Family dinners

You disgusting lot. Yes, you: the great British public.

Seventeen percent of you, it seems, have admitted to eating dinner in bed. One in 10 has eaten dinner in the office, and a further one in 10 has eaten dinner in the car. So poor are we, it seems, at actually getting around a dinner table to eat our evening meal, that barely one in five of us achieve it every day.

Why all the fuss about mealtimes? Because Birds Eye today launched its ‘Big Mealtime Audit’, a nationwide study of 1,035 Brits and their dining habits. It claims to have identified four types of eater: ‘rep-eat-ers’, who will consume the same meal up to three times a week; ‘social-eats’, who have people round to dinner at least twice a week and plot a big weekly shop; ‘all-day grazers’, who snack up to 11 times a day; and ‘free rangers’, who egularly eat on the go. In my student days I might have considered myself a ‘rep-eat-er’ (you can’t have enough spag bol, after all), though today I’d be a bit hard-pressed to assign myself to any of these four groups.

Birds Eye’s research comes as part of its ‘Food of Life’ marketing campaign, which includes a tie-up with photographer Martin Parr. It has also commissioned a report on UK food trends from Professor Peter Jackson of the University of Sheffield, whose review of existing literature reassures us that occasional panics about the decline of the family meal are probably unjustified.

“Though based on rather thin evidence, the alleged decline of family meals has been linked to a range of social problems including an increase in eating disorders and a rise in childhood obesity, drug abuse and alcoholism,” Prof Jackson writes. In actual fact, “public debate and media commentary frequently runs ahead of the available evidence”.

Historical studies show that “eating together at home has been a middle-class aspiration for over a century though it has not been widely achieved in practice, varying by geographical region and social class, and subject to the vicissitudes of shift-work and other pressures on everyday family life”.

In other words, we probably shouldn’t give ourselves too hard a time if we’re in the 26% of people who eat breakfast on the run, or in the 85% who snack throughout the day. We’re busy people. That’s not to say we should be complacent: Britons now spend around half of the time preparing meals that they did 30 years ago – 34 minutes in 2012, compared to an hour in 1980. Birds Eye itself has probably contributed to the last statistic: the rise of convenience foods is one of the key trends covered in the report.

But even then, the picture isn’t quite so black and white: as Jackson notes, convenience foods are often served with fresh ingredients, thus “‘convenience’ foods and ‘homemade’ foods belong to a continuum rather than to two separate categories”. And the decline of family mealtimes may look less extreme if we take into account the number of the times families eat out.

It would seem the family dinner isn’t disappearing – it’s just evolving, which spells opportunity (and good news) for anyone producing and selling food.