Time to wave goodbye to the dining table?

Kirsty Mcluckie considers the nation’s eating habits

o you set the table for dinner every night and see your evening meal as an opportunity for an exchange of news with your family or housemates, perhaps involving some witty banter and intelligent debate?

Or do you tend to slump in front of the telly with a plate balanced precariously on your knee to catch up on the latest box sets while you eat?

I would suspect that more of us are tending towards the latter, making the dining table increasingly obsolete but that might not be the case.

A Onepoll study on behalf of furniture retailer Fishpools found that two thirds of us eat at a dining table at least once a day and the demise of the dining room is exaggerated, although we are likely to be using it for far more than its original purpose.

In my experience, an unused dining table soon becomes a place to store paperwork, complete homework, or just another surface which attracts clutter.

Separate dining rooms, those bastions of formal meals, seem to have lost popularity altogether, with households mostly favouring open-plan living.

It is certainly easier, and more sociable, to have guests or family around the kitchen table rather than in another room while a harassed host ferries food back and forth, missing out on the flow of conversation.

Developers I have spoken to on the subject say that the trend for open-plan living isn’t universal, however.

While younger families prefer a large living kitchen with dining space, those whose children have left home tend to like a design which allows a separate dining room for impressive formal dinner parties.

While the days of ladies withdrawing to leave the men to port and cigars may be over, people serious about hospitality prefer to leave the table and move to another room for coffee, rather than sitting among the dishes in the kitchen.

The solution is to offer both house type layouts, according to my sources.

Apparently you can accurately predict which buyer will opt for each, depending on their age and family circumstances.

My family – which includes teenage children – try to eat at the table as much as possible, but often it depends on what we are eating.

Spaghetti or a roast lunch would be disastrous balanced on a knee in the sitting room, while the rules can be relaxed if a dish can be eaten with a fork only.

The general move away from eating at a dining table is probably not just down to the nation’s sloppy eating habits however.

A report last year found that a majority of people who admitted they did not eat meals at the table blamed their busy lives.

As workers spend more time in the office and families less time together at home there just aren’t the opportunities to sit down and enjoy a meal in company.

Families who are grabbing a takeaway “on the hoof ” or eating separately are not doing so because they wish to, but because they have no choice.

It is a sad state of affairs if we can’t spare half an hour or so a day to enjoy our food and each other’s company.

It might be more timeefficient to scoff standing up or while you are doing something else, but I think if I ever get to that stage, I’ll ditch my lifestyle rather than my dining table.