The Winter of Our Disconnect (30 page)

Anni’s appetite issues were blobbiness personified. Snacking on soy crisps was a way of life for her. She never felt entirely hungry, nor entirely satisfied. No meals were fully eaten, and no fasts were fully broken—only sort of dented. Snacks were not the station between meals, but the destination itself, nibbled by the handful here and there throughout the day, as though she were a house cat. Anni’s version of dry food was not uniformly unhealthy. She did have a tendency to hoe into chips and crackers and sweets—indeed, her utter lack of impulse control around junk food was more doglike than feline—but she also ate tons of yogurt, cheese, fruit, and salads. Overall her diet was not unbalanced, it was just . . . well, blobby.

Nor was there any discrimination in where she consumed her food. Any room in the house would do: the lounge, the TV room, her bedroom, of course (it often bore the look and smell of a recently vacated school cafeteria), and even the bathroom, where it was a common sight to encounter a half-consumed piece of Vegemite toast cheek by jowl with a hairbrush, or an empty juice glass next to a bottle of Sussy’s “Age-Defying Foundation” (at fourteen, I guess you need all the defiance you can get).

Further blobbiness was evident in the way food was matched to time of day, with Rice Bubbles slurped up at dinnertime and pizza cheerfully consumed cold and congealed on the way to school. A few months back, Bill had attempted to solve this problem by buying a bulk carton of mee goreng instant noodles from our local Asian grocer. This way, he reasoned, his favorite snack could be promoted from the fifth basic food group to the
only
basic food group. “Man cannot live by mee goreng alone,” I advised sternly. (Apart from the utter lack of nutrition, the salt content made Vegemite look like blood-pressure medication.)

“What are you talking about?” he replied. “You have to add boiling water.”

I’d wonder sometimes if the whole thing really
was
my problem, as the kids insisted. “Grazing is good for you! All the experts say so,” Anni assured me between chomps of her Chicken Crimpy snack crackers. “In prehistoric times, that’s the way all human groups got their sustenance.” What? When Crimpy Chickens still roamed the earth? I was pretty sure the environment-of-evolutionary-adaptedness argument had little relevance to a food chain dominated by blue sports drinks and flavor [
sic
] packets. But it was also true that I’d grown up in a culinary Stone Age, where you sat down with your family for dinner every night and ate what was put before you, whether animal, vegetable, or (in the case of my mother’s dreaded Iron Man Casserole) mineral. Processed foods were few, and the whole idea of individually wrapped snacks was still a rough beast waiting to be born.

My kids cannot imagine a world without muesli bars, or cheese strings, or yogurt you squirt from a tube, or fruit you can roll into a single, cigarette-size cavity ripper. In my day, your mother was as likely to put a fun-size Mars bar in your lunchbox as she was to serve canned hash to the bridge club. We really did eat fruit for a snack, I used to try to explain to the kids when they were little—not because we loved fruit so much but because there wasn’t an alternative. “Poor Mummy! Couldn’t anybody flatten it for you?” they’d ask plaintively.

Sure, if we’d had Dunkaroos the world might have turned out to be a different place. But the point is, we didn’t have Dunkaroos. We just had to soldier on anyhow.

The rules we observed for meals were to blobbiness as basic training is to a Montessori school. This was especially true for the evening meal, which, in white, middle-class Anglo households, predictably consisted of meat, a starch, and two vegetables. On the dinner plate, as in one’s bedroom, there was a place for everything and everything in its place. (Only foreigners messed their food together in untidy piles.) As children, my sister and I even preferred to
eat
in a boundaried way: first the meat, then the carrots, then the peas, saving what we liked least for last, the better for poking into a potato jacket, or scattering artfully beneath a chop bone.

Eating in front of the television was not unheard of, especially on Sunday night, when Ed Sullivan was on. But it was a vice my mother disapproved of. “Too much upsetment,” she decreed (as if eating our tuna patties off a TV tray would cause us to run amok, ripping the plastic covers from the formal lounge with bared canines).

