Dinner Time
The family meal, with everyone gathered around the table jostling for the best cuts of meat and the crispiest roast taters, is dying out – and I reckon it could be one of the causes of the national obesity crisis. Only a third of families now bother to meet over a crisp white tablecloth, compared with well over 80 per cent ten years ago and, when I was a kid, I remember it was a cornerstone of family life. In the 90s, the average mum served up dinner at 5.46pm. Nowadays, according to a new survey, its at 6.22 and usually the kids just grab something to eat on their laps in front of the TV. This decline must stop! I feel like leading a campaign banging the gong for Dinner Time – at any rate, it should be an election issue, since “family” threatens to be at the heart of most political agendas. We lose the family tea-time at our peril. Not only is it good for communication (when else are you ever going to chat to the kids and get them to tell you the details of their day without them realising that’s what they’re doing?), and excellent for teaching basic table manners – but it has to be the only way we can watch what we’re all eating. Family meals are, after all, cheaper to produce than a basket load of individual pizzas or microwave ready meals. It’s much healthier to bung together a load of fresh ingredients into an enormous casserole or slow-cooker and serve it to the whole family with a couple of baguettes – so that everyone can literally “break bread” as a group. Modern mums complain that the family timetable is too fragmented nowadays. Ravenous kids let themselves in their own front doors, straight after school. So they grab something easy and portable. Mum gets home later after her busy day at work, and everyone’s lucky if they see Dad at all before 7.30. All of this is true – in my house, too. So you have to work at it – and that’s what is sadly lacking. Most mums haven’t been taught HOW to work at what we cutely used to call, back in the post war decades, domestic science. You have to know how to chart, and budget, a weekly meal plan. You cook stuff in advance, and then pop it in the fridge at the right time. I make tureens of soup, cauldrons of chilli or Bolognese, and woks full of stir-fries that are then doled out – often portion controlled in Tupperware boxes in the fridge – to the offspring to keep them going until a proper family meal can be served later, around a dinner table. In fact, one of my teenage sons has now taken to helping himself to a box of home-made chilli for breakfast. At first I was appalled. But hey, he goes to school with a nutritious meal inside his stomach. Whatever works! The same survey, which was sponsored by Spam ( ironically I can’t think of a more disgusting and less inspired family food!) found that loads of families would LOVE to make more of an effort, and cook “nice meals together” in the evenings. It’s one of those ideal concepts that we still see in US sitcoms, as well as the most famous comedy of the British TV line-up, “Bread” where a Liverpool family celebrated the invincibility of the family unit over the kitchen table, under the eye of armour-plated matriarch, Ma Boswell. She kept her family close, bound together with strong apron strings and lots of love. To re-build the family in 2010 Britain, we’ve got to educate a new generation of girls in how to be mothers , how to be family cooks, how to bond a family together with the old-fashioned concept of Dinner Time. IT would be good for our hearts, great for our spirit and it’d do wonders for the waistline. Family food isn’t fattening. By its very nature, it’s simple, healthy and nutritious because it has to be planned and delivered with economy and resourcefulness. One prominent heart surgeon has advocated banning butter from our fridges. But the average home and kitchen is not where the excess fat is being delivered – it’s getting to us through the instant and ready meals industry. That’s where we’re also getting too much salt and sugar. The key to improved health and fitness lies in the family – no matter how alternative that family unit may be. I know families with single mums, two dads and an ever changing melee of kids and step kids. Whoever they may be, and whatever their timetable, they should know that there’s one place they OUGHT to be at least five times a week – and that’s around the table passing the cruet. |
