In many countries, the findings of the opinion poll released last week would be comforting. The average family spend 40 minutes at the dinner table every evening, and mostly they all eat together.
Men said that they devoted two hours and 22 minutes each week to planning family meals, and women two hours and 15 minutes.
In France, however, where the poll was conducted by the OpinionWay institute for HelloFresh, a meal kit company, the results have provoked anguish. The newspaper Le Figaro has said that the ritual of the evening meal is being sacrificed in an ever more frenzied society.
The paper was horrified to learn that dinners, at least in some families, were getting shorter in the country that likes to think of itself as a pillar of global gastronomy.
Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said they were spending less time at the table than they did a decade ago. Six per cent said they were spending more time there and 64 per cent said that nothing had changed over the past ten years.
In the sign of the sensitivities surrounding food, media commentators viewed the results with foreboding. “Is dinner time finished?” asked Le Bien Public, a paper in Dijon, Burgundy, which is renowned for its fine cuisine.
BFM, a rolling news channel, said: “The family dinner: a ritual on the path to disappearing.”
Commentators were particularly surprised to read that 25 per cent of families spent less than half an hour at the dinner table on average. One person commentating on the findings on Le Figaro’s website blamed an invasion of “ketchup and chicken nuggets”. Another attributed the changes to TikTok and a third to dwindling wine consumption.
However, other readers said there was little to be worried about. “Do you think that workers and farm labourers in the 1950s spent more time at the table?” one asked.
About 39 per cent of respondents said they spent between 30 and 44 minutes eating dinner on average, 13 per cent between 45 and 69 minutes and 20 per cent more than an hour. The average dinner time was 40 minutes, although parents questioned by the pollster said they ideally wanted on average to spend 47 minutes.
Fifty-five per cent of respondents said that all members of the family ate together every night, albeit slightly later than they would like. The average dinner started at 8.15pm, but respondents said they would prefer to sit down to eat at 8.04pm on average.
Dining and Cooking