In a recent Morning Edition segment on NPR, reporter Alix Spiegal explores the research that seeks to expand on the issue of family dinner and its benefits in a story called, “The Family Dinner Deconstructed.” According to Spiegal, researchers are now pushing further to ask: “Is it the mere act of eating together that counts, or is it that strong families are already more likely to have a family dinner?” And, “what is it in family dinner that can make it an antidote to bad grades and bad habits in kids?”

Your Health: The Family Dinner Deconstructed
(by Alix Spiegal, Morning Edition on NPR: February 7, 2008)

I think the segment is important to listen to for all of us who struggle to pull dinner together each night - and especially important for me to recommend as a co-owner of Let’s Dish!. Some meal assembly chains in the country use these statistics more heavily than others, to be sure, and I’m confident you’ve heard them: children of families that eat dinner together are more likely to have better grades, less likely to engage in alcohol or drug use, less likely to get an eating disorder and more.* Even TIME Magazine raves about “The Magic of a Family Meal” (June ‘06). The same folks who use these “magical” stats as marketing fodder might say that by posting the NPR story, I am undercutting the very research that the meal assembly industry uses to “sell” our services.

On the contrary. Researchers have shown and promoted these results - and as a parent, I agree that they are compelling. But, in my role in marketing for Let’s Dish!, I’ve never believed that these stats should be - or even could be - the sole reason to prepare your meals in our stores. To me, the positive benefits cited in these studies are just another reason to make family dinner a priority, but it’s already something I will strive to do for my family regardless. And, I think our regular “dishers” in the mid-Atlantic - customers who come to Let’s Dish! each month for meals for their family - would agree that the benefits for their family are more varied and quite personal.

For some, we are truly a convenient and economical way to feed their family. For others, the Let’s Dish! menu is a way to expand your palette, enjoy new and different recipes that you may not have had in your culinary reperatoire. For a large amount of customers, we’ve become a way to ensure that your family enjoys healthy, home-cooked and portion-controlled meals in an increasingly unhealthy world.

But what we hear the most often from our regular customers is that having a freezerful of Let’s Dish! meals helps reduce stress around dinner in their household. So, it’s not really about whether busy parents make, pick up or have Let’s Dish! meals delivered, the net result is that they get to enjoy Let’s Dish! meals at home. And, this means that having a family dinner each night - and enjoying it - is that much easier.

And with that ease, I hope, comes the energy and ability to engage in quality conversations with your children around the dinner table. As Spiegal explains, the results around literacy and language development and family dinner were more a result of the fact that the content is important; kids that did well, “ate dinner with families that maintained complex conversation, rich with explanation, storytelling and more.” Well, sure, that doesn’t surprise me. On the nights that I pop in a Let’s Dish! meal, I sit down to dinner with my girls after minimal effort to get the meal itself done. And I find that, on those nights, it is a whole lot easier for me to initiate and maintain a conversation with my children - and that’s no easy task with squirming, 4- and 5-year olds at the table for 30 minutes!

This is obviously just one example. It’s easier to assign roles to get the meal accomplished, as the story discusses, when you aren’t exhausted by the very act of getting the meal made. How about showing a “genuine concern about each other’s daily activities?” as the researcher on eating disorders and family dinners suggests. To me, that comes when you sit down to family dinner - and your concern can be your family, not your food.

As Spiegal concludes, the research can be interpreted that there is no independent value of dinner - that is to say, that it is unlikely that it is simply the eating of dinner that can have these positive outcomes. But, as she attributes to David Dickinson, Professor of Education at Vanderbilt University, “a solid certainty about dinner it is one of the few times in modern life when families can sit down together, speak face-to-face, build relationships, monitor behavior.”

As a co-owner of Let’s Dish!, that’s at the heart of helping to make dinner just a little bit easier. That has seemed to resonate with nearly 90,000 families in the mid-Atlantic who have dished over the last three plus years since we opened our first store in Baltimore, MD. We offer you the opportunity make many meals - 4, 8 or 12 - because that makes the nightly routine of dinner more convenient. Quite simply, the more dinners ‘ya got, the more chances for family dinners.

Listen, I can only hope for the positive outcomes cited in the research for your family - and mine. But, I can say with certainty that Let’s Dish! is an easy way to take care of the “dinner” component of “family dinner.” You obviously have to take the lead from there.

So, please take a listen to “The Family Dinner Deconstructed.” Tell me what you think. I look forward to the conversation.

RELATED LINKS:
> Download “The Importance of Family Dinner IV” report from the National Center on Substance Abuse at Columbia University

> Read our post in Family Matters, “The Importance of Family Dinners” on how family dinners reduce the likelihood of eating disorders