What dinner time looks like across the USA | Hacker News Reader

What dinner time looks like across the USA

huckmagazine.com

63 pointssimulate56 comments

I'm disappointed that my demographic wasn't represented: standing at the kitchen sink, eating room temperature baked beans out of the can, then sticking my head under the faucet for a drink.

I think that was the only thing missing from this depressing montage.

Do you use a spoon or just dump directly into mouth? Don't cut yourself licking the can. Also, could be on a sidewalk or squatter camp.

Yeah, I try to warm my can of beans by the hobo fire while I take a few pulls from my brown-bagged rum bottle.

Can't trust the water anyway.

I use a fork, but I rinse it off and leave it on the edge of the sink to possibly be used later.

Your comment made me laugh. We've all been there. The worst I have ever seen is someone who ran out of paper plates and started using phone book pages.

I always forget to bring a fork for lunch, so does everyone else, hence plenty of plastic knives; I use them as chop sticks.

Couples sitting at the table eating and looking at their cell phones are under-represented! Walk into any restaurant and there is plenty of that these days.

https://d2v9y0dukr6mq2.cloudfront.net/video/thumbnail/DHmMj5...

Really interesting pictures, although I hope people realize that this was meant to capture interesting things and not really represent the average dinner time in the US. My two favorites are:

   "Tuesday: Alex, Sophia, Kathy, David, Claudia, Eva & Ana." [0]

   "Wednesday: Nathaniel." [1]

That is a huge table that family has, I mean that's really, really wide. And Nathaniel looks like he likes to party, which I respect.

[0] http://huckcdn.lwlies.com/admin/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/1...

[1] http://huckcdn.lwlies.com/admin/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/1...

Maybe I'm interpreting it wrong, but these are some of the most depressing pictures I've seen, in an ordinary sense! Reminds me of Stranger Things.

Agree with your take on Nathaniel, perhaps he's having a gag with his bowl of lettuce.

Yeah, the way they're shot and the expressionless faces on the people make them quite depressing.

They actually kind of remind me of photos in Dwell (as captured by http://unhappyhipsters.com/ ), except with worse lighting and mostly in a different income bracket.

> I hope people realize that this was meant to capture interesting things and not really represent the average dinner time in the US

I'm not sure this is true. They may have not been meant to capture the typical American but I know many Americans represented in this group and I don't think it is atypical either.

Also, kudos to Nathaniel for using his dining table rather than giving into the temptation to plop down in-front of a TV since he is eating alone.

Although, all of these photos look staged. At the very least their postures were dictated by knowing they are being photographed.

If you go to the blog there are more photos http://www.loisbielefeld.com/weeknight-dinners/

Edit: looking at the other photos on the photographer's site, I think they were told not to smile. And I think the combination of lack of smiles + dark lighting contributes to the kind of depressing feel. Even for the other not-dinner-related photos on the site.

Edit 2: OMG the second photo on http://www.loisbielefeld.com/conceal-carry/ is terrifying. Never ever point a gun in the direction of another person you don't plan to shoot, people!

> Never ever point a gun in the direction of another person you don't plan to shoot, people!

With their fingers on/near the trigger, no less. Ugh.

I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but maybe they are unloaded?

I'm sure they probably are, but the first rule of gun safety is to always treat all guns like they're loaded and there's a bullet in the chamber. Proper trigger discipline is to have your trigger finger extended like you see in a number of the pictures.

This. Unless the barrel is stuck in the open position and you can see daylight through the other side, always assume the gun is loaded.

Even if you are 100% sure it is not loaded , we are creatures of habit. If you make a habit of putting your finger on the trigger of unloaded guns eventually you are going to do the same thing with a loaded one by accident.

If I'm handing someone a hand gun I always remove the magazine and pull back the barrel. Because even with the magazine out, there could be a chambered round.

I know someone who thought one was unloaded. Lucky for him his wife took it away from him.

Finger only goes near trigger when you are ready to shoot and have a target with nothing in the background. As an example, shooting at a bull while traffic is driving behind the bull is not a safety first response.

The point is it could be. You only have to be wrong once

You always assume a gun is loaded. It just makes for good habit, you want safe behavior to happen naturally.

An excellent point. I take some comfort in knowing more people on that page have their finger off of the trigger than on.

The people with their finger on the trigger probably should have never been granted a license... although I am well aware that in many states you don't need to know how to use it to buy it.

