When thinking about the question of how and where people eat, many places are brought to my mind. Whether eating at a restaurant, having a sit-down meal at home, going to a late-night pizza joint, or microwaving food in a dorm, how people eat food is influenced by where they are. Just within my life, how and where I eat food depends greatly on who I am with, and the meaning food has in that relationship. This blog will examine how the place people eat impacts how they consume food, using elements of my life as an example.
Growing up, my family nearly always ate dinner together. Within that, we had two distinct mealtimes: table dinners and tv dinners. There were days in which we would sit around the dinner table and talk about our days and all that you expect to be discussed at a family meal. These dinners usually lasted longer, and the food was more “complicated,” meaning it either required a knife or was generally harder to eat without the help of a table surface.
But there were other days when my parents were tired from work or there was something my sister and I wanted to watch so we would all gather in the living room for dinner. These meals were usually made up of foods that were easy to eat while sitting on the couch or the ground and, more importantly, something you could easily eat without giving it your full attention. Before dinner, we picked whether it was a “tv night” or a “boring table night” and adjust our food accordingly. This behavior is an example of how the social setting impacts people’s food choices even though it was only a distinction in my family between the table and the couch.