Family Dinners: A Tradition That Nourishes Hearts and Minds

The benefits of family dinners are wide and varied

The dinner table is a place for good food, laughter, and building family relationships. Biba Kayewich

Meals are sacred times for nourishing not just the body, but also the heart and mind. From ancient days to the present, meals have been hallowed by a tradition in which they signify far more than mere caloric intake.

Throughout various world cultures and epochs, meals have taken on ritualistic meanings of friendship, respect, trust, hospitality, cultural expression, and even religious significance.

Feasting Together

In the Christian tradition, for example, we see the importance of a meal in the Biblical parable of the prodigal son. What act seems most suitable to the father to express his joy when his son returns home? A feast. Only a feast is a fitting ritual to embody the joyful spiritual reality taking place: “And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it, and let us eat and make merry: Because this my son was dead, and is come to life again: was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.” (Luke 15:23–24)

It has always been considered rather tragic to eat or drink alone. Of course, doing so fulfills your mere bodily needs just as well as eating or drinking in company, yet it remains an unideal situation, which reveals how central communal eating is to human life and civilization, and how its importance goes far beyond just the “practical.”

Animals eat to satisfy, to survive. But with us, it’s different. Humans eat to celebrate, to commiserate, to converse, to commune. And that communing is not only with one another, but also with nature, insofar as eating puts us in touch with the natural and agricultural systems that underlie human life and civilization.

As Wendell Berry famously says, “Eating is an agricultural act.”

As aromas fill the dining room, they mingle with the laughter and conversation of those eating together, and the individual human spirit joins the spirit of the society, each being strengthened along with the human body.

The dinner table is a place for good food, laughter, and building family relationships. Biba Kayewich

The Importance of Family Dinners

The most obvious place where meals can form a kind of center of gravity for human life and community is in the family. Decades of research have shown the many benefits of consistent family dinners. Children whose families eat regular meals together enjoy benefits such as better academic performance, higher self-esteem, better eating habits, lower risk of substance abuse, and lower risk of depression. In light of everything stated above, family mealtime ought to be treated with respect. But how do we go about approaching dinner with a fitting emphasis and care?

Here are a few ideas.

Put away the phones. It’s well known that electronic devices interfere with face-to-face human interaction and conversation. In fact, according to Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who has done considerable research on the negative effects of technology on human conversation and empathy, just the mere presence of a phone, even if it’s only in our peripheral vision, causes us to be less engaged in the conversation with the people around us.

Children will never learn how to have real conversations—which are the basis of all human relationships—if they have their noses in their devices all the time and if they do not see their parents modeling real human interaction.

Light some candles. Not the battery-powered ones, but real ones, with real flames. Candles instantly dress up any eating occasion—they light up the dinner table, both literally and figuratively. You will feel “fancier” and you will behave accordingly.

Candles instantly dress up any eating occasion—they light up the dinner table, both literally and figuratively. Biba Kayewich

Use quality place settings and serving dishes, and cut back on the plastic. Instead of the ketchup bottle, put the ketchup in a small bowl with a spoon. Instead of the chip bag, put the chips in a basket or bowl. We don’t need corporate logos and garish wrappers cluttering our dinner table and distracting us as we try to see one another. Like candles, placemats also instantly dress up the table.

Don’t let family members eat before the family meal. Eating alone the instant we become hungry trains us to indulge our instincts without thinking and not wait for it to be convenient for others. In other words, we put ourselves first if we are not willing to endure a little hunger so that we can eat in the company of others.

Practice good manners. Manners are the bloom of charity and love for others, an outward sign of an inward disposition. They may seem small, but they form in us a habit of being considerate of others and should not be dismissed as “old-fashioned” or “out-of-touch.” Every little action we engage in shapes us to some degree, and poor manners chip away little by little at our concern for other people.

All too often, our familiarity with family members causes us to drop the small signs of being considerate—“he’s just my brother” or “she’s just my mother,” we say. Yet we ought to save our warmest smiles, our most attentive thoughtfulness, and our most worthwhile conversation for the members of our own household.

Prepare something of quality. Here, I refer both to the food and to the conversation. The food, it goes without saying, ought to be truly nourishing to one’s family. But so should the discussion. You might consider investing in a deck of conversation-starting cards, such as Questions for Humans. Or maybe bring an interesting article or poem to read and discuss during or after the meal. I richly remember how my father would sometimes bring a poem to the dinner table, such as T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” or John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and then discuss it with us. Those moments were incredibly formative for me.

Everyone will come to understand the value of family meals together in direct proportion to the seriousness with which we treat them. These little suggestions may seem small, but, taken together, they form an entire attitude about meals and their importance that sends a real message, even if it’s not spoken in words. That message, ultimately, is about the importance of good food, manners, and customs, yes, but most importantly, it’s a message about the importance of family itself.