Award-winning chef makes plea for families to cook, eat together

John Besh wants you to stop with the excuses and make dinner for your family.

And then he wants you all to sit down at your table and eat it. Together.

“We’re not eating at that family table any longer,” said Besh, and award-winning chef and author of My Family Table: A Passionate Plea for Home Cooking. “My worry is the further we get away from it, the more perilous our society becomes.”

In Besh’s book, he lays out strategies for how he, a working father who misses a lot of weekday dinners, cooks for his kids, but also plans dinners where they can all be together.

Besh said, at his house, Sunday is the day when they all plan to be together for dinner. But, instead of just cooking enough for Sunday, Besh throws in an extra roast, or chicken, or makes extra sides that can be eaten during the rest of the week, when he might not be able to be home to cook.

“The days of Mom staying at home and preparing everything and cleaning up after the children have long gone by. We need to get together as families and decide, you do this, you do that.”

At his house, everyone has a job. And those jobs extend all week long. But he admits he’s certainly less than perfect in making sure his family is cooking and eating together.

In fact, a big part of his book addresses just that.

“A third of this book would be my mea culpa for adding to the problem that plagues America,” Besh said. “We’re much more food concious today than ever, but we’re cooking a lot less for ourselves,” he said.