Families Centered Around Dinner Tables

After reading Diane Negra's text on ethnic cultures and food, I began to notice this duality taking place in so many of our television programs, like the famous Family Guy and Everybody Loves Raymond. There is this stereotypical concept of food directly correlating with foreign and ethnic cultures. Everybody Loves Raymond's Italian-ness is centered around the dinner table, with a major emphasize on Raymond''s wife's cooking and his mother's cooking. Since his mother s more traditional, she is more ethnic, more authentic, therefore her cooking and family values are better than Raymond's wife's cooking. Since she s younger and more America, she knows less about the kitchen and therefore less about what it means to be authentically cultural. Many of the show's issues and themes arise from everyone being at the dinner tale. Shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy offer this false imagery of the American family still maintaining the close bond of eating together and sharing their time at the dinner table, which in reality, as Negra explains, is not true. Families eat less together and fewer still cook home made meals with the productions of frozen dinners. Its a false nostalgia still maintained on television today.