Eating Together
Family dinners are extremely extremely important. I haven’t always thought this. In fact, I’ve usually considered food to be simply a necessity for living, nothing more. I dislike eating out in a mindless pattern (and I had better start to cook or train the cat to do so, lest we exhaust my wonderful wife, our only cook). On the contrary, I really enjoy eating out and trying new things… when there’s no obligation (perceived or otherwise) to eat the whole thing. My ideal dinner would be sharing a bunch of newfangled dishes at a restaurant… my nightmare is receiving a huge plate of something I feel obliged to consume. I have this problem where I think “all or nothing” re:the food on my plate… it’s easiest for me to eat all of it or none of it. It is supremely difficult for me to eat a little, unless my mono-food voraciousness is held in check by social obligations to my fellow diners. Hence the sharing.
So I’ve come to understand food as something that needn’t be 100% healthy or 100% unhealthy. Sampled in reasonable quantities, food eaten out can be OK. Secondly, there’s a quote that goes like this: “eating together softens people.” I always thought that lunch meetings were a silly thing, and then I started to ponder that quote (whose origin eludes me). But I’ve come to believe that the shared table does have the “civilizing influence” of which so many articles speak.
My attitude towards food has been shaped by the chefs kottke consistently links. Here’s a great article he recently linked called “To Develop Young Tastes, Look Past the Children’s Menu”:
“You know, I’m their parent, I’m not their best friend,” Mr. Marzovilla noted. “I have a duty to mold and teach.”
The idea is: you tell your kids to try new things. They needn’t like them, or always like you, but they at least should understand the breadth of the privilege in which they are brought up. Marzovilla’s quote at the end elegantly sums up that sentiment.