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57 3 COMING TOGETHER AT DINNER A Study of Working Families Elinor Ochs, Merav Shohet, Belinda Campos, and Margaret Beck Family mealtimes have received considerable attention in the popular media as a barometer of family well-being. Dinnertime, they report, is an endangered or defunct family ritual that has given way to the demands of parents’ work and children ’s extracurricular activities (RMC Research Corporation 2005). In the United States, as in other societies, the family dinner is viewed as an icon of the family and an ideal toward which contemporary families should strive. Cultural expectations that the family should eat a healthy home-cooked meal together present a challenge to working parents, whose finite time and energies are too often expended on workplace demands. This study examines the extent to which, and how, working parents and their children manage to come together to share an evening meal. Eating together is a primordial form of sociality, often defining boundaries for a social group (Dumont 1980; Lévi-Strauss 1963, 1969; Malinowski 1935). Across communities and historical time, sharing a meal has constituted an important locus for reifying and structuring social order and for social sense-making. Beyond fulfilling the body’s biological need for nourishment,mealtimes are vital cultural sites that are“historically durable, yet transformable, socially organized and organizing, and tempospatially situated arenas, which are laden with symbolic meanings and mediated by material artifacts” (Ochs and Shohet 2006, 35). Distinctions in food types and manner of preparation, along with meal duration, locale, participation, communication, and demeanor are historically rooted, conventionalized, and morally evaluated. Indeed, as Norbert Elias (2000 [1939]) observes, table manners have been viewed as critical to good breeding and “the civilizing process” since at least the Middle Ages. For this reason, mealtime practices are deeply intertwined with social hierarchies (Bourdieu 58 OCHS, SHOHET, CAMPOS, AND BECK 1979), and mealtimes themselves are cultural sites of socialization into standards of comportment and taste (Ochs, Pontecorvo, and Fasulo 1996). Yet the structure of mealtimes is also dynamic and subject to shifting social and economic exigencies and preferences. Eating together under the same roof was a singularly defining feature of peasant family communities in the late Middle Ages (Segalen 1986). Yet shared family mealtimes at home as a routine, bounded formal activity in Europe and the United States have been strongly associated with industrialization , which separated the worlds of work and home, and deemed the home a private sphere for cultivating family (Cinotto 2006; Davidoff and Hall 2002; DeVault 1991; Draznin 2001; Gillis 1989; Jordan 1987). The construction of dining rooms, the centrality of the dining table, and the act of dining together on a regular basis became markers of status for the middle class and beyond. Judith Flanders (2003) notes the social importance of dinnertime in Victorian England: Dinner had, earlier, been a meal eaten at midday....By midcentury, when most middle-class men were no longer working at home, dinner moved to the later hour of five or six, after the office workers returned home. From this hour, those who did not have to get up for work the next morning pushed dinner ever later, as a sign of leisure. The upper middle classes copied them, in order to indicate their own gentility, and the middle classes, in turn, followed their lead, in order to separate themselves from those beneath them. (266) In the United States, the Victorian standard of families eating dinner around the table during evenings at home has waxed and waned over time. For example, in their study of Middletown in the 1920s, Lynd and Lynd (1929) report that families bemoaned the decline of the family dinner ritual in their community. Decades later, the 1950s middle class family apparently insisted on dinnertime as a centerpiece of the “Leave It to Beaver” American way of life. However, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which the family dinner meal historically and currently constitutes an ideal toward which families strive rather than a quotidian practice in American households (Cinotto 2006). The concern with the status of the family meal and, more particularly, family dinnertime in the United States, is highly palpable in public health, social science, literature, film, television, and the popular press. Family dinners are potent cultural sites for generating wistful longings for an arguably imagined past or a possible future family way of life (Sutton 2001). In addition, family meals are charged with exceptional predictive powers for children’s well-being and, as a corollary...

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