Family Meal

“The family meal” conjures an image readily recognizable in the West of a man, a woman, and two or three children seated around a table to eat. It is an image kept alive by steady coverage in the mass media over the second half of the twentieth century. It is also an image of propriety: an orderly family keeping life in order, a virtue endorsed in both mass media coverage and research reporting that, by and large, people aspire to domestic arrangements whereby the family members regularly forgather to share whatever in their social milieu counts as a meal.

[Page 577]“The family meal” is an expression with wide currency in English. Without primary research, however, dating its origin is not straightforward. It is not listed in either Webster's Dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary. Jane Austen, did, though, have Mrs. Bennett in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice talk of “family dinners.” These dinners consisted of a single course (though it would have comprised many more dishes than the modern reader would expect) as distinct from meals comprising two or more and to which guests were also invited. All the same, perhaps as if anticipating his marrying into the family, Mrs. Bennett reminds Mr. Bingley that he had “promised to take a family dinner” with them. Usage through much of the twentieth century appears extensive, seeming to need no explanation by social commentators, pundits, or journalists. An early reference appeared in the New York Times on January 6, 1921, and by the end of the century, the expression could be widely found on the Internet and in newspapers as far apart as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

A theme of such public coverage is that family meals are disappearing, replaced by people eating alone, taking frequent snacks rather than regular meals, at a desk or on a sofa instead of at the table. Sometimes part of a broader discussion of changes in modern life—in 1950s America with the advent of TV and TV dinners, in the “death of the British Sunday” in the 1990s when new legislation allowed shops to open seven days a week—family meals are said to be on the wane. As significantly, this trend is presented not as reason for celebration—such themes as liberation from a chore, old-fashioned habit, or outdated formality tend to be muted, ignored, or simply absent—but as cause for concern, disapproval, and anxiety. Added to pundits' urging the intrinsic virtues of a slower pace, or chefs' reminders to appreciate both the food and the activity of eating together, are media reports of investigations revealing associations between infrequent family meals and health or social problems (e.g., poorer nutritional intake, higher likelihood of childhood obesity, eating disorders, and illegal drug use and alcohol abuse among the young). The associated anxiety about the quality of daily life is exemplified by a July 30, 2006, headline of the UK's Independent on Sunday, “Families drift apart if they don't eat together.”

The theme is also echoed across western Europe, in Belgium as much as in Norway. The expression family meal is not, however, always readily translatable. For example, the only direct equivalent in Finnish is said to be obsolete, while a subtle distinction can be made in French between le repas en famille, a meal with, or in, the family, and le repas de famille, an abstract notion with more formal connotations conveying a sense of obligation on members to attend. All the same, in both Finland and France, the idea of a family meal and the type of domestic arrangement associated with it is both recognized and valued.

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