Erik has some wonderful things to say about The utmost importance of food in our culture. Be sure to read the comments in the box, also.
I was raised to value sit-down dinners, despite having feminist parents who both worked. Of course, I also was the person responsible for cooking them and cleaning up afterwards from about the age of 12.
What interferes with out family meals these days is a combination of weird work hours (I stay overnight at the hospital 2 nights a week) a long commute (I drive 1 hour each way) and the multiple activities that a High School aged daughter is involved in. Still, I think we manage to sit down together for dinner most nights -even if it is at 8 or 9 PM. We also have a firm tradition of Sunday bruch as a family.
We are caught in the two-income trap. I don't think it is necessarily good, but I also think that there are good and bad ways to manage having two paying careers and a large family. (Split shift parenting, or per diem work, or home based work, for example). Many of my classmates when I was growing up had less access to their 'non-working' mothers than I did. Their mothers were involved in social and volunteer activities that took them away from home as much as my mom was gone for work. My parent's generation also often had domestic help - ranging from the weekly housecleaner to the ironing lady to the live-in (think of the Brady Bunch).
Technology and fast food is this generation's equivalent of the domestic help.
