Why Eatting Dinner as a Family is Important

Introducing Huffpost Family Dinner Downloads: Eat, Talk, Love

      Arianna Huffington writes in the HuffPost Food, "The Internet Newspaper: News Blogs Video Community" about the importance of eating as a family. Arianna introduces her claim by recounting a book written by Laurie David, The Family Dinner, that talks about the importance of families making it a ritual of sitting together to have dinner and meaningful conversations. Laurie David claims, "Dinner is as much about digestible conversation as it is about delicious food." Arianna goes on to claim the importance that sitting as a family has on the emotional and sociological part of the human relationship.
      Huffington structures her argument by an extended comparison by defining how important dinner talk is to the opposite of our fast food culture. She goes on to explain how her family would sit and talk about everything from, girlfriends, schoolwork, to of course boys. She states that they would even have debates versus the fast food culture where meals were short (there was homework to be done, after all!), Blackberries to check, and the TV blaring in the background (or hypnotizing them in the foreground). She also claims that her mother would get upset if they ever said that they were "grabbing something to eat." "Food is not something to grab," her mother would say. "It is something to savor."
       The author, Arianna Huffington’s, most powerful proof comes in the form of her talking about her childhood and saying how her parents were divorced by the time she was 9 yrs old, where she claims that spending time at the table was even more important to them since they had a broken family. The emotionally charged approach was appropriate and effective, showing how eating together can bring people together for meaningful conversation and relaxation even. In order to make a point, Huffington constructs this magical world and food by saying that food has a truth serum effect, and things come up and are dealt with that wouldn’t have come up anywhere else.
       More Important than the techniques Huffington uses to explain how important eating at a table is the way she uses them together. For example, if she would of just said right off that you should eat together and not explained why eating together is important I don’t think it would have been as effective to her intended audience. Her audience would have just shrugged off the statement and been done with it. I think that approach would have prevented the article from being convincing. It is obvious that Huffington specifically designed this article in a beneficial way to help her present her ideas.

Huffington, Arianna. "Arianna Huffington: Introducing HuffPost Family Dinner Downloads: Eat, Talk, Love." 
         Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post. Web. 09 Oct. 2011.
         <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/introducing-huffpost-fami_b_779610.html>.