Yahoo dinner hour

I’ve done some thinking lately, about eating. You know how they’re always trotting out studies about traditional dinner rituals and how families that sit down together to a pot roast with real napkins, and a nice discussion about the days events produce healthy children. (As opposed to the grab and go families whose children go on to think up South Park, or write Captain Underpants books.)

I’ve been struggling for some time with the guilt which stems from being the kind of mother for whom and Ozzie and Harriet dinner hours come as naturally as speaking Swahili. Unless you speak Swahili. And I don’t.
Here, Ozzie is more likely to go rooting through the cabinets looking for a chocolate bar at 5:00 pm than he is to support Harriet’s attempts to call the crew to dinner. Which makes no difference whatsoever, since Harriet’s been hacking away at her book project and only just noticed that her blood sugar (not to mention that of the teenagers,) has just dropped so precipitously that she could no more organize her thoughts to put together a lovely meal than she could reinvent calculus. In Swahili.

But is the outcome really so bad? Here’s a typical scenario. I say, “Wow. We have to eat. Jeff, do you want a chicken burger (antibiotic-free, on a bun with tomato, lettuce and mustard,) or a tofurkey sandwich? He picks chicken. Becca fixes herself a tofurkey on a bagel. Olivia complains that she hates chicken and and tofurkey, and makes macaroni and cheese. That’s cool. Gabe’ll eat some. Otherwise he would fix pasta. I go around throwing mixed baby greens at everyone's plate, and everyone ends up fed. Meanwhile, we’ve been mixing it up in the kitchen in our usual boisterous, cantankerous, and occasionally convivial way. So, as far as I’m concerned, we’ve covered nutrition and we’ve covered family time. Would Martha Stewart be proud? Do I care? I can safely answer no.