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2003.
12. Campos et al. 2009.
13. Offer and Schneider 2010.
14. Good 2009; Ochs et al. 2010.
15. Beck 2007.
16. Ochs et al. 2010.
17. Beck 2007.
18. Sloan 2006.
19. Davies and Madran 1997.
20. Ochs et al. 2010.
21. Several surveys report high frequency of young school-aged children eating dinner frequently with their parents, then declining to do so toward adolescence (Child Trends Data Bank 2003; RMC Research Corporation 2005; Bradley et al. 2001).
22. Intergenerational conflicts surrounding food desires are common sources of tension during family dinnertime in the United States and other postindustrial societies (Aronsson and Gottzén 2011; Ochs, Pontecorvo, and Fasulo 1996; Paugh and Izquierdo 2009).
23. Paugh and Izquierdo 2009.
24. Campos et al. n.d.
25. Garro 2011; Paugh and Izquierdo 2009.
26. Hubpages website: http://hubpages.com/hub/Go-Gurt-Ingredients-List-Sugar-Sugar-Sugar.
27. Ochs, Pontecorvo, and Fasulo 1996.
28. Anderson-Fye 2004; Kleinman 1988; Shohet 2004.
29. Lévi-Strauss 1969.
30. Ochs et al. 2010.
31. Ochs and Shohet 2006.
32. Campos et al. 2009.
33. Ochs and Shohet 2006.