Big game season ended yesterday, and the Mighty Hunter didn’t get his
elk this year. He got antelope and deer, so it’s not like any of us
will go hungry, but no elk, which is too bad. I like elk. This morning
I went over to check New West Network and found this terrific piece on the intertwined pleasures of hunting and providing for oneself and one’s family: “The Thrill and the Meat” by Greg Lemon. I realize that in most parts of the country that hunting is an anathema, but out here, a lot of people like Lemon rely on the fall hunting season to make it possible to live a little lower on the economic ladder. Montana has one of the lowest wage rates in the country, and most locals aren’t hunting for trophies — they’re after a winter’s worth of food. It’s been fascinating watching the MH butcher these past
weeks. I have to say, if you’re going to eat meat, then there’s really no better way to know what you’re eating than to go out and hunt it, kill it, drag it home, hang it in the garage, skin it and butcher it yourself. These are the antelope that the MH
and his son killed earlier this year, hanging in the garage waiting to
be cut into manageable sizes and wrapped for the freezer. Gross? Only in the eye of the beholder. I think they’re
really sort of beautiful.
And although I’m still a long way from my
goal of being able to live small enough to quit my Corporate Job and
freelance like Greg Lemon’s done this year, knowing that the MH can
provide meat (I tease him that I only date him for his freezers, but
really, the duck confit he whipped out from the back of the fridge on
our first date was very very sexy), and that I can grow and put up a
lot of vegetables makes it seem like more reasonable goal than it might be in a lot of other places in the country.

I’ve been trying for days to figure out a way to write about this topic without sounding like a scold. Maybe the key is to ask you all (well, the three or four of you left after my various lapses in blogging) — what is it with dinner in America these days? Why is it so hard? Estimates vary, but it now seems that something like 30-50% of American families are not eating dinner together on any given night.

I don’t get it. I’m not talking about pulling off some gourmet multi-course meal. I’m just talking about dinner — a meal in which everyone eats the same thing, at the same time, in the same room. Even my parents, who admittedly didn’t have it together much of the time when we were growing up, managed dinner. Pot roast, spaghetti with red sauce, a roasted chicken, or that pork chop thing my Dad used to make with the tomatoes and the sour cream that my brother and I hated (sorry Dad). We ate out once in a while, but not very often, and I think I can count on one hand the times we ordered out, even for pizza. When we were little, it’s true, my mother was fond of the TV dinner, and when we lived with my Dad in high school we ate dinner in front of the TV a couple of nights a week. But we always ate together, even if we had to wait for Dad to get home from a late meeting, or if Patrick or I had an after school activity. It would never have occurred to us to eat alone, or in stages.

And it’s been one of the nicest things about dating someone again — I have someone not only to eat dinner with, but to check in with sometime during the day to see what the plan is for dinner. Dinner exists again and not just as another thing to get through by myself. Now it’s true, we both like to cook, and we’re both interested in food, but it’s not as if just because one is interested in cooking, one has to cook elaborately. I cut my teeth on Laurie Colwin’s books, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, for example, memoir/cookbooks that follow Colwin’s interest not in fancy restaurant cooking but in the sometimes-oddball things people cook at home, and about the ways we take care of one another by cooking.

So, gentle readers, fill me in — just what is it about dinner that has us all so flummoxed? What’s the big deal?