The family that eats together, talks together

Over the years our family has come to appreciate just how important it is to ‘break bread’ together, that the communal activity of sharing meals fuels us both physically and mentally.  Yet ironically, given the growth of huge industries around diet, nutrition, fitness, celebrity chefs and TV cookery competitions, the societal practice of cooking a meal from scratch and eating together as a family has waned. In our view that’s more than just a shame: it removes a great opportunity to develop our relationships, our sense of belonging and stability - and lots of frequent, shared memories.  We try to eat together every evening, when we all unwind, talk about our days and share (often quite strong!) views on everything from world events to what happened at school. Of course, pre-Covid-19 it’s not always been possible to have supper together every day but still the norm is for whoever is around chez Morrissey to congregate for our evening meal, spending time together, pulling us together as a unit. 

The food itself is important – the act of preparing the meal, the giving of time and effort to create a dish that hopefully everyone will enjoy. (See below for dealing with fussy eaters, dietary ‘requirements’ and other eating issues.) To be honest, the preparation of the meal isn’t really shared in the Morrissey family: my husband Richard is the chef and doesn’t let any of us ‘interfere’ apart from to do ‘very menial’ tasks (his words) although he welcomes the rest of us playing our part by laying the table and cleaning up. Each day he thinks about what he’s going to cook that evening and as he likes to experiment a lot, the ritual of the children asking, ‘what’s for supper?’ has become part of the event. And as they’ve watched him cooking over the years, they’ve all developed some level of interest in the whole process of creating a meal (Richard refers to that as ‘learning from the master’!) While he’s not keen on ‘too many cooks’ he has taught them when they’ve shown interest and the older children are now pretty capable at making meals like salmon with stir fried vegetables, paella or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. When they are home from school or university holidays, they now like to plan and cook their own lunch together, discussing what they want, agreeing who will go out and buy the ingredients and then prepare the meal itself. The various TV food shows or recipe pages in the weekend newspapers and magazines do actually inspire us to do something practical – we can usually predict what Richard will be cooking for lunch on Saturday, for example, based on the recipes in the papers that morning. 

Meanwhile, I've been ‘allowed’ to bake and that’s led to some fun family times (and not just with the girls) over the years, including big collaborative efforts like making Fitz and Dyedra’s wedding cake (a giant, eight-storey pavlova which took several weekends of disastrous practice and involved my sister Liz as well as multiple children – and 32 eggs!). Meringues have featured in our extended family get-togethers over very many decades, being my mother’s signature dish as well, and spectacular pavlovas are woven through many happy memories of family parties. The picture above is from Easter Sunday's special lunch this year. Birthday cakes are planned (sometimes too ambitiously for our ability) and baked, then presented in a slightly over-the-top way, with sparklers, decorations and special candles. And then there’s the more regular baking efforts, often led these days by our sixteen-year-old, who loves thinking about what to make for pudding on Saturday evenings, going with Richard to the supermarket to buy ingredients and then pulling it all together and seeing how much her creation is enjoyed. 

The food itself is just one aspect of our family meal. The build-up to the drawing together of our days around the dinner table was a big part of our daily lives when the children were young. Richard devised ‘cocktail time’, a 5pm ritual, when he would put crisps, carrots, celery and other snacks into the different segments of one of those large serving dishes that are sometimes used to serve crudités at cocktail parties. The exact foods in the bowl would vary, creating a buzz of excitement amongst the children (even if it was just a new flavour of crisps). At 5 o’clock exactly, Richard would shout ‘cocktail time’ and all the children would stop what they were doing and gather round a low coffee table in the living room to help themselves from the special bowl. The tiny toddlers, in their nappies, would join in, loving the moment. It was a punctuation point in the day, the signal that the evening was beginning. We no longer do that because the children have different timetables or are busy with their homework, but the memory is indelibly inked on all our minds and there’s still a growing sense of anticipation in the house as the supper hour approaches. 

