The Long-Forgotten Beauty and Usefulness of the Family Dinner

When I grew up in a kampung life-style setting, the evening family meals were almost considered sacred family affairs. Each dinner time was a very important meeting time for all the family unit members. A dinner could not start if there was a missing member of the family. The family head, my mother, for all dinner times, would ask a complaining hungry member to wait for all to arrive. Sometimes someone would be sent out to call any slow comer to come faster for it was dinner time. A kampung call for a brother who happened to be at a neighbor's house or at a game in the field, would be issued aloud in their local tongue, "/ludi:, muhi:, maka:n/" That was in the early 1950s and then onwards in time. Years later, sometimes in and around the late 1980s, the practice of a corporate family meal was still continued and cherished. That was long after the members of that intact family unit that I came to know so well have then gone their separate ways and have then started their own family unit to lead and to guide. The picture appended gives a testimony to such a small family dinner beauty. The eldest sibling would lead the others to organize the setting of the table. The preparation of the food need not be done by the children. Their mother normally did that specialized work, so to speak. The TMTs in the picture are seen around the table ready to partake in a family meal, at dinner time. That was the now-lost happy scenario of a family dinner. Nowadays the sanctity of a harmonious family unit was gravely compromised, if not, grossly corrupted by that anti-Christ red herring, the G games.