Opinion: Family dinner in front of a screen is not the end the world

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Tinned spaghetti (AKA any excuse for a dad joke).
Kim Knight is a senior journalist with the New Zealand Herald’s premium lifestyle team. She holds a master’s degree in gastronomy and eats dinner at a coffee table most nights.
OPINION

The formica table was pulled out from against the wall to squeeze in an extra chair. Sausages?
Eggs? I am making this up as I go along, but it would never just be spaghetti for dinner and it was definitely dinnertime and there was definitely spaghetti.

The extra chair was for my friend. New town, new school, new kids to bring home for sleepovers.
She grew up on a farm down the road in a house from the era when rooms really were rooms. Separate and distinct. The dining table was enormous and you could walk all the way around it, all the time.
My friend kept her hair short, her gumboots at the door and drank cups of tea with milk and sugar even though she was only 10. When I stayed at her place, we had saveloys for tea. I sat down to eat slowly and politely but her mother grabbed our plates back before I had taken my first bite. The saveloys still had their skins on. A child could choke and die. I made a mental note to ask my own mother if she was aware of this.
It was tinned spaghetti. Differentiated from spaghetti pasta, which came in a packet and was boiled in salty water until it was limp. Other varieties of pasta consumed by my family at this point in the 1970s included seashell (tinned tuna, red onion, condensed milk mayonnaise) and macaroni (cheese sauce, bacon, frozen peas). Tinned spaghetti was thick, soft and sweet. It was not, I would come to understand as an adult, “al dente”.
My father sat at the head of the table. My mother was at the opposite end but it was, somehow, implicit that only one end of the table was the head. “Kim,” he said (don’t say it-don’t say it-don’t say it). “Kim,” he repeated (don’t say it-don’t say it-don’t say it). “How come she got worms and I didn’t?!”
Suddenly he lunged, stabbing his fork directly at my new friend’s plate. “Worms!” he crowed, triumphantly waving a forkful of tinned spaghetti. “Worms!” Shortly after dinner, my friend said she didn’t feel well. She phoned her parents and they drove the 8km between our dining tables to collect her and I don’t remember her ever coming to stay again.
Not every family dinnertime is a good time.
Another week, another headline examining the state of family meals. According to a recent press release from a popular meal kit business, “only 36% of Kiwi families are sitting down to eat dinner together every night”.
Frankly, I am more shocked when I request the raw data and discover 78% still manage four nights or more. The biggest interrupters are after-school activities and commitments (39%), work schedules (34%) and dad jokes (I’m joking). Two-thirds, meanwhile, say they have a screen on during dinnertime.
My family had dinner together every night until I left home, aged 13. We were rural kids, there was no bus to the local high school and my formative eating years were at a hostel, sans family and table manners.
In the 1980s, the screen-free evening meal was an artefact barely holding its own against the 6pm news. In the 1990s, I properly left home and definitively shifted dinner to my lap. Stir fry and Shortland Street. Bolognese and Beverly Hills 90210. The world did not end, civilisation did not collapse, but every other year, another editor would ask me to write a story about the demise of the family dinner.
I think about the meals I actually remember. When Dad is away for the night, Mum cooks liver and bacon. The gravy is sludgy, the “meat” lacks structural integrity. When I bite down, it’s grainy and the taste is metal and blood, like when you accidentally-on-purpose touch tinfoil to a tooth filling.
When Mum is away for the night, Dad fries chicken. He does this exactly once, combining herbs and spices from cardboard Gregg’s packets with crushed Weetbix and it becomes the stuff of family legend. I’m not so young that I can’t build a gendered narrative about men getting special credit for work everybody should be doing.
He makes the chicken the same week he makes my costume for the pirate-themed school play. I am the narrator, with a skull-and-crossbones scarf and eyepatch. Other kids have swords – repurposed rulers and two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs – but my dad has made a cutlass with a spray-painted silver blade and a proper, cupped guard around the hilt. Afterwards, he tells me he didn’t realise I would have so many lines. I am the wordiest, swordiest pirate at Havelock School.
I read this story back to my family, four and a half decades after the described events are alleged to have occurred. “Don’t you remember,” Dad says, “I also made you a proper pirate captain’s hat?” He distinctly recalls cutting out blank pages of the family photograph album – thick, black cartridge paper – and shaping the tricorne; the three-cornered, cocked hat.
“Also,” says my little sister, “Dad made that chicken heaps of times.” They remind me the recipe also contained a packet of Maggi onion soup mix, and how about that time when Mum went to Christchurch to do the Christmas shopping and he made a week’s worth of school lunches on Sunday night and stored them in the freezer and every day we unwrapped another frozen orange?
Memory is a fragile, unstable creature; a newborn that mewls until it finds a note you will pay attention to. Something that sticks like spaghetti to a fork.
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