Judging by the research, one could easily conclude that home-cooked, family dinners are a veritable panacea to the major public health problems facing America today.
Kids not eating enough fruits and vegetables? Several studies have confirmed that children and adolescents who eat family meals more frequently have a higher diet quality compared to those who do so less frequently. Concerned about your teen’s well-being? Studies have shown that children and adolescents who eat family meals more often are less likely to smoke, drink alcohol, use marijuana and have symptoms of depression compared to their peers who eat with their families less often. Family meals may also be protective against childhood obesity — a key risk factor for adult obesity.
And more meals eaten at home have benefits for adults, too: One large study of parents of adolescents found that those who ate meals with their family more often ate more fruits and veggies compared to parents who did so less often. Furthermore, dads who ate with their families more often were less likely to eat fast food compared to dads who did so less frequently, and moms were also less likely to engage in disordered eating behaviors, like binge eating. To the extent that home-cooked dinners allow for leftovers that many of my patients take to work for lunch the next day, cooking more meals at home often has a multiplier effect for my patients trying to lose weight.
[Read: Can Recommending Sandwiches, Eggs and Roasted Chickens Really be Considered Elitist?]
And yet, available data suggest that over one third of our calories are being consumed away from home, and more than 40 percent of food dollars are being spent on food away from home. With such a low cost and seemingly simple solution to so many of our problems, it’s confounding, then, why so few of us are actually preparing and enjoying home cooked meals on a regular basis.
Or is it?
[Read: You’ll Gladly Die for Your Children, Why Won’t You Cook for Them?]
You see, getting dinner on the table several nights per week isn’t just about finding time to cook the meal. After all, national survey data suggest we spend a little less than three hours on the average day watching TV — at least some of which can be devoted to cooking (or at least shared with cooking, by preparing a meal with the TV on.) And many of my patients don’t even mind the cooking part itself — most tell me they actually even enjoy it sometimes, and find tremendous satisfaction from the outcome. The problem resides in all the other tasks that come before the actual cooking: deciding what to eat, making a shopping list, buying ingredients, bringing the groceries home. This is the zone in which our best intentions inevitably clash with our tightly-scheduled realities.
Indeed, my patients echo these obstacles when describing their frustration at their inability to be consistent with executing home-cooked dinners for themselves and their families. And to be clear: It’s not just those who work full time outside the home who struggle with overcoming these barriers to home cooking; plenty of stay-at-home parents feel equally paralyzed when it comes to getting organized for regular family dinners. It’s not surprising, then, that multiple research surveys have found that about 60 percent of Americans don’t know what they’re having for dinner by 4 p.m. each day.
[Read: The Secret Ingredient for Weight Loss? Planning.]
So if family dinners can save America, what can save the family dinner? My vote goes to technology.
For all of the diversions and disruptions that technology has wrought onto modern family life, I have reason to be optimistic that it may be the salvation for the fading institution of the family dinner. At least, it has demonstrated the potential to do so in several cities where busy families recently tested out a new software service called gatheredtable.
gatheredtable is a new web-based service that takes over all the mundane planning and organizational tasks that so many of us find to be prohibitive when it comes to cooking at home more regularly. Subscribers build a personal library of their favorite recipes and set their preferences with regard to how many dinners they’d like to cook each week and how frequently they prefer to consume certain types of foods. The service handles the rest by generating weekly menus that are not just customized but individualized, and creating a shopping list that reflects what’s usually already in hand in your pantry, fridge, freezer or even a window-sill herb garden. They will even pre-load your shopping cart with a local online grocery delivery service.
Here’s how it works in practice. First, you set up your family’s meal preferences and establish your recipe library — a task made easier by simple snip or copy/paste tools that allow you to grab recipes from your favorite online haunts. (You can also follow friends to peruse their libraries and copy their recipes marked public — including mine!) Then, once weekly, an email arrives with your menu, allowing for one-click confirmation of the menu and, if desired, your online grocery order. The groceries show up at the appointed time, the weekly menu is set and all that remains is the actual cooking itself. (OK, and cleaning up, too. But that’s what kids are for, right?)
[Read: 7 Steps to Successful Family Meals.]
Mary Egan, the company’s founder, approached me when her product was in beta mode. She asked me to try it out — as both a working mom and dietitian — to give her some feedback and suggest ways she might improve upon the service. As much as I prided myself on planning my own family’s dinners a full day in advance, I knew that I could also benefit from being more organized in this department. After all, I found myself making up to five trips to the grocery store each week as the result of my short-term planning horizon, and had recently succumbed to a weekly tradition of Wednesday pizza night to help alleviate the pressure of planning nightly home-cooked dinners. So I agreed to test her service.
After four weeks, I became hooked. And then I signed on to consult for the company, helping them integrate even more nutrition-related functions into the service — allowing subscribers to set custom nutrition goals for their menus in terms of nutrients (calories, fiber); specify dietary preferences and restrictions (vegetarian, kosher, paleo, gluten-free); and get help with tailoring menus to their health goals (heart-healthy, diabetes-friendly). To paraphrase Sy Sperling of 1980s Men’s Hair Club commercial fame, “I’m not just the company’s Chief Nutrition Officer: I’m also a client.”
There is such a disconnect between what we know we should be eating — and often what we want to be eating — and what we actually eat. So many of my patients’ daily dietary choices are dictated by “whatever’s in the fridge,” and when there’s nothing in the fridge, the default is takeout. So if a technology-based solution can get the right foods in our collective fridges at the right time, and relieve us of the tasks that require scarce resources such as time and attention, it may just be able to save the home-cooked dinner.
gatheredtable is currently offering a limited time promotion for a free six-month trial of their service. (“Free” as in you don’t even have to provide your credit card number, “free.” That’s really free.) Click here to check out the service and take it for a spin!
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Can Technology Save the Family Dinner? originally appeared on usnews.com
