ABSTRACT
This is the kind of survey that can get research a bad name. Who was asked these questions? How was a meal defined (it is, as we shall see, a problematic concept)? Why are (a) the family sitting together for a meal and (b) watching television mutually exclusive categories? To turn to anecdote, as a child many of the families in my working class/lower-middle class neighbourhood would eat their evening meal upon the breadwinner's return home from work. Small houses with few rooms often meant that the television was in the same room as the dining table. If the television was on, it might form the focus point for shared discussion of the early evening news, it might just be background noise. One could proceed to extrapolate from this a whole series of (documented) cases and variations in the role of television in
family meals. One thing is clear from the survey noted above, however, and that is that 92 per cent of the respondents dined with their family at least once a week, 86 per cent 2-7 days per week, and 72 per cent 4-7 days per week-hardly evidence of the decline of family meal taking. Nor is the data on watching television while eating a meal commensurate with the first set. Who is to say that the meals eaten watching television are the same as the ones self-identified by the sample in response to the first question (for example, breakfast is much less likely to be taken as a 'family' meal but may be accompanied by the television)? There is a reasonable amount of good quality evidence to suggest that domestic meal-taking is as routine a part of household life as it ever was. Warde (1997: 149) refers to speculation about the rise of grazing and the decline of the family meal. In his survey, 85 per cent of households recorded a daily family meal with 13 per cent having several per week. Dickinson and Leader (1998: 126) cite a 1994 study that showed that many low income households eat together because it was more economical to do so. Their own survey of 233 children aged 11-18 showed that 52 per cent shared meals with their whole family every day and 55 per cent said their family usually ate around the table at evening mealtimes: only 15 per cent said they ate alone (Dickinson and Leader, 1998: 127). Murcott (1997) also cites market research reports broadly supportive of these findings.
