Book Research Roundup: Diet Culture At Your Dinner Table

Considering the evidence for and against family meals.

I don’t have the usual Tuesday essay for you today because last week was a Book Chapter Writing Week for me. As most of you know, I’m working on my second book right now. The manuscript is due next June, a deadline that feels reassuringly far away but is, in fact, only achievable if I stick to my schedule of researching and writing one chapter per month, every month, until 100,000 words are done.

For most of the month, I’m in reporting mode for the book and I put all of my writing bandwidth towards Burnt Toast. But then comes the week when I need to take all that reporting and turn it into an actual chapter draft. After several months of trying and failing to produce a 2,000 word reported essay and a 6,000-7,000 word chapter in the same week, I have realized that Book Writing Weeks need to be for book writing only. (Yes it sounds obvious to me too when I type it out like that.)

Instead of an essay this week, I’m bringing you into the book reporting process with this link round-up focused on family dinners. The chapter I’m writing this week is about how diet culture and fatphobia show up at our family dinner tables and how we might envision a different approach to feeding kids that doesn’t hinge on the “ob*sity prevention” version of healthy eating. I’m not going to explain it any further because I want you to want to read the book of course (when it comes out in 2023… sorry!) but if you read this piece from two weeks ago, you have a starting point.  

Photo from Jimmy Dean via Unsplash

What follows is essentially a Burnt Toast-tailored version of my reporting notes and Zotero folder. Some of it will inform what goes into this chapter; some of it is just random and interesting. If you are a person who has to generate family meals with any regularity, or is concerned about/interested in how we teach kids diet culture, I think you’ll find this useful. This may also be the kind of post that is handy to send to partners, co-parents, and other relatives who share family meals with you. 

CW: Many of the articles I link to use weight-stigmatizing language because science is full of anti-fat bias and so is media coverage about family dinner. Take care of yourself!

Why Family Dinners Matter

An awful lot of this research centers on research that seems to show that family dinners may protect against ob*sity. But what happens if we take that goal off the table? We find that family dinners are associated with:

• Moms going on fewer diets and also doing less binge eating. Plus dads (oddly just dads) eat less fast food, and everyone eats more vegetables. 

• Less cyberbullying (and less traumatic fall-out from said bullying). 

• Teens who do less drugs, drink less booze, get better grades, and struggle less with depression and suicidal ideation. (Again, correlation!!!) 

• Kids with bigger vocabularies and (maybe) better early literacy skills. 

• You get the idea but if you want more pros, The Family Dinner Project has you covered. 

• ALSO: This 2014 study (or Time writeup, but lots of fatphobic language here) found that kids in bigger bodies were more likely to experience hostility, pressure around eating, and discipline at family dinners than thin kids. 

Note that pretty much all of this research is correlation not causation. We don’t know if families who eat dinner together experience these benefits because of dinner or because of other factors that also happen to make it easier for them to eat dinner together.

Why Family Dinners Don’t Matter

Because 6pm on a weeknight is not the only time you can be a good parent!

• Here’s an old episode of Comfort Food where Amy and I talked to our friend Kate who, at the time, was emphatically not doing family dinner with her toddlers and loving it. 

• Here’s a much more recent Huffington Post piece making most of the same points, with expert commentary. 

• On an episode of The Splendid Table, Bruce Feiler, the author of The Secrets of Happy Families, says, “there are only 10 minutes of conversation in any mealtime. The rest is taken up with ‘take your elbows off the table’ and ‘pass the ketchup.’” Feiler makes the argument that those 10 minutes of conversation do not need to happen while you are eating.

• Also, Sam Sifton says family breakfast is better. (I mean, sure. But at his house, every meal is probably better?) 

Photo from National Cancer Institute via Unsplash

The Mental Load of Family Dinner

• The Tyranny and Misogyny of Meal Planning, always. (Yes, I’m still doing it. Yes, I’m still using the cheesy app. No, it did not permanently solve my children’s frequent hatred of dinner.) 

• We also talked about this all the time on Comfort Food. Listen here, here (shout out to Darcy Lockman’s book if you haven’t read it yet!), and here.

• I am, somewhat emphatically, not a meal prepper but I respect Talia Koren’s anti-diet approach to meal prepping.

• There is also this stress-free meal plan. (You’re welcome.)

Why Pressure To Eat Fails

Family dinner is not much help if it always ends in fighting and sadness.

• Kids who were told “Finish your soup!” before dessert, ate less soup, liked it less, and wanted dessert more than kids left to eat at their own pace. I have cited this study 20 million times. I will cite it 20 more million times. It continues to be a game-changing piece of research.

• Parents with symptoms of disordered eating are the most likely to use “coercive food parenting practices,” meaning either restriction or pressure to finish, in this new Australian study. 

• The thing your husband needs to read. 

• Using food as a reward is its own kind of pressure and also backfires. Note that rewards and comfort are not the same thing.

• And restriction doesn’t always look like restriction.

• Pressure to eat is subjective.

• One cook’s secret: “I don’t care, and I don’t give in to their idiosyncrasies.” (I completely adore this mindset AND I am very sure she has never dealt with a true “picky eater.” But so much yes to: “Not caring on the micro level—while caring an awful lot on the macro level—has set me free.”)

How Satter’s Division Of Responsibility in Feeding Can Help Family Dinners

• My own story here and here, plus a good overview of what I like about DOR here. 

• Letting kids be in charge of “how much” is especially useful for breaking out of the good food/bad food paradigm. 

When DOR Becomes A Diet

• What Instagram gets wrong about feeding our kids.

• Nutrition doesn’t matter as much as we think.

• Worry about nutrition can fuel counterproductive feeding.

Okay, So What Is Responsive Feeding?

• Responsive Feeding Therapy (RFT) is “an overarching approach to feeding and eating interventions applicable to multiple disciplines and across the lifespan. RFT facilitates the (re)discovery of internal cues, curiosity, and motivation, while building skills and confidence. It is flexible, prioritizes the feeding relationship, and respects and develops autonomy.”

• More detail in the RFT white paper.

• It’s a therapeutic model but can also be part of a framework of responsive parenting. 

• (Full disclosure: I spoke at the Responsive Feeding Conference in 2020 and will be doing a webinar for them on diet culture and family feeding challenges in 2022.)

ETC.

• A History of Family Dinners in the United States

• “Limited studies exist that explore the intergenerational transmission of family meal practices, particularly among racially/ethnically diverse and immigrant populations.”

• A collection of pieces about family dinners in the New Yorker.

As always, thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it on social media or forward to someone you don’t hate eating dinner with!