A newspaper assignment gets medical reporter Josephine Marcotty reminiscing…. 

Just a small confession. When my daughter was young and I was a single parent working full time at a job with unpredictable hours I used to feed her noodles and ketchup for dinner. Okay, she got some fruit and vegetables, too, and it’s not as if she didn’t LIKE noodles and ketchup. It was her favorite. But I confess, that’s what she got sometimes.

When I re-married, my second husband brought dinner with him into the household. He’d plan the meals, shop for them and rush home after work to make them. My daughter started calling them “real dinners.” That’s one way this interloper into her life built a strong relationship with her that to this day still revolves around food. Now she’s a college graduate living with a bunch of kids her own age in a bunkhouse in the woods on the East Coast.

Five or six times a week they gather for dinner, and these sophisticated young adults hold hands, talk and sing before dinner in a ritual that she has come to love. I told this story to Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, the researcher at the University of Minnesota who just published yet another study showing how
regular family dinners protect kids from all kinds of health problems. (For girls, eating with family is eating healthy.)

This one showed how they steer girls away from destructive eating habits. “See,” she said, teasing me. “It worked.” Indeed. And really, it has so
little to do with the food.

Many families have rituals and stories about dinners — both good and bad. Tell us one of yours.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.