MY childhood tasted of bland roast chicken and canned crescent rolls — starchy fare that typically came out of a box, plopped on our plates by our tireless working mom. Dining out usually meant wielding our trays down the line at
Luby’s Cafeteria in San Antonio for mashed potatoes and a factory-cut square of fried fish, with a clover-shaped dinner roll on the side.
So how did we end up here, crammed around a corner table at
Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco this summer, arguing over whether we should order a second
bottle of a primitivo from Apulia? The meal began with my sister and me offering Mom $80 to try the fried pigs’ ears with chile oil (they’re heavenly; she refused) and ended with Dad trying his best to swallow the sticker shock of the $300-plus bill. (“For pizza!”)
In the decade since my sister and I left South Texas and adopted the palates that come with our respective coastal cities, San Francisco and New York, meals for my family — and, I discovered, many others like ours — have become a source of tension, a stark reminder of the generational red food-blue food divide.
It’s as if each time my family sits down together for a meal, all the cultural differences from the place we came from (land of chain restaurants, big-box grocery stores and drive-throughs) and the places we ended up (lands of Michelin stars, artisanal cheese and locally farm-raised you-name-it) bubble to the surface like the yeast in my sister’s favorite
sour batard bread.
Eating together inevitably leads to a long list of proscribed cuisines that are either too spicy (Indian) or too rich (French) or just too New York (brunch). Our mom, always eager to please, recently declared that she loved sushi, “just not the raw stuff.” The morning after Delfina, over dim sum at
Yank Sing, an epic family fight broke out somewhere between the Shanghai dumplings and the Peking duck carts.
My sister, Stefani, and I are no better on a visit to Texas. On a recent trip, she declared my folks’ favorite restaurant on the River Walk “a waste of a meal.”
My parents have tried for years to get me to eat at
Pasha Mediterranean Grill, built in a former Tex-Mex restaurant shaped like a sombrero. They swear it’s better than anything I can get in New York. The conversation usually ends with my rolling my eyes and saying, “We have pita bread in New York, Dad.” He replies, “Not like this you don’t.” And so on until everyone is annoyed.
As the holidays approached, my husband, having endured these fights for three years, encouraged me to use my reporting skills to investigate whether meals bring out the same generational and geographic rifts in other families. Can food, so often portrayed this time of year as the glue that binds a family together, also be the wedge that drives us apart?
Absolutely, said
William J. Doherty, a social science professor at the University of Minnesota who writes about family rituals. “Food is physical, psychological and emotional,” he said. “There’s almost nothing like it as both a connector and a divider.” Tensions aired around the table — “a microcosm of family life and social relations” — often lead to broader, more healthy debates, he said. (True. The dim sum fight somehow transformed into a dayslong discussion about our parents’ retirement plans.)
Dr. Doherty suspects that parents in suburban and rural areas harbor unspoken pride in their children’s culinary snobbery. Yes, we can be insufferable to dine with, but we can also afford to eat out and learn about foods that were not available where we grew up. But like working-class parents who sacrificed to send their children to college, only to find that they have little in common, different tastes can also highlight familial growing pains.
“Food is a symptom and a symbol of change and how people grow apart,” said
Heather Paxson, an anthropology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “People want their kids to do better, but there’s also the fear that they’ll be left behind or judged as lacking in some way.”
The reverse can happen to parents who forced their children to eat foie gras and Wagyu. “An adult child can go to one extreme and become an epicure, or say, ‘I want peanut butter and jelly every day,’ ” said
Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and family therapist in Madison, Wis.
The generational food gap corresponds to the evolved way many American families eat today, Dr. Paxson said. Baby boomers like my folks largely adopted the frugal dining habits of their World War II-era parents. Dinners were about affordability and efficiency. My parents put dinner on the table each night to feed us, not to enlighten us about edamame and the wonders of a Le Creuset Dutch oven (which my mom now owns and uses often).
“It was part of the day’s routine,” said Marilyn Hagerty, a columnist in Grand Forks, N.D., who gained
instant fame this year for her review of a local Olive Garden. “We had to eat. It was nothing we’d all stand around and savor.”
That all changes when children move away. For some, a new social milieu means adopting a vegan diet or giving up carbohydrates, while others, like my brother-in-law, drink only
Blue Bottle coffee made in a handblown Chemex coffee maker. My friend Barry Dale says the only thing tougher than telling his Southern parents he was gay was telling them he was gluten free. (He does not have celiac disease.)
Ms. Hagerty’s daughter once worked in Hong Kong, and took her mother on a culinary tour of Shanghai. “I just thought she’d come a long way from the macaroni and cheese and tuna fish and noodles she ate in North Dakota growing up,” Ms. Hagerty said.
All that worldly deliciousness can turn even the most agreeable eaters into arrogant urbanites. But I also learned that within each family, neutral ground exists.
My parents and I completely agree when it comes to San Antonio’s regional Tex-Mex and barbecue spots. Stefani and I desperately miss the flavors of a bean-and-cheese taco from
Las Palapas (closed on Sundays “for family and worship”) and bring back jars of
Rudy’sbarbecue sauce in our suitcases after most visits home.
Ms. Hagerty said that on visits to Grand Forks, her adult children rush to the
Red Pepperfor its special “grinder” sandwich made with taco meat and white sauce. And each of the children’s kitchens has an aebleskiver pan, a tool Danish cooks use to make the little doughy pancakes that the Hagertys grew up on.
My family has developed some new favorites, but it has not been easy. One of my most heated food fights with my father started at
Russ & Daughters, a landmark appetizing shop on the Lower East Side. My dad loved the look of the smoked salmon, chopped liver and dried fruit arranged like artwork behind glass. Then he discovered that the store did not have a toaster oven.
I tried my best to convince him that the
bagels were so deliciously fresh they didn’t need to be toasted, but the thought of an untoasted bagel was too much. We left the store screaming at each other.
Years later, now that the shop has a toaster oven, he laughs at what is known in my family as “the toasted bagel incident.”
“The main thing is that we are all together at the same table, and not the food that is on it,” he said.
Still, he’d really like us to try Pasha.