Was I nostalgic for all this? I was not. As a parent, I’d never wanted to bring back the halcyon days of casseroles held together with mushroom-soup mucilage and family mealtimes so rigid and ritualized you could practically hear your arteries harden. Lord knows, I had no appetite whatsoever for the whole meat-and-three-vegetables thing. It had been bad enough having to eat it. Having to produce it night after night would have really stuck in my craw. At the same time, I was determined to use The Experiment as an opportunity to combat the blobbiness epidemic that had overtaken our eating habits. I wanted to try to bring more structure to mealtimes, to put more energy into appreciating what we had on our plates. Or noticing it, even.

 

 

In a recent Australian study, four in ten mothers describe dinner as an “unpleasant experience,” with the meal usually ending in an argument. At the same time, 76 percent agree that sit-down meals strengthen their family’s communication (and possibly its vocal cords), according to a recent survey of more than 16,000 mothers nationwide.
¹
Contradiction? Not necessarily. Maybe the experience of being together as a family is a bit like eating your spinach. As Popeye might have observed, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Like it or not—and clearly four out of ten of us don’t—family meals are consistently correlated with positive outcomes for children. And not just slightly positive outcomes. Ridiculously positive ones. Kids who eat family meals five to seven times a week get better grades, have a sunnier outlook on life, have significantly fewer problems with drugs, alcohol, or nicotine, and seem almost magically protected from developing eating disorders. They also—surprise!—have healthier diets. Recent research from the UK Department for Children, Schools and Family found a direct link between the frequency of family meals and high school leaving scores, while a study published in the
Journal of Adolescent Health
in 2008 uncovered a clear, inverse relationship between “eating together as a family” and risky sexual behavior. Weirdly enough, simply having supper together was as protective against unsafe sex as “doing something religious together.”
²
Then again, maybe it’s not that weird.

It’s not the “postcode effect” either (where socioeconomic class is the underlying determiner of advantage). Researchers in study after study have controlled for demographics and the findings remain. Rich or poor, middle class or underclass, highly educated or barely educated, families that eat meals together are dishing up a smorgasbord of advantages for their kids.

These facts are hardly news—although the media love nothing better than to give parents a serve on the topic. Or mothers, more accurately. In most accounts, the demise of the family meal is attributed to the usual suspect: feminism—or, as it is more decorously described, “women’s participation in the workforce” or “the dualearner family.” The implication is that when mothers work, families, like chickens, go free-range and slightly feral. Yet in Australia—where the full-time workforce participation of women with children is much lower than it is in the United States and the UK—a mere 11.42 percent of mothers report that their children usually eat at the family table. Remember, too, that we are talking about where and how family members eat, not about who (or what) is doing the cooking. The effect is exactly the same, whether it’s a roast with all the trimmings, a stir-fry with fourteen intricately diced and unpronounceable vegetables, or burgers and fries eaten straight from the wrapper.

Instead of blaming mothers who work outside the home, maybe we should be looking more carefully at the media at work within it. Researchers from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that families with “multiple communication devices” were less likely to eat dinner with other household members, and they also reported less satisfaction with their family and leisure time.
³

The speed with which digital devices have invaded our domestic lives has left sociologists and other family researchers with virtual egg on their face, scrambling to keep pace with change. Reading research that is more than two to three years old is like traveling in a time capsule. (The dangers of “chat rooms?” “Online bulletin boards?” Who even knows what those terms mean anymore?) Even today, studies of the impact of technology on patterns of family food consumption focus almost exclusively on television—and this despite the fact that TV’s market share is in steep decline among older children and teenagers. These findings are still worth examining—not only for what they tell us about TV per se, but for what they suggest may be true about screen time in a general sense.

Eating the evening meal in front of the TV, according to research conducted by the Nestlé Corporation in 2009, is almost twice as common as eating at a dining table.
⁴
The big question is, Does it matter?

