AP poll: Family dinner survives, with distractions

WASHINGTON — Pass the gravy — plus the phone and the remote control. It's dinnertime in America.

Between the blare of the TV, the ring of the phone and Junior texting his buddies under the table or from the couch, the modern dinner comes with a heaping helping of distracting bells and whistles, an Associated Press-iVillage Food poll found.

Yet the sit-down, home-cooked family meal is an enduring tradition. And not just on Thanksgiving or other special occasions.

Most nights, most families manage to eat together, the survey found.

Democrats and Republicans do. Devout churchgoers and never-goers do. Childless families and those with kids are about equally apt to have a regular family meal. So are families from the suburbs and the country.

Altogether, more than 60 percent of those who live with families said they sat down with family for dinner at least five nights in the past week. Home-cooked meals were the norm, not just takeout and the like.

Hand-me-down recipes determine the menu more than any other source. Although more than half in the poll have cooked something from an online recipe and TV shows, such digital delights lag recipes clipped from newspapers and magazines, and none of that holds a candle to recipes passed on from family elders.

So far so good, painter Norman Rockwell, that celebrant of the idealized old-fashioned life, surely would think.

But family bonding has some competition when people are chowing down.

Television is a constant dinner companion for a quarter of families, the poll suggests. More than half have it turned on more often than rarely.

Half are pestered by phone calls — including, it must be said, from the occasional pollster like the ones who did this survey.

Texting or e-mailing on a cell phone is always going on over dinner for 5 percent of families. It's more than a rare intrusion for 15 percent. Nearly 40 percent have the radio or stereo going, at least occasionally.

Surveys over recent decades have generally found the American dinnertime to be hanging in as family time despite the growth of households with both parents working. It might be harder to pull off these days but, in the view of Don Wells, 59, of Phenix City, Ala., it's not that hard.

"Cooking is not rocket science," said Wells, a government contractor who is retired from the armed forces. He and his wife, Mary, have dinner together every night, along with kids, grandkids or "anyone else who happens to be in the house at meal time."

Cell phones don't interrupt. "Not in this house," he said. But the TV is sometimes on.