A Consideration of Family Dinner
Welcome to Tender at The Desk and Stove and the relaunch of my monthly newsletter!
I have been publishing less work online and I have missed you all. Although I have been quiet, I have been busy at my desk and stove. I have been working on a second book which means less time to write essays and newsletters!
In my first book, Lifting Heavy Things, I offered a new approach to an ordinary thing— exercise—to help folks transform strength training into a healing, empowering, and even joyful, practice. My next book is an examination of how the commonplace activities of cooking and eating can become a path home to ourselves, as well as a means to asking and answering bigger questions about life and love. I wanted to give you all context for where I have been, and where my writing is headed. It is still too early in the writing process to share more than that though.
My newsletter will continue to be a place where you can learn about opportunities to work with me and read my essays about wellness practices and self and community care. As reflected by the title of this newsletter, my lens has expanded to include more about the body than movement; I will also be writing about appetites, eating, cooking, and body image!
So without further ado…
A Consideration of Family Dinner
Social scientists have been promoting family meal times as supportive to healthy childhood development since the mid-twentieth century. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, I ate dinner with my family at the dining table. My memories of the dinners we had before my parents were divorced in 1987 are fond—just thinking about them causes the corners of my lips to turn up and eyes to brighten. I remember lively conversations, lots of jokes, and ample food. My parents are fun and funny and they also enjoy a good meal. I attribute my love of cooking and eating in part to those dinners.
From 1987 until I left for college in 1996, depending on divorces, marriages, and whose house I was in, the participants, tables, and main courses varied but the rules didn’t. Watching television was not allowed and we ate together at the dining table. Phone calls were returned after dinner and we stayed at the table until everyone was done. Family dinner continued to be the primary way for all members of the household to connect with one another daily. It was, in theory, a good idea, and enforced with loving intentions. Unfortunately in practice, family dinner is where some of my disordered eating habits took root. I began to habitually dissociate at the dinner table, eating without noticing how food tasted, without honoring what I actually wanted, eating very fast, and becoming unable to recognize when I was full.
The practice of family mealtime is touted by the American College of Pediatrics because when done while also meeting a very particular set of criteria, it can support children’s development by fostering socialization, improving academics, and boosting emotional, mental, and nutritional wellness—including reducing the risk of children developing eating disorders. These criteria are “turning off the television, parental modeling of healthy eating, higher food quality, a positive atmosphere, children’s assistance with food preparation, and longer meal duration.” They also note that despite its benefits family dinner has been on a steady decline over the last thirty years and ought to be protected.
I am not arguing with these findings. I want to highlight that we do not equip parents to meet the characteristics of a beneficial family dinner. According to the American College of Pediatrics, barriers to family meals cited by parents include: too little time, child and adult schedule challenges, and food preparation. A lot of the time, these sorts of limitations are systemic and can be traced to larger issues including, but not limited to, institutionalized oppression, environmental injustice, disparity between rising costs of living and wages, and food apartheid. It is grossly unfair to expect families to simply rise above such large and deeply entrenched obstacles. Furthermore, fostering a positive atmosphere and parental modeling of healthy eating can also be something the most well-meaning parents aren’t always equipped to do. Life happens.
Coming together and turning off the television was easy to do in our house, as was serving diverse and high quality foods, because we had access to the time, money, and grocery stores needed to meet these criteria. I was also often eager to help cook. However, the reality of our lives made maintaining a positive atmosphere easy for some periods of time, and then there were years during which our family, like most families, were given a lot of lemons, and we didn’t have a recipe for lemonade. Conflict brewed under the surface, tickling my spidey senses, and sometimes it even came to a boil. Distractions in the form of busy minds can’t be turned off like a television. I began to associate loneliness, grief, and feelings of reduced self-worth with time spent at the dinner table. These difficult periods coincided with my going through puberty and entering adolescence. Without being aware of it, my limbic system in an attempt to keep me safe, eventually wove together sitting down as a family at the dining table with all of the aforementioned terrible feelings. I then coped with the distress I was anticipating by dissociating at dinner. Dissociation bred loneliness and I was stuck in a painful cycle that I brought into my adult life, and to family dinner as a parent. Now, I am working to heal this part of myself.
An important characteristic of family dinner that needs to be in place to support nutritional wellness for our children is “parental modeling of healthy eating,” which leads me to ask, who is teaching the parents what healthy eating is? After years of diets I had no idea what healthy eating was, nor was I sure where to learn more about it. Until I went into eating disorder recovery, I did the same thing as many others did around me: I repeatedly turned to restrictive diets masquerading as healthy lifestyle plans for guidance.
