The idea that cooking dinner can be a huge hassle for hardworking Americans, especially those who have young children, is retro yet timeless. By Hannah Goldfield ![Illustration of a mother serving dinner to her children.]()
Most afternoons,around 4:30P.M., a pair of words, separated by a comma and followed by an exclamation point, pops into my head; sometimes I say them aloud. The first, a profane four letters beginning with “F,” is not worth printing here. The second is “dinner.” It wasn’t always this way. In my twenties, dinner was the reason I got up in the morning: if I didn’t have plans to go out, I spent hours fantasizing about what to cook for the biggest meal of the day. Often, I had enough time for a post-work trip to the grocery store, to gather ingredients for some complicated recipe I’d never made before; sometimes I even entertained. In my thirties, I had kids, two of them, about two years apart. They rise at dawn. I am extremely lucky to have full-time child care, and at 9A.M. Ibegin a race against time to manage professional and household affairs without them underfoot. When they were newborns, dinner was pure sustenance: middling takeout from the closest place possible; supermarket prepared foods eaten while I stood in front of the fridge, with a baby strapped to my chest. But, when the younger child began to eat solids, and to go to bed at the same time as her older brother, a new ritual emerged. We started to eat a proper family dinner, the four of us sitting together at a table at around 5:30P.M., not out of some moral panic (although the alleged benefits are an added bonus) but because it was what made the most logistical sense. The only thing that seems harder than cooking one meal for a group of four is cooking separate meals for two groups of two. | 
