Society

A&L links to Jonathan Yardley’s review review of Miriam Weinstein’s How Eating Together Makes Us Smarter, Stronger, Healthier, and Happier.” He feels she overstates her case, but agrees a powerful case is to be made. This reinforces a point some other writers made that I mentioned in an earlier post. And I see this as we are preparing to go another family celebration in my husband’s large and tightly knit family – one of his twenty-five or so cousins on his mother’s side is celebrating a 25th anniversary. (In the last year we’ve been to a 50th anniversary and a wedding for others of those cousins.)

And I remember the dinners my mother-in-law insisted on making and serving every night of the week for our small family (at first with only one daughter), for the beginning years of my business. I was never home to fix meals during those long days and longer weeks; sometimes I literally fell asleep on my feet. The home would have been chaotic – food ordered, dinners out, snacks grabbed – if it had fallen to me. But she proceeded with an iron will. The family must eat together, eat calmly, eat at the same time, eat a balanced meal. I can’t say it was always easy on me – it wasn’t my food in my house, it wasn’t, in a real sense, my family. But it was, as I came to realize, exactly what my husband and daughters needed: they needed to be able to count on that meal, they needed to be able to count on that quiet. And so my daughters felt relatively secure and our marriage lasted when the external pressures of our separate professional obsessions (and my lost career in English) strained it. My husband and daughter (and therefore, I) needed that space, that ritual, that predictability. And now, my mother-in-law is 87 and wants to go to this anniversary dinner because it, too, is a ritual and even more important to her as her siblings age and there are fewer of them to observe it. Barbecue and kolaches and polkas – it is a rowdy ritual but no less meaningful for that.

A. Scott Crawford made some good points in his comment on Shannon’s “Critical Failure” post. A lot of commentators seem to assume that governments can just order people to leave and that they will do it. A lot of them will — almost everyone in New Orleans left — but some will not, no matter what the govt does. Even if the NO municipality or LA state govt had provided transportation out of town, some people would have stayed. In hindsight, evacuation looks like the obvious choice, but before the storm arrives you can’t know. There have been plenty of false alarms in the past, and evacuation is costly.

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Here’s a history of one of the most versatile tools ever.

UPDATE: The history of duct tape!

Whoa.

In ”Much Depends Upon Dinner”, Cameron Stracher discusses the family dinner. Apparently studies prove its importance. For instance, one from Columbia shows

teens from families that almost never eat dinner together are 72% more likely to use illegal drugs, cigarettes and alcohol than the average teen and that those who eat dinner with their parents less than three times a week are four times more likely to smoke cigarettes, three times more likely to smoke marijuana and twice as likely to drink as those who eat dinner with their parents at least six times a week.

This strikes me as soft science; obviously, a lot of related variables lead to such outcomes and dinners on the fly are more symptom than cause. But maybe not. Dinner is significant.

In the first chapter of his autobiographical Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington tells us:

I cannot remember a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together, and God’s blessing was asked, and the family ate a meal in a civilized manner. On the plantation in Virginia, and even later, meals were gotten by the children very much as dumb animals get theirs. It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another. Sometimes a portion of our family would eat out of the skillet or pot, while some one else would eat from a tin plate held on the knees, and often using nothing but the hands with which to hold the food.

Slave owners set tasks for even a young child that made family dinners impossible in the slave quarters. To Washington, eating together meant eating “in a civilized manner”; that he saw it as important we see in his contrast of that ritual with food taken by “dumb animals.”

Dining together, the charm & weight of tradition bears down on us as children; we learn and grow. The family civilizes us, helps us transcend our brute nature, supports us as we fumble toward maturity.

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