Family meals in Mexico and in many countries around the world symbolize, in different ways, an idealization of domestic harmony and unity. In 1950s American television, for example, it was common to find portrayals of the family meal as the meeting place and setting for discussing important events in the characters’ lives.
In Mexico, family meals are popularly associated with large gatherings where the extended family participates in various ways; there are dishes, people, and conversations of all kinds. However, everyday family meals are often stripped of this mythification of “family unity” (as ambiguous as that term may be) and represent, among many things, a cultural site for understanding some of our main concerns and relationships with food. Alarmist voices warn about the loss of the family meal, but different studies reveal that while daily life makes it difficult to gather all members of a household for meals, people develop strategies to share occasions with family, making these moments more festive and out of the ordinary.
Paradoxically, the importance placed on family meals can generate tensions. An American woman told me about the anxiety she felt because she, her husband, and their two teenage children no longer had dinner together, partly due to conflicting schedules, and how this made her feel like “white trash” or “redneck” (something akin to a “naco”), in her own words, as she came from a conservative, Protestant, bourgeois American family.
This episode reminded me of the conclusions of anthropologist Elinor Ochs, who explains how in the United States, everyday family meals serve to moralize children about table manners and how to behave in the world, and in a way, that every transgression deserves punishment. It is striking how, for example, in American families, eating vegetables and finishing everything on the plate is negotiated with the promise of dessert. In cultures like the Italian, children are not expected to finish everything on their plate, and dessert is simply not considered a bargaining chip.
Nowadays, everyone feels like a food judge. A mother of two posted on Facebook a photo of the dish her children rejected: it was pasta dyed a purple-black color by the eggplant it contained. Comments quickly appeared from mothers mentioning how their children ate everything because they had lived in different parts of the world, and scrutinizing the presentation of the dish (which, in my opinion, did not look unappetizing). What stands out here is that the judgment about eating or not eating goes further. It is as if mothers whose children eat all their vegetables were better mothers than those whose children reject a particular food. As if those children who “eat everything” were morally superior. Clearly, exposure to different foods and leading by example helps children overcome these stages and prevents them from developing eating disorders.
The point is to stop feeling guilty because the family meal is not always the exemplary scene that meets perfect nutritional, culinary, economic, and social criteria. Let’s start by enjoying what is served without placing so many judgments on the morality of what we eat and those who prepare it.
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.