In the Victorian era, the culture adopted the dining room, and it became a decadent display of family and social status. Across cultures and centuries, dining rooms continued to appear, but the modern American dining room has roots in 1800s Victorian England. It is one of the earliest examples of the power dynamic that exists at the dining table and in hosting rituals - a collision of class, race, and gender relations, still laid out at dinnertime even today. Generally, the men were served by enslaved people or the women of the household. They often held symposiums there, where they discussed academia or were entertained by performers. Called an andron, this space was meant for men to eat and drink in. The ancient Greeks had one of the first popular versions of the formal dining room. For centuries, having a dining room was seen as a marker of a rich family, and it implied a certain level of dignity. The current status of the dining table can only be understood in light of how it used to be used, and what it used to represent. What has this fade into obsolescence done to the dining table, and to the people who once gathered around it to share a meal? The dining table hasn’t disappeared - there are plenty next to my family’s on Facebook Marketplace - but its meaning seems to have been altered forever. For the sake of convenience, we don’t sit down for capital-D dinner anymore. The American dining room is dying a slow death, and we’ve barely batted an eye. The shift happened right under our noses - in a 2019 survey about cooking at home, while 72 percent of respondents grew up eating at a dining room table, only 48 percent of them still do so now. Dinner happens everywhere now: on the couch while streaming a television show, hunched over a kitchen countertop, on a commute home. It’s likely that this scenario in your mind’s eye is not unfolding in a formal dining room. It’s a regular Tuesday evening, not any kind of special occasion. My parents paid thousands for the table and its six chairs but haven’t been able to get even a few hundred bucks for it. The table’s rich mahogany top is in near-perfect condition because of the protective cover it came with, but nobody on Nextdoor or Facebook Marketplace seems interested. Over the years, our dining table became a dumping ground for assorted crap: bills, flyers from school, Amazon packages. Instead, our family ate in the kitchen, which also doubled as a place to do homework, or to watch something on TV when the living room wasn’t the right vibe. I’ve only eaten at it a handful of times in my life because my sisters and I surely would’ve made a mess of it when we were kids.
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