Edit: please don't turn that last sentence into a debate about what the license requirements for guns should be. While I think is actually a worth while debate I already feel bad about taking this off topic.

I can't help but see this [0] guy and just pretend he has no idea how to hold a gun. Makes me laugh

[0] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57b7caeed482e9b69b7b9...

Not a single handgun chambered in 10mm auto (with the possible exception of the Glock you can't get a good look at).

People must be more afraid of recoil than they are of bears. ;)

> And Nathaniel looks like he likes to party, which I respect.

He's rocking Windows Media Player!

Ya david and kathy are loaded. both currency and offsprings

> “That being said, I was quite surprised to see a few families using paper plates rather than dishes. I’m keenly aware of my culture’s extreme wastefulness and have tried to make efforts to reduce my footprint, which is why I probably was more aware of it.”

It's damn tempting to do it at least a couple days a week if you have kids. Stretches how long your kitchen stays clean-ish without a bunch of work, and is way cheaper than paying a human to come help. Especially effective if you couple it with frozen food that can be cooked in its own container, or a meal that can feed 4-5 but be cooked in one pot with no cutting boards or anything (so, something out of a box). That combo can buy you a day of zero-added-mess in the kitchen, which is so nice when you've got kids and two working parents.

Actually, now that I'm writing it out like this, I'm thinking maybe we need to start doing this like Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I try to consider any possible way to solve household issues and not get stuck on particular solutions, think about our house as an environment to help us get stuff done, that kind of thing, but I think I've been neglecting the possibility of generating slightly more trash as a way of achieving ends. Yet I've considered the far more expensive option of hiring help. Just a couple regular, planned days a week of basically not using the kitchen could give us a perceived lower amount of work and an actual time-the-kitchen-is-clean much greater than the 2/7 it implies. And it's cheaper and (way) more convenient than dining out. Hm....

I don't mean this in a bad way - do you not have a dishwasher? I've long stopped considering them luxuries. The amount of time saved on cleaning is enormous, especially since I cook every day, and I can't imagine cooking even half as much if I had to do the dishes by hand afterwards. The electricity cost is so small it's not worth worrying about, and water happens to be free where I live, but the time saving is the biggest plus.

It also saves water. I remember a study from years back showing that using any electric dishwasher saved a ton of water versus even the most fastidious hand cleaning in the sink.

Think of how much water is saved by using paper plates!

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who don't do the dishes at all, and people with a deep appreciation for paper plates. :)

What I'm trying to say is that even unloading and loading the dishwasher can be too large of a time burden for large families.

Yeah. They still take ~50% of the effort of hand-washing before you can expect them to actually clean anything you put in them, in my experience—our current one, though only a year old, is incredibly shitty and takes more like 75%. With a few kids you're running the dishwasher and putting away dishes like 4-5 times a week. Dropping that to 2-3 would be pretty nice.

Also dishwashers are entirely useless for something like 1/4 of the items that are dirtied in meal prep + eating (and it's only that low because we have 3 kids, so the dishwashable-item count is higher than for, say, 2 people, while the non-dishwashable count is similar). There's more stuff you don't have to do with a frozen meal and paper plates.

Admittedly, this latter point is almost a non-issue if you mise en place and Clean as you Go when cooking, but not every working couple gets home at the same time and sometimes the spouse who consistently and gleefully uses the above gets home too late to cook unless you want to push back the kids bedtimes (god no) and sometimes the spouse who gets home earlier just cannot be convinced to use the above by seemingly any means and gets really snippy when further efforts at convincing are made, no matter how gently. At least I'm quite sure that must be the case for someone. Ahem.

You can thank the EPA and their energy usage labeling requirements for a large part of the crappiness of modern appliances. People want to see a small number on the yellow sticker so manufacturers don't use as much hot water. The pressure regulator is also usually set very conservatively from the factory for the same reason.

I'm surprised I haven't seen shower mixing valves installed with washing machine hookups in new construction. Then again, code would probably change to prohibit it the second it caught on.

That has not been my experience with dishwashers at all. I've had 4 different ones so far and never had to do anything other than just swipe solid food off to the bin,never prewashed anything. Usually use the 65C programme on them and everything comes out super clean, there will be an odd thing that is not completely clean but I'm serious when I say that's probably one thing in 1/10 loads.

