YES
By Simon Mills
Simon (pictured) argues that having a candlelit dinner every night is no longer special
How ironic that a man who has made a lucrative television career out of eating standing up and talking with his mouth full should suddenly decide to judge how the British public take their own suppers.
Masterchef’s John Torode says that a TV dinner is bad manners and a surefire romance killer. I disagree.
In fact, John, to paraphrase one of your show’s catchphrases: ‘Opinions don’t get much more half-baked than this.’
You see, this is 2021, more than 60 years since America’s Swanson food company invented the grim yet hyper-convenient TV dinner.
We now have frenetic and logistically unpredictable lives. We live versatile and freestyle. The modern way to eat has evolved and progressed in parallel with the modern way of working — Sunday breakfast in bed, Monday lunch in front of the laptop, sushi standing up, sandwich in the car. The gastronomic equivalent of hot-desking.
So after a few days of this, an early evening pasta-and-Pinot-Grigio dinner, on the lap, with one’s wife or girlfriend nestled beside you on the sofa and BBC2’s smartarse game show Only Connect just beginning can seem rather romantic.
A candlelit dinner every night is no longer special
Of course, my girlfriend and I don’t manger à l’écran plat (eat in front of the flatscreen) seven days a week. Particularly during the lockdown, it has really depended on what’s on telly . . . and what’s in the oven. A binge on the new series of Succession or Call My Agent will be a strictly after-dinner treat accompanied by a simple glass of chilled Albarino. And it would be wrong, say, to have risotto ai funghi porcini with the idiot box distracting from the aroma of the mushrooms.
Sometimes, at around 8pm, I love to cook, lay a table, arrange napkins, light a pair of candles, maybe put on some music and open a bottle. But doing this every night would make it less special, less romantic.
John, I am aware that you and Lisa Faulkner have teenage kids in the house and want to set a good example and, yes, I know you are still in the honeymoon period of your second marriage and want to be a good husband. But it would be rather gauche to consume, say, a Five Guys burger and fries off a plate, at a table, with a knife and fork.
My love and I are not Masterchef fans, by the way. Don’t know about you, but I can’t bear to watch Torode wolfing down his dinner — in a kitchen, for heaven’s sake — while staring at a TV monitor. I mean, really.
NO
By Esther Walker
When it comes to my marriage, eating in front of the telly is my line in the sand.
While Esther (pictured) says that having dinner at the table with her husband is sacred
It’s not like I’m some romance junkie, reading aloud from a Barbara Cartland novel while my husband, Giles, massages my feet with a rose between his teeth. In fact, after ten years of marriage, standards have most definitely slipped.
For example, my husband and I often sit next to each other in bed, happily scrolling through our phones and ignoring each other. We allow the cats to sleep on our duvet, forget Valentine’s Day and discuss unappealing health matters.
But dinner at the table is sacred.
I have two children, aged seven and ten. Even at the best of times, they are all-consuming from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep, which used to be 7pm, now it’s more like 9pm. By that time I’m ready to turn in, too.
Table dinners with my husband are all I’ve got off
Now that we’re all at home together, it’s even more intense. My day is packed with print-outs and questions, lunches and snacks. There’s nothing that kills intimacy — and, therefore, romance — in a marriage quite like children talking non-stop about Pokemon. Dinner alone, at the table, with my husband, is all I’ve got left of my actual marriage. The rest of the time it feels like Giles and I run a two-star internet cafe with the world’s rudest customers.
My parents ate in front of the TV sometimes, but that was before On Demand TV, when we were all slaves to the schedules.
If something my parents wanted to see clashed with Mum’s fish pie being ready, then they set off for the telly room with their plates — napkins tucked under armpits, cutlery in back pockets. Otherwise it was all of us, at the table, no excuses.
My parents have been married for 40 years. Maybe it’s not the eating‑together thing that has kept their marriage thriving. But what if it is?
Giles and I chat throughout the day, but there are many days, particularly right now, when the dinner table is the only place we have for uninterrupted conversation.
We time the kids’ dinner and bathtime so they are both upstairs on their iPads while we eat something that one or other of us has cooked. Sometimes I even light candles.
We have a glass of wine (possibly more than one), and we have a conversation. It’s not usually about anything much, but we’re concentrating, properly, on each other.
I’m not sure that’s the dictionary definition of romance, but it’s a damn sight more sexy than being hunched over our plates in front of University Challenge.