Couch, potato

An entertained gut is a happy gut, I’ve decided.

John Lethlean

You read it all the time, don’t you? That groupthink rot surrounding the ritual that is The Family Meal. The sacrosanctity of coming together at the dining table for the sharing of food and conversation, ideas and a bottle of wine. Because this is how real people, with solid values, conduct their lives and anything less is… a bit pitiful.

Well, I’m not so sure. I absolutely love eating in front of the television, preferably with it on loud showing anything other than reality cooking nonsense. There are millions of us out there who are single, or empty nesters, or don’t have apple-pie nuclear family lives, who feel the same way. Is there something wrong that we don’t particularly want to talk with a fork in our hands come dinnertime? Of course not.

We cook; we chat; we have a drink while we’re cooking and chatting. This is blue-chip exchange stuff. And then, when dinner’s ready, we almost always retire to the couch. How else are we supposed to keep up with all the important water-cooler TV conversations? How else can we participate when someone asks, “Have you seen the new Twin Peaks?” I need to be able to say, “Claire Underwood has lost the plot” with conviction. I also need to have a decent evening meal, and as far as I can see, the two are not incompatible. As that great philosopher Ferris Bueller noted many years back, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. And that includes eating and watching telly simultaneously, to keep abreast of Stuff.

A couple of things ought to be pointed out here lest my windscreen gets lipsticked with “bogan” (unlike Rebel Wilson, that’s not a tag I’d be comfortable with). First, my wife and I live fairly selfish lives and get a lot of mutual airtime. We talk heaps. Second, we go out to dinner (and lunch) and sit opposite each other and talk more than most. No TV. So there’s that. And finally, like I said, that cooking and talking stuff, it’s real. I refuse to do takeaway. It’s eat out, or cook, but no blurred lines. (There is, apparently, a revolution happening with home delivered food on the backs of panting English backpackers, and I even had a crack at delivering the stuff myself recently, for fun and the massive gross of $95 for four hours’ work.) But I’ve never really understood the compromise people are prepared to make for the sake of “convenience”. Show me a home-delivered pizza worth eating and I’ll show you a flying salami.

So food prep is the conversation hour; television and eating the entertainment. If you live on home deliveries, ignore my example and sit at the table and make a mess someone else would clean up if only you’d gone to the source and had the curry the way the chef wanted you to have it in the first place, at his restaurant.

But there is another way. You can go to a restaurant and watch telly, too. I spent a glorious hour in an Adelaide Chinese the other night eating noodles and watching the footy, and I intend to do it again. It was awesome, even if the food was a bit suss. An entertained gut is a happy gut, I’ve decided.

So do what works for you and the people you love, but don’t make us feel bad about eating dinner on the couch. There’s more than one route to foodie Nirvana.

Now, let’s talk House of Cards.