How the modern American family eats: a video-ethnographic study

The traditional family meal is a powerful cultural symbol of family connectedness and socialization, but it has become increasingly difficult to maintain. In this article, we expand on the concept of the fragmented meal (Ochs et al. Citation2010) to conceptualize modern family eating patterns. Deviating from traditional family mealtime norms, families in our study followed unstructured and, in some ways, unpredictable eating patterns. We frequently observed fluctuations in the timing of meals, types of food, mealtime setting, and mealtime participants. Our study is innovative in drawing from video data of 21 racially and socioeconomically diverse families with young children inside their homes over a one-week period. Because we video-recorded families for the full day, we can capture the dynamics of meals and everyday eating patterns that might escape studies that have focused on formal mealtimes.