And what sort of things do you use for prep that can't go in the dishwasher? All knives, plastic chopping boards, bowls - all goes straight in the dishwasher. The only things I don't put in it are my frying pans since I have a nice Circulon set and I've already ruined one by putting it in a dishwasher.

> And what sort of things do you use for prep that can't go in the dishwasher? All knives, plastic chopping boards, bowls - all goes straight in the dishwasher. The only things I don't put in it are my frying pans since I have a nice Circulon set and I've already ruined one by putting it in a dishwasher.

Lots of utensils that are too tall to go in the silverware basket, but tend to fall down and block the arms if you put them on the regular tray section. Pots, pans, mixing bowls, cutting boards. They block too much water and if they're not clean enough to wipe clean with water and a towel in ~10 seconds the dishwasher's not gonna do anything for them anyway.

We've owned... oh, 5, maybe 6 dishwashers? All but 2 of them new. None of them have not left several dishes dirty enough in every load that you had to leave them in to run again, or hand wash them after the machine had already "washed" them. None have been any good at all for things that are really dirty and couldn't be hand-cleaned very quickly. If I lived alone I would 100% for sure not bother with one at all. Easily the most frustrating/useless appliance in my house.

[EDIT] there's also the problem that anything sitting dirty in a not-yet-full dishwasher can't be used... unless you take it out and hand wash it. Not a problem for plates and stuff, but a real problem for prep-related items.

I'd love to know the reason why our experiences are so vastly different. Either our cooking styles are very different, or US dishwashers are more inefficient or I don't know what else. But there must be a reason.

I was wondering the same. I have a very similar experience to yours (3 dishwashers in France, all of them Bosh or Siemens) and this is one of these wonderful inventions which change life.

Interesting pictures, but they seem designed to convey "disappointment"

I'd be disappointed too with most of the food, not to mention the anti-social eating arrangements, in many of the pictures.

My personal take-away (ahem) - gay couples (or maybe just friends/family/room-mates) appear to have better dinners. Or better presentation, though in that case I'm not sure whose.

That's a lot of screens at dinner time... either TV or computer screens. That's kind of sad. There are lots of reasons (and science) for why you shouldn't have screens while eating.

I'll bite: what scientific reasons are there for a screen to be worse for you while eating than while not eating?

There is evidence that distracted eating tends to increase overall food intake: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/97/4/728.abstract

https://theconversation.com/science-says-eat-with-your-kids-...

This is way more a artistic photo shoot than anything approaching journalism.

Yes, a lot of staged shots, and off camera lighting.

The photos aren't being represented as journalism, it's a profile of the photographer and collection.

They are missing something: if you don't feed the darn animals first you don't eat in peace!

Where were the pets in the pics?

This guy has his locked in the kitchen

http://huckcdn.lwlies.com/admin/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/1...

"Wednesday: Brandy and John."

Australia here, I guess our dinner times are reasonably similar to the US.

Personally, I'm a fan of the old stable table in front of the TV. Alternatively, being inappropriately drunk at a nice restaurant seems to happen more often than I'd like.

Only pictures on unhappy looking people? Was that for artistic or for didactic purposes?

That's a very interesting point.

Writer-filmmaker Errol Morris has written extensively about how there are no absolute truths in a photograph. A photograph, like art, can cover up facts, reveal new truths and distort reality.

So when I view these pictures in a particular way, like you, I too sense melancholy.

But seen in another way, these are little domestic vignettes, filled with pizza, contentment, sitcom laugh-tracks, boredom and some anxiety.

The question is, how do we want to view these photos? What do we want to believe about dinnertime in the USA?

My family is in the minority; 4 of us eat at a table. Though my son wolfs it down to get back to Roblox. Unless mom is gone, then we revert to animals.

A lot of pizza.

Dominos must have a special deal on Wednesday nights...

Pizza is great, people should have pizza for dinner all of the time.

Read the article while sitting at my computer with my dinner, what a coincidence.

Yes, I can eat in the living room on the proper dining table, but I don't like it. When I was living with my parents, we had a decent table in the kitchen, where we had all our meals. Sadly my kitchen in this apartment is not big enough for any kind of table, which is really sad.

Can't say if it's just me, but I noticed that almost noone (the ones actually sitting at a dining table) use an actual tablecloth.

In the first picture of Natalia and Maryann, is that a CRT monitor in the background?

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