The last supper

By: Jill Pertler
I am clinging to supper like a desperate and damp piece of toilet paper on a slippery sneaker. I hold on by a thin thread of two-ply ultra-soft. My grip is tenuous, yet tenacious. They will not break me.
Supper has been a mainstay at my house for as long as I can remember. My parents practiced the mealtime concept up to three times a day and must have passed along the supper gene to me. Unfortunately I don’t think the DNA transferred to my kids.
They tell me I am old-fashioned, behind the times. No one eats supper anymore – at least not together, as a family, sitting around the kitchen table. That sort of thing went out of style back in the olden days, like before the Internet or Netflix or something.
So I’m told.
“We just had supper last night,” one of them tells me. “Isn’t that enough for this week?”
I am prepared for their rhetoric. I have some of my own. I may be old-fashioned, but I’ve got supper statistics from places like the Journal of Adolescent Health and American Academy of Pediatrics to back me up. This isn’t my first course in supper 101.
I tell them: Teens and kids who eat family dinners together are less likely to be overweight. They are more likely to make healthy food choices and try a bigger variety of those things called vegetables. They do better in school and engage in less risky behaviors – and I’m not talking about skateboarding without a helmet. Most importantly, they have better relationships with their parents and have even been known to hug their moms in public. These are all facts my friends. Even the part about the vegetables.
My kids shake their heads, as though they’ve heard this all a hundred times before – which they have. Then they ask if we can make a frozen pizza – even though we had frozen pizza two nights ago and the scent of roasting chicken is clearly emanating from the oven.
Despite their lack of cooperation, I stand strong most days. Statistics don’t lie. It is my duty as their mother to love them, take good care of them and make sure they eat broccoli at least once a week. And sit at dinner table and talk to me.
Food connects people. It provides calories and comfort. It creates and triggers memories. The smells and tastes of a certain dish can bring us back in time to a special birthday or holiday or maybe even a typical Wednesday evening when your dad browned the hamburger for your mom’s chili while you did your homework at the kitchen table.
There’s just something inherently good about food and memories and lingering around the table with the people you love. It’s tangible and intangible at the same time.
It’s supper and it’s a dish best served repeatedly – a habit that promotes catching up and connecting over a meal. It’s a time to pause and take a moment out of our hectic, harried and plugged-in lives to put down our smartphones and simply linger over our plates and focus on food and one another. And whether the meal is made up of frozen pizza or fancy chicken doesn’t matter much, because it’s more about the people and the conversation than what you put on your plate.
But don’t tell my kids I said so.