Good food, loved ones, and a dinner table

Thanks to my landlady’s dinner-table ritual, her daughter has made it an everyday practice to cook and eat with her flatmates, making a new family of sorts. She seldom orders in food. I’d say she’s a pretty good example of what family dining can do to your lifestyle. A study has shown that with regular family dining, children would be 35 percent less interested in unhealthy foods and 24 percent more likely to eat nutritious foods. What better way to watch your diet than to cook your own food?

Good food certainly entices everyone to the dinner table and keeps them in high spirits. But for some, it’s entirely about the family bonding that comes with eating together. Nikhil M M, an Indian IT professional, has enjoyed regular family meals since childhood. He says, “The dinner table has always been a place of family huddle to discuss our woes and joys. We find it so relaxing that we rarely bother about what’s on the table.”

Indeed, we all cherish the warmth that comes with such family dynamics. In fact, for one of her studies, child development expert Ellen Galinsky asked a thousand children, “If you were granted one wish about your parents, what would it be?” The parents thought their kids would say they wish to spend more time with them. They were wrong. Instead, the kids wished their parents were less stressed. And what better way to unwind after a long day than talking to your kids at the dinner table?

Family dining needn’t be long. It’s all about the quality of time you share with your loved ones. Bruce Feiler, author of The Secrets of Happy Families, suggests in his Ted Talk Agile Programming for your Family that we consider a quick midnight snack with our families if we can’t make time otherwise. After all, psychologists have established that being flexible with family time can go a long way in supporting one another emotionally.

Technology consultant Emre Tuncoglu is a busy bee. Between keeping up with his stringent deadlines and meeting clients, he rarely finds time to sit at the dinner table and chat with his wife and kids. He shares, “Eating together with family is a very important Turkish tradition. I used to follow it as a child. I remember how reassuring it was to have the whole family at the table. So, I work extra hard to make sure my wife and kids see me at weekend breakfasts and dinners.”