Joining together for the family meal

You might guess Aloysius Lugira is not originally from the United States by the elegantly clipped syllables of his Ugandan accent. You could also tell if you dined with him, his wife, and their 25-year-old son at their Woburn home. On weekends, they observe a ritual that has become foreign to many American families. They eat together.

They often savor a traditional Ugandan meal: a main course of boiled, mashed banana, complemented with rice, potatoes, or some other starch; fried wheat cakes; beef or chicken for protein; and spinach or chard. The family (the couple has four grown sons and daughters) ate together when the children lived at home, says Lugira, a Catholic who teaches African theology at Boston College.

Dining as a family fuses Christian and African spirituality. "Africans think in terms of communalism," says Lugira. "In the Ugandan tradition, closeness to each other, relatedness to each other, means eating together. . . . And this is no different from Christianity." To cite the most obvious example, Jesus and his disciples shared a Last Supper.

On Thursday, we celebrate a holiday premised on gathering as families for a meal. While some studies have suggested a general decline in the number of families dining together, other research, picked up by some religious believers, shows that communal meals bestow vital social benefits on children.

Miriam Weinstein, a documentary filmmaker and journalist from Manchester-by-the-Sea, became interested in the topic of family meals after reading a startling 2005 study by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. The 10-year research tried to determine why some children wound up with destructive behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and teen pregnancy, while others didn't.

"The common denominator," says Weinstein, "was kids who eat supper with families do better." And family dinner five times a week produced better results for kids than twice a week, the study found.

In fact, dining together was a more powerful indicator of positive behavior than good grades or churchgoing by children, says Weinstein, who was surprised by the findings.

The study results weren't isolated. Harvard's education school researched what set apart kindergartners who were well prepared to learn reading from those who weren't. Researchers expected the good learners to have been read to at home and to have watched little television, Weinstein says. Instead, family meals made the difference, because "when you sit around the table together, you learn to tell little stories" that build vocabulary.

Regular family meals are a ritual, and religions grasp the power of ritual. In her own Jewish tradition, Weinstein said, "food is all over the place," the Passover Seder being just one example.

A 2005 book she wrote, "The Surprising Power of Family Meals" (Steerforth Press), wanders the denominational landscape to profile other faiths with soul food, metaphorically speaking. Vermont Buddhists share a long, vegetarian lunch in silence, each taking just the amount of food necessary to sate hunger, after a blessing: "This food is the gift of the Earth, the Sky, the Whole Universe, and much hard work. May we live in such a way as to be worthy to receive it."

"The food looks and smells wonderful," Weinstein continues, "brown and white rice, something brown and cut up that must be tofu. A dish made with yellow noodles and veggies (carrots, corn, peas) cut up very, very small, and garnished with crushed peanuts. A salad made of cabbage, something slightly gelatinous, and very thin strips of cooked tofu, with three bottles of sauces."

But what really strikes her is the slow pace of eating and the limited portions. These convey spiritual lessons: "Eat only what will help you. Be mindful of what you are eating. . . . Be thankful for the food. Savor each mouthful."

To her surprise, Weinstein says, her book became a hit with the religious right for its promotion of family. Whether family meals will join abortion and gay marriage in a trifecta of conservative Christians' concerns, dining together may be making a comeback. The Columbia addiction center polled American children at random and found that, between 1998 and 2005, the proportion reporting family dinners five times a week jumped from 47 percent to 58 percent.

Another native Ugandan, Agnes Lubega of Fitchburg, grew up in a family whose parents, four children, and extended family ate together "to ask about school and also just to teach us good table manners and talk about family issues. It would be a time to communicate."

Expecting the birth of her first child, a boy, in a month, Lubega says, "My hope is to carry on the values that I acquired [and have] regular meals with the family."

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