in eating news...

From the NY Times
Families With Full Plates, Sitting Down to Dinner

It may come as no surprise, given my interest in everything edible, that my family had a strictly enforced family dinnertime. Replete with "no-thank-you" helpings of undesired foods and a draconian clean plates policy. I challenge the findings that family meals make children smarter, given my experiences with "konks" on the head as punishment for sassy refusals to eat. I was much smarter before said konks. In fact, I knew everything (hence the sass).

[I know my dad reads this, it's my job to give him a hard time]

But I wouldn't be half as interesting without the lessons learned with my family at dinner. As much as I hated being ordered to, "Get me a three by five card!", the diagrams my dad drew on his three by five cards to explain how things work, his thinking out loud with my mom about plans for the farm, their answers to the questions my brothers and I asked all form part of my weirdly encyclopedic knowledge. Our family meals fed curiosity.