A meal worth savouring

Published on Sunday 28 October 2007 01:19

MY FAMILY eats dinner together almost every night. I realise when I tell you this I am probably conjuring up a scene of Waltonesque conviviality: a clutch of clean, happy faces gathered round a sturdy table, digging in enthusiastically to homebaked fare, while sharing titbits of news from their busy days. And occasionally it is like that (except without the dungarees and homespun American wisdom).

More often, however, it is a chaotic and slightly tense affair. The effort of switching off The Simpsons and coming to the table may have taken its toll on the children's mood, transforming them from the sunny boys who trooped out of the school gates to sullen wannabe teenagers. When conversation does begin to flow, there is every chance it will be cut short by that bane of the hospital casualty department: the dinner table-related accident. Our fidgety seven-year-old toppling backwards off his chair mid-mouthful, for example, or our three-year-old somehow succeeding in lodging his fork deep in his brother's arm.

And then there's the mess. There's nothing more calculated to put you off the whole experience of eating together than finding peas at the bottom of beakers or entrails of spaghetti wound round the back of a chair. On the worst days, when the carefully prepared plat du jour is greeted with an expression that declares it slightly less palatable than an upturned tin of Chum, the meal will end with me stomping off to the kitchen, muttering: "I don't know why I bother."

And many people nowadays simply don't. Bother that is. A report by Sainsbury's published last week suggests almost a fifth of families in Scotland - 17% - never sit down to a meal together. An increasing number of children are so used to eating junk food with their fingers, they do not know how to use a knife and fork. And it's not just children either. According to the survey, just 19% of the population now use a knife, fork and spoon at dinner time, with many opting for a "knork" - a fork that, transferred to the right hand, doubles as a knife, as they balance plates on their knees in front of the television.

Cue more guilt-tripping over the dire effect these ad-hoc dining habits are having on our children's diet and family bonding, and lots of photographs of middle-class families sitting up, elbows off the table, politely discussing the day's events. But for many working parents this idealised domestic set-up is simply unachievable. Forced to work long hours, they are lucky if they make it home in time for bedtime, never mind teatime.

I think they are missing out, but not necessarily in the way psychologists would have us believe. According to some, mealtimes act as a kind of safety valve, where issues that have built up over the course of a week can be aired and resolved.

Writing on the internet, one "expert" tells how every member of her family writes a topic of conversation on a piece of paper before their meal. While they eat, the topics are picked out of a bowl, then taken round the table twice, so everyone gets a chance to give their view. In The Scotsman, chartered psychologist Ben Williams says: "Families who dine together can share their values in a relaxed atmosphere."

Well, perhaps some families do have laid-back meals, but most of the ones I've been to are anything but. Far from everyone chewing the fat in a civilised fashion, there is a tendency for everyone to gabble at once. Bones of contention that could easily be settled on a one-to-one basis lead to huge arguments as everyone weighs in with their opinion. Or worse still, a dearth of interesting anecdotes and/or energy sees normal conversation abandoned for a massive game of I-Spy.

Looking back at my own childhood, family meals could be hard work, particularly when my dad, desperate to pass on his heritage to his apathetic offspring, decreed only Italian was to be spoken. Those dinners were very quiet. And over very quickly.

On the other hand, evening meals could be genuinely educational. As adult conversation raged around us, my brother and I would listen quietly, gleaning an insight into an intriguing world we would not otherwise have been privy to. On the best days, they were just great fun, with jokes and stories, and a little trick with Sambuca, a match and the papers from Amaretti biscuits that once almost set the house on fire.

These memories, and the testimony of friends whose passion for politics stems from animated teatime debates, are what I cling to when I feel our evening meals aren't worth the energy we invest in them. That and the belief that often the value of things is only apparent retrospectively.

Thankfully, we can already see our efforts beginning to pay off. The length of time our children will sit at the dinner table is increasing, their manners are improving and they are more appreciative of the food that's put in front of them. With homework and their social lives increasingly eating into family time, even they have come to relish the chance to impart their news. And one happy day, when they had school friends over, we sat at the table swapping holiday stories long after the meal was over and the plates had been cleared away.

So we will persevere with family dinners, even though they are likely to be broken by frequent toilet trips for some time yet, and we will count ourselves lucky to be able to do so. Not so much so that our children know how to hold a knife and fork, though of course that's a bonus. Nor even so we keep the channels of communications open among us. But mostly in the hopes they come to relish it and look back on our messy, noisy mealtimes as an enjoyable part of the fabric of our messy, noisy lives.