Food Journal #3

My family is Russian/ Austrian. At my house though we tend to eat alot of italian food. Also my dinner is generally some kind of meat (chicken, beef, hotdogs) with corn or rice, and salad. My mom makes dinner and we usually sit at these small tables on the couches surrounding my television. We eat with a fork and knife like every other person in the civilized world does today (not to say chopsticks and spoons aren't civilized). My family is Jewish, but not religiously practicing, so we do not conduct any religious ritual or blessing before our meals. I sit on my computer usually, on a couch by myself, my brother sits either on another couch near me or downstairs on the family computer, my parents both sit on the larger couch and watch MSNBC. We talk about how our days went sometimes and about stuff that happened since we last had time to talk. Than I will usually grab some desert and hang out with my parents and talk a bit while watching TV "with" them, before I get ready for bed.

I think that my families dinner routine is fairly typical of how Americans tend to eat meals. For the most part, we in America cannot break ourselves away from a screen even to eat, and often find ourselves in the company of others, paying attention only to the people on the screen and not those around us. This is a problem i think and says alot about the attention span and value of media over family in America. It bothers me when I try to converse with my dad and he tells me to wait for the commercial, and i feel that this happens often in most american households.