Cherish Family and Family Dinner (#afundforjennie)

Not too long ago, I wrote a post called "Why Family Dinner" which outlined many of the "big reasons" why family dinner is important, such as reducing childhood obesity, preventing alcohol and drug abuse among teens and helping people see value in real food and sustainable food systems. The post title leaves off the question mark because I was making a statement, rather than posing a question: family dinner matters and here's why.

Recently, I've been reminded of the small miracle of family dinner and what it means simply to the people sitting around the table. It means everything.

Many of us have been shocked and saddened by Jennifer Perillo's story of the sudden death of her beloved husband Mikey. Even in her grief, she has managed to find the courage to write beautifully about him and the life they had together, a life that was clearly full of love, good food, family and many dear friends. She has somehow found the grace to inspire us and remind us to take the time to hug close our loved ones, to cherish every moment.

There is no better reason than this for family dinner.

The blogger community has responded overwhelmingly to show Jennie love and support. (A short summary is on Storify.) Thousands of well-wishes have been sent via Twitter, hundreds of comments have been made on many beautiful memorial blog posts, and countless homemade peanut butter pies (#apieformikey) were baked and shared with loved ones.

Now, Bloggers Without Borders, a new non-profit collaboration by Maggie of Three Many Cooks, Erika of The Ivory Hut, and Aimee of Simple Bites is harnessing that virtual love into something more tangible. Their "A Fund for Jennie" project (#afundforjennie) is collecting donations (through auctions and direct contributions) to help Jennifer and her young children with needed financial assistance. I am honoring Jennie and the memory of Mikey with a donation. I encourage you to do so as well. Just click the button below or go to the BwoB website for more details. Every little bit will help.

Bloggers Without Borders How to Help

Thank you!

Blog For Family Dinner

It's been a busy month behind the scenes of EatDinner.org, as is often the case when days stretch out between blog posts. I have been working to launch a new project: Blog for Family Dinner, which is a collaboration of Billy Mawhiney of Time at the Table, Kathleen Cuneo of Dinner Together and myself. I am thrilled to announce that the project website is up and running. Woo-hoo! I hope you’ll check it out and lend your support.

Blog For Family Dinner (B4FD) is about creating a community of people who believe in the power of family dinner—bloggers, writers, parents, researchers, health organizations, and just about anyone who can see the far-reaching benefits of family meals. We are starting with a month-long promotion, from September 26 to October 24, 2011, that will feature daily blog posts from popular and emerging bloggers. We hope to highlight compelling stories, tips, advice and recipes, and most of all, inspiration for readers to make a commitment to family meals in their life.

We are collecting submissions now, please to add your voice to the community. It can be a brand new post or one you’ve posted before. It can be a personal story about what family dinner means to you or a diatribe about how hard it is to pull off. You can let us know how the work of your organization helps support families value healthy meals or how the latest findings of your research center help us to better understand the problems parents face. Your post, personal story, or organizational report will be reviewed and considered as a Featured Blogger for Family Dinner. We even have a nice badge for you to include on your website.

Join us! Add your name as a supporter, share your URL to become part of our Blog Roll, spread the word of Blog for Family Dinner via Twitter, Facebook, or your own platform.

Thank you for supporting Blog for Family Dinner!

#B4FD

Why Family Dinner

Why family dinner? With all the problems in the world, really, why focus on family dinner? Even if you were to restrict your view to all the food-related problems in the world, there are so many to choose from: hunger, obesity, pesticides in food, E.coli contamination, unsafe and environmentally unsound food production practices, to name just a few. So why, of all things, would you focus on family dinner?

I focus on family dinner because it is a solution. It is actually one of the only solutions that has ever been shown to have a consistent and positive effect on multiple health and social issues such as  obesity, underage alcohol and drug abuse, social disconnectedness, low school performance and unhealthy relationships to food.

The research shows that families that eat dinner together do, in fact, eat better. They tend to eat more fruits and vegetables, and all members of the family are less likely to be obese. The direction of causality is unclear, but I think that once you make the commitment to eating dinner together as a family, you naturally start cooking more and making better health choices. There seems to be something about the ritual and routine of family dinner that supports healthier choices.

Plus, family dinner is not  a bad-tasting medicine. Once you get into the groove, it's actually fun and rewarding for adults and children alike to have regular meals together. A public health intervention that involves family connectedness, laughter and the potential of healthy delicious food? Where do I sign up?