I am not the only parent facing this predicament. The fact is culturally, lots of us don’t have a healthy relationship with food. And the experts we turn to in the United States to tell us how to eat are often part of the seventy-billion-dollar diet industry or the United States Department of Agriculture, which gives vague, confusing, and likely biased advice. Frustratingly, doctors are just as deeply entrenched in diet culture as everyone else. So how can we expect caregivers to model healthy eating when they don’t know how to do it either? Nearly half of all Americans are on a restrictive diet on any given day, and an estimated 9% percent of Americans will have an eating disorder in their lifetime, and most will never receive treatment for it. So many adults have forgotten how to listen to their bodies and how to nourish themselves. If parents aren’t clear on what healthy eating is, how can they be expected to model it at the dinner table.
I am not saying let’s chuck it all and skip taking the opportunity to connect with our loved ones regularly over mealtimes. No way! It can be a wonderful way to foster deep connections and add structure to they day. And I definitely want to teach our children how to have a wonderful relationship with one of life’s greatest pleasures—food. I love cooking for, and eating with my family. I value what the experts are telling us, when I take it with a flake or two of Maldon salt.
Allow me to offer a view of family dinners through a holistic wellness lens: for anything to be a true wellness practice, including family dinners, it needs to work for the individual family, their resources, their skill sets, and their lifestyles. In my household we did away with mandated family dinners at the dining table.
As part of my own recovery from binge eating disorder, I am working on remaining embodied while seated at the table. It is embarrassing as an embodied movement professional and avid cook, to admit that I find it difficult to fully arrive, ground, and stay present when it is time for me to sit down to dinner. If I don’t intentionally bring mindfulness to the table, instead of staying present and enjoying my food and company, I habitually check out, devour what is on my plate with great speed, and when my plate is clean I become overcome with sleepiness (hypoarousal) or remain alert to everything around me besides whomever I am dining with (hyperarousal.) While I could always schedule and cook a delicious meal featuring various food groups, textures, and seasonings to nourish my family, and everyone could chip in to get dinner on the dining table, away from the TV, when family dinners at the table were the default I was unable to meet the American College of Pediatrician’s criteria for a beneficial family dinner because I was so dysregulated.
While working with a counselor specializing in eating disorder recovery, I realized that leaning into my agency around mealtimes would help me feel safe enough to stay present and do the hard work of healing. I did this by giving myself permission to not follow the family dinner formula I had grown up with. I didn’t have to sit at the dining table to eat dinner anymore. None of my family did. Each evening we chose where we wanted to sit as a family: at the table or on the couch. If we chose the couch then we asked if we were going to chat or watch television and oftentimes we watched a show together.
We still ate together and no one was harmed. Our closeness was not lost. Our family checked in with each other daily and had good conversations no matter where dinner happened. And eventually, I was able to become more present at mealtimes, and that meant that I was more able to connect with my loved ones on the couch than I was at the table. And now, about three years later, I can stay connected while eating meals with my family at the dining table, kitchen table, and coffee table, because my whole system understands it is a choice to be there and that the family dinner table is not an inherently emotionally unsafe place. And from an embodied place, I am more equipped to model healthy eating too.
LISTEN to my favorite podcast Normal Gossip which is in it’s sixth season and continues to have me giggling, gasping, and reacting out loud while I am along in my car.
READ this gorgeous essay My Mother Will Live Forever in the Stories of Alice Munro: Jonny Diamond on the Timeless Genius of Canada’s Greatest Writer which I found via Memoir Land. And How Doctors Are Inadvertently Fat Shaming Kids, an excerpt from Virginia Sole-Smith’s Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture
FOLLOW Zoë Bisbing, LCSW @mybodypositivehome for information and advice that empowers you to nurture a more embodied and inclusive next generation – and heal your own food and body stuff while you’re at it.
COOK vegan collard greens. I had a hankering for southern style collard greens, one bunch of collards, and no meat. I found this promising recipe for a vegan version in Food & Wine, but I didn’t have liquid smoke, white vinegar, adobo, or seasoned salt! But I did have ideas and substitutions. I quartered the recipe, made my own adobo blend which I used for both the adobo and seasoned salt. I added apple cider vinegar instead of white vinegar. And then instead of adding liquid smoke I used some smoked paprika and it did the trick.