Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
I hear what you're saying, minx. I just don't buy the "modern" excuse that families use, to say they're too busy to cook or eat together. Sports and extra-curricular activities are mostly scheduled to NOT conflict with dinner time or homework. But there is a real issue with transportation and reliance on the car....which sadly translates to what the food industry sells.

Parents will drive 50 miles to their kids' next game or competition, with grocery stores and farmer's markets along the way, but they consider it an 'inconvenience' to park the car and pick their own fresh foods in less than 20 minutes. They've also been (falsely) convinced that cooking takes soooooo much time that it can't be done, so they don't even try...even tho we have microwave and convection ovens to speed the process.....so they use the fast food window instead.

One of my best childhood meal memories was having breakfast for dinner, at 9pm after an out-of-town swim meet, at the kitchen table with my parents and sisters. Cold cereal with milk, hard boiled eggs, toasted English muffins with peanut butter and jelly, and fruit for dessert.
GGT, in high school I routinely got home at 9 or 10 at night - figure school was 8-6 or so, followed by one extracurricular or another almost every night of the week. Most high schoolers are similarly overscheduled; if they're old enough, they'll also have jobs. And we haven't even gotten to homework or studying yet.

With little kids, it's not an issue of extracurriculars but bedtimes. My toddler has a 7:30 bedtime; we typically pick her up from school around 6 pm after a full day of work. If we want to fit dinner, bath, and bedtime in, that leaves precious little time for cooking, assuming both parents work full time. It's easy enough to scrounge up something for a little kid to eat for dinner - their leftover lunch food, some other odds and ends - but adults might need a bit more work to prepare a full meal, so we sometimes end up eating our 'real' meal after the kids are asleep (and, for that matter, we're pretty busy with feeding and parenting tasks to eat much anyways).

This isn't to say that we subsist on fast food or frozen meals - we mostly do eat home-cooked food, but it's frequently leftovers from the weekend or the night before, and it's rarely fancy (though it tends to be reasonably tasty and healthy). But honestly we prioritize getting a full day's work in, having some sort of family dinner, and getting the kids to bed on time over having a freshly cooked meal every day. I worked nearly 40 hours already this week (with 40% of the week to go), coupled with a few dozen hours of parenting duties and household chores. I really don't need to add more work than I already have.