Another reason to promote family dinner is because buying, cooking and serving food to your family directly connects to many broader economic, social and health issues. The promotion of family meals, then, can indirectly increase awareness about important related food and health issues. As I argued recently, once people are sitting down around the table and give a damn about what they are eating, you have a far greater pool of folks for which "good food" matters. Step by step, people become more aware of issues with the food system and the environment. Then, perhaps, they will be ready to advocate for better safeguards and subsidies and to vote with their wallets for better food for their families. Family dinner can be an important first step.

So can family dinner be a movement? Can more people see family dinner as a cause? There are so many wonderful food bloggers out there, many of them tacitly promoting family dinner with home-cooked food everyday. Working the other side of the issue, there are public health and environmental policy advocates tirelessly trying to bring attention to the threatened food system from government regulators, Big Food, Agri-business, and the press. Then there are nutritionists, school food reformers and community gardeners who have there own take on a common theme:  good food can solve problems. Family dinner can be both a tool for change and an umbrella under which like-minded reformers can find common ground.

The call for family dinner can seem simplistic to some, but sometimes simple solutions work. Join us in supporting family dinner: leave a comment, follow by email (box on side bar), or follow us on Twitter @eatdinner. 

Family Dinner Survey, Take 2

Family Dinner Survey

So far, hundreds of respondents have told us what they think about family dinner. Already, some very interesting trends have emerged (see post here).  I would like to get many hundreds more responses as well as a wide range of opinions about family dinner.  Results would be boring if we all agreed, right? Really, if you hate the concept of family dinner, tell me what you think. (But please answer truthfully!)

I have added a link to the Survey as a permanent feature on the top navigation bar. Please share the survey with your online friends and contacts. Send me an email me if you work directly with families on promoting healthy eating and lifestyles. For qualifying organizations, I'm happy to provide a FREE paper copy of the survey for you to use in your work.

Thank you!

Link to Family Dinner Survey 

About Us
At eatdinner.org, we believe in the health and social benefits of family dinner and provide research, education and resources for families, policymakers and educators. The Family Dinner Survey is designed to provide information about real families and their dinner habits, so that we can learn more about the challenges as well as personal benefits of family dinner.

All the survey information is confidential and aggregated so that no one person's responses can be identified. Please take the survey only once. Paper surveys are available to qualifying organizations upon request.

Friday Favorite: Pumpkin Apple Muffins for the Share Our Strength Bake Sale

Maybe I'm trying to boost the food cred of this blog, but I baked 48 pumpkin apple muffins today. Quadrupled my favorite recipe, mixed and beat and baked mounds of ingredients, then wrapped the muffins up and tied them pretty with orange ribbon. It took a surprisingly long time. But they do look all nice and bountiful in the box, ready to go to the Share Our Strength Blogger Bake Sale. All props to the ladies and guys who do this all the time.

The pumpkin apple muffins, modified from a Joy of Cooking recipe, are headed for the Share Our Strength Food Blogger Bake Sale tomorrow, Saturday May 14, 2011. Organized by What's Gaby Cooking? nationwide, the NYC version is hosted by Maggy of Three Many Cooks  and will be at Kiehl’s 109 3rd ave New York, NY 10003, starting at 10am. Seriously, the reason I did this was that I am proud to contribute to this great cause.

True, true my pumpkin apple muffins are not a seasonal selection, but I used organic ingredients and they are certified yummy. I hope they raise a lot of cash for Share Our Strength and their fight to be sure "No Kid Hungry."Go out and support! (Find a local sale here.)

Orange Tag and Orange Ribbon are signature Share Our Strength colors.

SOS Bake Sale

Pumpkin Apple Muffins

(Organic)

from: eatdinner.org

Parents as Real Food Advocates? More Thoughts on Family Dinner and the Food System

One of the hot topics among slow food/real food/sustainable food (take your pick of labels) advocates is how to expand their message broadly and fight the "elitist" label that only the super-rich could care about sustainable food practices. As I wrote in a post last week, I think taking the message to families is one way to do it. With eatdinner.org, I am most interested in helping support families so they will start eating meals together, without too many rules or caveats. But I am often asked, "What's more important: the food or the family?" The truth is, they are wed pretty tightly. Family dinner is often the first step in a progression: from family dinner comes an interest in healthy eating and home cooking, from this comes an appreciation of better nutrition and real food, which ties into reductions in obesity. The next steps could easily be better understanding and support of a sustainable and safe food system. 

