How many times a week do you get to sit down to a nice family meal nowadays? Once, maybe twice a week? How many times can you say that you've been able to sit at the dinner table for longer than half an hour and strike up a good-natured, warm-hearted comversation with beloved family members and not have to worry about one or all of them rushing off two seconds after completing a meal? If you anwered with a bigger number than two, perhaps even three, consider yourself one of the blessed few.

Fast food, pre-prepared food, and just the general nature of today's living - rush, rush, rush - has caused a serious decline in both the health and communication within families today. Too often, a family will sit for only five minutes, never together, so that they can dine on the pre-packaged, pre-cooked, pre-boxed, swill that is stamped Stouffer's, Swanson's, and, the all-time irony, "Healthy Choice". In reality, it is all the same thing: a sticky, slimy, steak-like substance covered in saturated pig fat masquerading as gravy .

The chances of hearing "home-cooked" and "meal" in the same sentence today are almost as rare as the pre-cooked chicken sitting in a cardboard bucket somewhere waiting to give some poor unsuspecting soul salmonella. "Fast food", "meal-on-the-go", and "quick-bite", are all phrases that have replaced "dinnertime", "setting the table", and "Mom's slow-cooked baked beans." People have become so concerned with convenience that health and family time have been beaten to death by the club of laziness.

Think back to the stories told during days not so long ago when Mom would spend hours in the kitchen snapping beans, washing fruit, and kneading dough. The smells of fresh-made biscuits, ham drenched in honey, and fresh-baked apple pie with cinnamon would roll through the house in waves.

The sounds of the kids washing their hands and faces would echo down the stairs, as if coming from atop a mountain, until the avalanche sounds of the rugrats coming downstairs would rumble through Mom's kitchen. The metallic rattle of the clutter inside the silverware drawer would unfurl, and Mom knew the table was being set.

Dad would come through the door at the same time every night, smelling of dirt, grease, and dried sweat. Mom would, of course, kiss him anyway. After he cleaned up, they would all gather around the table as Mom set out a mouth-watering feast fit for even the harshest king.

Everyone would sit down together, say grace, and pass around

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