A Good Square Meal
I always liked family dinners, with everybody heckling each other trying to top each other’s stories. In my house growing up, a food fight could break out at any time. I remember once I shot a green pea off my fork like a guided missile intended for my tattletale sister Betsy, but it went off track and stuck to my father's glasses. All hell broke loose.
That kinda thing is less common nowadays, and everybody's got a theory about how we wound up glued to these damn screens. You can point the finger at social media, smartphones or the internet, but according to Bob Greene, the trouble started a whole lot earlier than that.
Bob says you can trace it all back to that goddamn wobbly TV tray and the arrival of Swanson's TV dinners.
Yep, that was the beginning of the end of the family yabba-dabba-do around the dinner table. Instead of looking at each other, we started looking at the tube while we stuffed our faces. Hell, the Swanson's box even looked like a television screen.
Still, compared to today, the Swanson days seem pretty innocent. At least everybody was looking at the same screen. And I'll tell you something else, I always liked the turkey dinner. You could have Thanksgiving any night of the week—and you couldn’t argue with the price. Keep your dukes up.
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