Nutritionally, the answer is yes—although not by a huge margin. In a University of Minnesota study of five thousand middle and high school students, researchers found that teenage girls who ate alone typically consumed fewer fruits, vegetables, and calcium-rich foods, and more soft drinks and snacks, than girls who ate with their parents. They also took in 14 percent more calories. (As I’ve said, plenty of other research confirms that family meals protect girls against eating disorders.) The effects were similar, though less striking, for boys. Yet researchers noted that, compared with not eating family meals at all, eating meals together in front of the television was definitely associated with better eating; kids of both genders showed “high intakes of total vegetables [and] calcium-rich food, and greater caloric intakes.”
⁵
Did socioeconomic class have anything to do with it? You bet it did. As might be predicted, more affluent families were less likely to report TV viewing during meals. But the general patterns held even when demographics were taken into account.

Overall, researchers concluded that “watching television during family meals was associated with poorer dietary quality among adolescents. Health-care providers should work with families and adolescents to promote family meals, emphasizing turning the TV off at meals.” A study of families with preschool children, titled “Positive Effects of Family Dinner Are Undone by Television Viewing,” found . . . well, I guess it’s pretty obvious what it found.
⁶

What about the psychological payoffs of the family meal? Does TV reduce the resolution here as well? A study published in the journal
Young Consumers
in 2008 argued that parents practically have a duty to capitulate to kids’ demands for TV-enhanced meals. Mothers and fathers who refuse to do so, the authors argued, risked creating “social distance” within their families. “By joining her children at the television,” a mother has the opportunity to engage with them while developing “a common interest,” they noted, adding that “this communication can be seen as a way of maintaining love and relatedness in the family.”
⁷
I hope I am not being cynical when I observe that
Young Consumers
is a journal devoted to “responsibly marketing to children.”

On the other hand, if television helps bring teenagers to the table, it may be worth a look. Even researchers at the University of Minnesota conceded that “adolescents unhappy with family relationships”—i.e., the kids who arguably need parental contact the most—“may be more likely to participate in family meals if the TV is on and conversation isn’t the main focus.” One subject, seventeen-year-old Christina, complained that a media-free dining experience was just too boring. “It’s fine at the beginning when Dad asks what we’ve done at school” but it quickly “gets boring without any music on or anything. If you eat in front of the telly, you have something to occupy your mind.”
⁸

Yet if conversation
isn’t
the magic ingredient that gives the family meal its transforming power, it’s hard to know what is. If eating dinner in silence in front of
Wheel of Fortune
qualifies as a “family meal,” what about all those breakfasts we used to bolt in the car on the way to school? Did they count too? After all, we were all gathered in the one spot. It just happened to be moving at thirty-five mph. Some experts have suggested that the real secret to the family meal is simply that it gives parents a daily opportunity to “visually assess” kids for potential problems. Others concede that its power, while undeniable, remains mysterious—possibly even unknowable.

In 2008 pediatrician Katherine E. Murray found that family meals and family nutrition both declined significantly in households where teenagers had a television in their bedroom—and almost two-thirds of her sample did. They also engaged in less physical exercise, consumed more soft drinks and fast food, and read and studied less. Girls with bedroom TVs, public-health researcher Daheia Barr-Anderson found, spent almost an hour less a week in “vigorous activity”—extreme channel-surfing excepted—and ate an average of three family meals a week or fewer, compared with just under four meals for other girls.
⁹
For male teens, physical activity wasn’t affected but school performance was. Grades for boys with TVs in their bedrooms were 10 percent lower than peers without TV. And boys, interestingly, are more likely to have their own televisions in the first place.

Among the multitude of things the family-meals literature
doesn’t
tell us is whether the benefits increase arithmetically with time—if twenty minutes around the dinner table is beneficial, are forty minutes verging on miraculous?—but heading into The Experiment, it seemed safe to assume that more of a good thing was probably going to be ... well, a good thing. Because we had always been a family that ate meals together, and did so without the benevolent assistance of television, I was looking to The Experiment as a way of extending the experience in both quantity (time spent) and quality.