I’ve been wondering about the pending death of “the family dinner.” Since the late nineteen nineties, there’s been quite a bit of press about the gradual disappearance of family time around the dinner table against the backdrop of the current dizzying lifestyle of capitalism. By that I mean, you read about stories that lament about what’s happened to American domesticity: No more stay-at-home moms, dad working late or in other states and countries, and kids with too many social, work, and extracurricular activities that need to be fulfilled for the college admissions check-list. Oddly, there’s this discourse about the dinner table as an ad hoc counseling sessions — eating around the table and confessing your teenage anxieties about sex with your parents — that supposedly protects children from deviant behaviors.
In the New York Times article, “The Guilt-Trip Casserole: The Family Dinner,” writer Jan Hoffman looks at the gradual disappearance of the family dinner and the new forms of domesticity that occur. The crux of the article is a study done about the relationship between family dinners to children substance abuse. The argument being that children who have less family-time tend to do drugs.
Towards the end of the article, after giving a half dozen examples of (predominately white) families that find new ways of sustaining the heterosexual domestic arrangements of “family,” the stories seem to debunk the mythic place of the dinner table and the social practice of eating together within the American domestic imaginary. It sort of inadvertently asks when did we begin to think that the “family dinner” — maternal acts of cooking, eating mom’s cooking, children confessing personal problems and parents giving guidance — was the normal thing to do. Why do these national fears over the loss of casserole in favor of bags of “Sonic” burgers scarfed down in a mini-van always appear as the tragedies of capitalism?
As I mentioned in previous post, the “family dinner” never was the moment of rejuvenation, but where the forces of “American” assimilation were contested and sometime reaffirmed. It wasn’t domestic healing as much as it was domestic disputes. My dad worked late and was home for dinner probably 3 days a week. My sister was away at college for a portion of my h.s. days so it just ended up being my mom and I around the dinner table. The “family dinner” seemed was more fiction than fact in our family and it hardly aligned itself with the fun times that re-runs of 50-60s TV made it out to be. It’s not that we detested “family dinners.” More often that not we tried to have them as much as possible. But the national resonance of the rejuvenating properties of the kitchen table never emerged on our plates. When we did eat as a “family,” we just sat silently together watching the sporting event on TV.
I find it kind of fascinating about the varied social meanings that come together at the ordinary dinner table. What people ingest in their bodies, what people talk about, who prepares the meals, and the actual materials that people are gathering around (ikea table?) all seem to matter in the re/production of dominant ideas and practice of gender and sexuality (and by extension “America”). In particular, these notions of what proper gender, sexuality is and isn’t gains its relevance and social meaning alongside capitalism. Here’s a quote from the article:
““The family dinner research may be telling us that that some of the more important elements may be about slowing down, organizing our lives with a little bit less harried time,” she said. “There just needs to be some element of structure and reconnection during the day. And I don’t know that it has to be ‘meaningful.’ It could be a drive, a walk, a regular conversation.””
It’s interesting that children are susceptible to the machines of capital much more so than adults. It’s like capitalism is as much as threat to their development if given to soon in their lives, like peer pressure or alcohol.
But isn’t capitalism what makes our country go? Isn’t healthier and more innovative approaches to capitalism what our nation has been pining for, especially as the national employment rate passes 10%? And if capitalism operates as a rule of law in the United States, why do we fear that it will bring deviancy and looser set of morals to youth?
Anyway, its funny to me that the “family dinners” may be losing their cache in the American imaginary. Perhaps we can do away with the purportedly rejuvenating properties of mass manufactured furniture arranged to facilitate familial congregating. Perhaps in this era of constant movement, will the mini-van or interior of the car take it’s place?
