Blog #6 - Brittney McLaughlin

When I saw the suggestion of "your family at table" in Robin's original post, I immediately was hit was several questions. Family dinner at a big table, mom and dad on each end, is somewhat of a staple in modern western culture. You see it on TV, in movies and commercials, and I always thought that's just the way dinner was supposed to be. It's not thought of as a place for food, even though eating is ultimately the reason we are there, it's thought of a place to discuss our activities from the earlier day, to plan upcoming events, to generally continue to reinforce our family relationships.

I found this especially interesting because I would never consider talking to my sister about day at work as a "food event," just as I never would have considered making fun of Culver's (which I absolutely despise and frequently make fun of) as a "food event."

So, how does my family at the dinner table use food in relation to everything I've mentioned above? How do we use food at the dinner table? I like to look at my own family in this scenario, and the reason we stopped eating dinner at the kitchen table very frequently - hard conversations started to come up. We moved past "how was your day" and into my sister telling my parents that she and her fiancé were expecting a child (God forbid she get pregnant before she was legally married) and my brother making the decision to share that he was dating another man. Why did these conversations happen over dinner? Why did these announcements become "food events?" My only reasoning is that the kitchen table becomes a place of comfort, or rather, food becomes a mechanism to hide behind if everything doesn't go as planned. It gives my mother an out if she doesn't immediately know how to respond - she can just take another bite of her chicken and chew it until it's pulverized and she's formed a complete thought. It gives me something to do - shoveling mashed potatoes into my mouth rather than sitting there wide-eyed and uncomfortable.

I think that the concept of eating has become something far more than a survival necessity. We don't do much just to survive anymore. I had never thought about why my family has so many deep or heavy conversations at our dinner table, but I've gotten the idea now that it has to do with using food as a delivery system and coping mechanism(?) rather than just one of the basic requirements to survive.