You can bet June never stuck anything from a cardboard box into her oven.
Saw a commercial this morning that depicted a family preparing to sit down at the dinner table as the narrator notes that children of families that eat dinner together get better grades. Which is true: A 2005 Columbia University study found that teens who ate dinner with their families on a regular basis were 40 percent more likely to get As and Bs, while a Harvard University study cited the importance of family dinners in helping children develop language skills. Family dinner is a good thing, no argument there.
But then the commercial goes on to show mom slicing portions of lasagna from a piping hot frozen dinner, a frozen dinner from one of the leading manufacturers of such concoctions. We looked up the nutritional breakdown on one serving of this particular prepared lasagna and discovered that one lone serving has 690 calories. That’s about 28 percent of the average American male’s total calorie intake per day and 38 percent of the average American female’s. And that’s just one element of one meal, a meal in the evening no less, when you should be consuming fewer calories. Further, this serving of family-time lasagna contains 22 grams of fat (35 percent of the daily recommended allotment), 1,857 milligrams of sodium (77 percent), 77 milligrams of cholesterol (26 percent) and 75 grams of total carbohydrates (25 percent). On the plus side, it provides 6 percent of your daily recommended dosage of Vitamin C!
I’m hardly questioning the convenience factor; It’s a frequent necessity in the average American household these days. We’ve had convenience-driven meals in the GOGF household the past three evenings. But quick meals don’t have to be laden with calories and fat. A quick Google reveals a plethora of sites that offer quick meal suggestions. EatingWell.com offers 30-minute recipes, Fitness Magazine goes 10 minutes better with 20-minute dinner recipes. Go to your local bookstore quailridgebooks.booksense.com and you’ll find shelves of similarly-focused titles. And you can probably trim those prep times by making dinner a truly family-oriented event and getting the kids to pitch in.
Family dinner is good. A family dinner that doesn’t turn us into statistics is even better.
I, for one, can testify Eating Well is a great resource for healthy recipe ideas and healthy eating in general. Last Christmas, my wife gave 3 gift subscriptions of the magazine to friends who often complain that they are too busy to cook healthy meals.