Over dinner, we talk about anything and everything. I'm going to cover ‘diversity of thought’ as far as families are concerned in a future article; the starting point is to encourage children to think for themselves, to have an opinion on what’s going on – both in their own life and the wider world. Over supper we will talk about our day but also what’s in the news and our views on those events. Nothing is off limits! And we play music and opine on that too. Phones are banned (shamefully, my husband and I sometimes transgress on that). We linger and although we don’t always have pudding, we’ll bring out chocolate and Turkish Delight to extend the meal. Then everyone helps clear the table and load the dishwasher, before we each go off to do our remaining work for the day and eventually reconvene for family TV time (usually an episode from a couple of our favourite series). 

None of this was planned, it’s evolved and we can now see multiple benefits from what has ended up being such a big part of our family life, part of the ‘bedrock’ that helps each of us deal with the many less stable aspects of our individual lives. We hear from our children that their friends often eat by themselves in their rooms, which might be fine or necessary once in a while but can easily become a habit, exacerbating the isolation that so many children feel and diminishing the opportunities to get together. It’s clearly not always possible to make supper a shared daily experience; people work long hours and (apart from during coronavirus lockdown) may get home too late to eat with their children or perhaps parents want that time to themselves. It’s important though to carve out certain points in the week – say, Sunday lunch – to bring everyone together over a meal. It’s a matter of prioritisation – there will always be another alternative activity and this one is important for the rest of your family life. 

Shared meals are also a way of keeping an eye on everyone’s eating habits. Over the years we’ve experienced children eating very little, becoming increasingly fussy about what they will eat or adopting a specific diet. I don’t eat meat (but do eat fish) so Richard has accommodated that for years (if the rest of the family is eating sausages, for example, he’ll cook a few vegetarian sausages as well), and within reason he’ll adapt the menu (for example several don’t like anything spicy). 

Very young children tend to go through ‘fussy’ phases, in our experience, especially in their second year (although it can be later). In our view, there’s little to be achieved by making a drama of this; instead, disguising healthy foods in fun shapes and gradually introducing other flavours or foods other than the strawberry petit filou that they insist on eating. When I was two, I ate just a boiled egg and an ice cream every day for a year....

I was also anorexic as a teenager and again in my early twenties, helping me to understand the complexities of that particular eating disorder (although obviously not as a medical expert). We’ve had some brushes with that; one of our daughters was clearly hardly eating but from my own experience, we realised that we shouldn’t tackle the issue head-on. Instead, when our daughter developed a (supposedly unrelated) medical problem we suggested she visit the doctor. The (young, female) doctor in turn very tentatively suggested that her being underweight was the cause of the secondary issue. This kindly 3rdparty intervention proved to be the turning point. We were fortunate that the problem wasn’t too severe, but watching how she avoided or minimised her intake of food had helped us see it in the first place. We’ve learned over the years that a fashionable diet such as veganism or strictly limited carbs can be adopted to hide a problem, so now that puts us on watch. 

If you aren’t used to eating together as a family, as usual it can be hard to take that first step. But as always, it’s possible, and you can start small, suggesting a family supper night and discussing the menu together if you have older children.  Soon the ‘occasion’ can become a habit – and like with many things, practice makes us better, if far from perfect. It is also good to show children that you are willing to take some risks and that some days you cook something that turns out to be too complicated and a ‘fail’. There should be staple dishes but also a willingness to experiment. 

In our experience, persevering is well worth the effort. Just to recap the benefits of regularly and frequently eating together include: 

1.     Improved family relationships – a sense of security and belonging, bonding, chatting, alleviation of stress. Having dinner together in particular helps us all wind down and to gain perspective on issues and events from each other. 

2.     Better and healthier food choices and more sensible eating habits. Children learn to share, to have patience to wait for others to eat. They learn good manners and self-restraint. 

3.     Studies show better academic results, improved mental and physical health, less dysfunctional activity. 

Here’s some websites and articles that we'd recommend for further reading:

https://learntocook.comonline culinary school

https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/6-reasons-eating-family-dinner/

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/parenting/healthy-families-the-importance-of-enjoying-mealtimes-together-1.3754710

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-importance-of-eating-together/374256/

https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=why-the-family-meal-is-important-1-701

https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/healthy-eating/eating-together