Family Meals

Abstract

Family meals have been the focus of a substantial body of research and are considered important key events in everyday family life, both socially and nutritionally. Academic scholarship on the family meal has come from a range of different disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, social policy, nutrition and dietetics, and public health. This paper provides scholars with an overview of the key themes emerging from academic interest in the family meal. Family meals have been looked at in relation to a vast range of different factors. Studies have explored the correlation between family meals and general health and wellbeing, and family meals have at times been portrayed as a panacea for a multitude of social and dietary ills. Within the epidemiological and public health literature, studies have often explored the link between family meals and nutritional quality and obesity, though systematic reviews of such literature suggest that the evidence for a causal protective effect is weak and inconclusive. There are also intervention studies which have sought to influence health outcomes by changing aspects of family mealtimes. While these types of studies dominate the existing literature, scholars will also find studies exploring the relationship between family meals and other factors, such as TV viewing, eating disorders, substance abuse, academic and behavioral outcomes, and emotional wellbeing. Family meals have also been a key academic interest among social scientists who have typically pursued different research questions. For example, scholars have looked at how the family meal can be and has been a vehicle for the governing of families, and how family meal discourse has moralized maternal feeding work. Sociologists interested in the family meal have also often written about the changing nature of family meals over time, and have debated the alleged “decline” of the family meal. Anthropologists have explored family meals in relation to themes such as culture, tastes, and the structuring of mealtime socialization, among many others. What can be concluded from this introduction, and from this entire paper more generally, is that family meals have captured the imagination of scholars across the disciplinary spectrum, that researchers have sought to understand how family meals relate to, are shaped by, and affect a very broad range of other factors, and that the overview provided here is not exhaustive.