The Importance Of Eating At Restaurants

My mom expressed that eating out at restaurants has been a rarity throughout her entire life. When she was a kid, fast food chains were not common, and her family did not have enough money to afford eating out very often. At most she would eat at casual restaurants like Macayo’s once every month or two with her dad when they went to town. In college, she began to eat out quite a bit more as she was exposed to fast food and pizza delivery for the first time in her life which were convenient options for a busy student. As an adult, she has always preferred to eat at home and her kids do too. She says that we often stop at healthier fast food restaurants such as subway when on a long road trip or stop for lunch at casual chains such as Panera

As a result, she experienced life largely as an only child. In addition, her father would leave very early in the morning to go to work and her mother was often physically unable to leave her chair in the living room. Thus, my mom typically ate breakfast and lunch by herself, but dinner was always eaten with her parents at the dining room table. In college she often ate either alone or with classmates, and now she eats most of her meals with at least one family member. She often gets up early to eat breakfast with my dad before he goes to work and ate lunch with her children until they were old enough to go to school. Dinner has always been eaten together as an entire family at the kitchen table. Mary remarked that breakfast was always a meal that the three of us kids ate before school, but we did not really sit down and eat our cereal together. As we all continued to get older and have different routines, breakfast became even more independent. Lunch was usually eaten with classmates at school all throughout childhood, high school, and even college, and dinner was always eaten together as a family after everyone had returned home for the day. Now that she lives on her own, she eats almost every meal independently. The only exception is on Sundays when she drives over to our parent’s house to visit and eat Sunday dinner with our parents and younger