Do you talk or stay quiet while eating?

[aser]

What do you prefer? Are you the type that focuses solely on eating when a piping hot dish sits in front of you? Or are you the type that enjoys the social aspect of dining, preferring to converse with your dining partners, elongating the experience as a whole.

All my thoughts and conversation while eating focuses on the meal itself. I'm thinking about eating it before it gets cold, thus affecting taste, texture. When I talk, it's to discuss the nuances of the dish; cooking method; ingredients; highlights, downfalls, how it can be improved; how it compares to other renditions; etc.....

My brain returns to earth after I finish eating, I can hold a normal non-food conversation again. I guess you can say I live to eat.

Am I being anti-social by being so single minded while eating? My gf seems to think so....

[Chris Amirault]

My wife and I have two kids, and we eat a sit-down dinner as a family every night (and sit down breakfasts & lunches every weekend). It's the primary social event of our day as a family, and we talk about just about everything, certainly including the food. I can't imagine life without it.

[Katie Meadow]

We eat almost all our meals at home, and they are almost all cooked by me. I use the freshest tastiest ingredients I can find within reason and I'm a pretty decent home cook. If every meal I put on the table was so exciting as to be worth conversing about or swooning over for the entire dinner hour we'd be an awfully weird family and I would be a famous chef. Well, okay, perhaps we are weird anyway, but we do talk about all kinds of things, and it's rarely the food. Once in a while I get some serious complements, but typically my husband (and daughter if she's home from college) are spoiled and a good meal is pretty routine.

One of the few communal efforts we make is pizza. My husband makes a great dough, and I do the tomato sauce and toppings. We do all have a habit of critiquing our pizzas, but that is usually a fairly short topic, since by now we know what we each want out of a pizza and we've been doing it for years.

Once in a great while we declare a "reading dinner." That happens if one of us is so wrapped up in a novel or is just feeling anti-social for some reason. But we all do it together.

[azurite]

I grew up in a "talk about everything at dinner" family (and my mom was a fairly good cook & she did most of the meal preparation). If there was something everyone particularly liked, like fresh corn on the cob purchased that afternoon from a local farm or farmstand, then we'd focus on eating the corn (& praising it). I didn't enjoy the arguments we sometimes had, but I did appreciate the idea of conversation at a meal. I thought good conversation or discussions added to the pleasure of eating with other people.

Most of the people I know now (that I share meals with sometimes) scarf down their food & that's it. Maybe they talk afterwards. I'm usually the last to finish and I feel a little let down, even if the food's very good. A few friends are different & I enjoy eating with them a great deal.

[Chris Amirault]

Happy to set an extra place over here, azurite.