More people eating "family dinner" means:

more people that come to the table,
more people that care about food,
more people that know about food,
more people that eat better,*
more parents teaching kids about healthy choices,
more people that vote with their wallet and their forks to affect change in the food system.

So, family dinner is both a first step and a platform. The slow food movement will mean something to parents who are already invested in serving their families nutritious foods at shared meals. Reaching out to parents and families will not only expand the slow food audience, but it will combat charges of elitism. 

Researching these issues, I stumbled across a couple of great slow food projects: The Perennial Plate, by Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine, a online video documentary of weekly sustainable food adventures in Minnesota that is now launching a nationwide a road trip, and 100 Days of Real Food by Lisa Leake who challenged herself to feed her family "real food" for over 100 days.  While the documentary filmmakers are indeed inspiring, very few of us in the trenches with kids could or would launch such a drastic life change. But Leake's model is more do-able for a family, and in some ways, more instructive. How can you make changes today to  embrace a commitment to real food, and in the end, make more healthy choices for your family?  I was particularly inspired by her stint of serving real food on a budget of only $125 a week for a family of four. I am also excited by Food Day, which seems to be reaching out to a broad audience, as an Earth Day for food. I hope these efforts will bring families into the "slow food" fold, so that they can eat better for themselves and they can advocate for a better food system for all.

More resources for Slow Food and a Sustainable Food System
SlowFood USA, an organization to promote slow food
Food Day.org, an organization to promote "real food" advocacy
100 Days of Real Food on Civil Eats, May 5, 2011
Fair Food, a new book by Oran B. Hesterman on positive ways to change to food system. 

*Recent coverage of new meta-analysis on the health benefits of family dinner
CNN Health
Pediatrics Article May 2, 2011

How to Change the Food System? One Table at a Time

Yesterday, an important discussion took place on the issues of safe food, sustainability and health of our people and our planet with a conference called "The Future of Food" held in Washington, DC (archive of video highlights here). In February, there was a TEDx Manhattan conference on the food system called "Changing the Way We Eat" (archive here) that touched on related topics and the intermingling of ecology, health, politics, and economics. There are a lot of amazing people who care about food and health that are bringing up hard questions about our current food system and how we can feed the nation and the world without sacrificing individual health, public health or the health of our planet.

At the Future of Food conference, stalwarts of the food movement Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Prince Charles of Wales (who knew?) gave their perspectives on the long road we have traveled and the long road ahead. On hand were a wide range of advocates (Josh Veritel of Slow Food USA, Laurie David, who is extending her environmental activism to the dinner table and to advocacy against antibiotics in meat, Marion Nestle, leading nutritionist and founder of Food Politics) and journalists (Joe Yonan of The Washington Post, Tom Philpott, Jane Black, and Paula Crossfield and Naomi Starkman of Civil Eats) who called out, via twitter and in person, big food on their arguments about the economic necessity of big-AG techniques and policies all day.

Following along at a distance, the conference was inspiring, enlightening, and, at times, infuriating in the ways that listening to the church choir might be when you are living in the red-light district. How can good food advocates get the message out more broadly that safe, good food is not a luxury, but a necessity? Furthermore, as Eric Schlosser argued in the Washington Post this week, how can we get across that being a "foodie" is not elitist?

The soapbox I stand on is family dinner, but I do believe that the future of the food lies around the family dinner table. Michael Pollan put it simply as "More and more, I realize our food problem is a cooking problem."  Caring about what we put on the table for our families and knowing how to prepare real food are two of the first steps to changing the food system. Caring about getting to the table in the first place may indeed preempt that. We need to embrace a culture where the time spent to shop, cook, and eat together as a family is viewed as essential, not a luxury. Family dinner can consist of two roommates, a single parent and kids, a large brood of multiple generations, or any other configuration you can think of, as long as they are breaking bread together. We need to to value this simple act and get around a table together, if we are to ever change the way we eat.

Agenda and Speakers for The Future of Food Conference, May 2011

Changing the Way We Eat, TEDx Manhattan, Feb 2011

FoodDay.org, an event to celebrate the food movement and inspire families and communities to commit to real food.