The New Yorker:

Late dinner, sexy and recherché, has its acolytes. But, despite its connotations of denture-friendly fare and penny-pinching, early dinner is the most decadent meal there is.

By Lauren Collins 

Irecently read that Terry Gross thinks the best icebreaker is “Tell me about yourself.” With all due respect to Terry Gross, the best icebreaker is “What time do you eat dinner?”—a question so seemingly basic that a respondent is likely to use it as a prompt to talk about something else. Ask about dinnertime and you’ll end up hearing all about a person’s upbringing and her current family situation, her workload and her waistline, the intimate dynamics of her life. The when of a meal can be as important as the what. Each has its own rituals: weeknight dinner, weekend dinner, family dinner, gala dinner, Sunday dinner, birthday dinner, TV dinner, pre-theatre dinner, progressive dinner, pancake dinner, picnic dinner, winner winner chicken dinner. While we’re ranking things, the best dinner is early dinner.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans typically eat their evening meal between six and seven in the evening. It is called “dinner” or “supper,” depending on where one lives, and it hits the table slightly earlier in the dinner-centric regions. “The average time for dinners was 6:06 p.m. This varied from 5:31 p.m. in the Midwest to 6:21 in the West,” one analysis of the U.S.D.A.’s Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals explained. “The average time for suppers was 6:22 p.m. This ranged from 6:06 p.m. in the Northeast to 6:28 p.m. in the South.” (The survey was last completed in 1996, when dinner was often accompanied or followed by a suited man on the nightly telecast reading the day’s news aloud.) Mark Wahlberg claims to eat dinner at five-thirty—but he gets up at 2:30 a.m., to fit in a 3:40 a.m. workout and a seven-o’clock session in the cryo chamber. When I was growing up, in North Carolina, my mother occasionally took us to Quincy’s, a buffet restaurant with unlimited yeast rolls and an ice-cream-sundae bar, directly after school. Two hundred and seventy-seven of 11,212 respondents to the U.S.D.A. poll said they ate “all day long.”

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