I am writing this to say that there are substantial benefits to making the dining table and kitchen the center of social life. This is especially the case for old married couples with empty nests, like my wife and I, together since 1980, 46 years. But maybe there are benefits also for younger families with children.
I am writing this because so many friends are stuck with traditional dining rooms with uncomfortable chairs that discourage sitting for long periods. And that have no home theater in the dining room to provide a huge variety of news, music, various kinds of drama from Netflix, YouTube documentaries, sports, etcetera along with excellent surround sound audio to enjoy music to.
Almost every night we — my wife and I, aged 75 and 82 respectively — spend usually about two to three hours together from about 9pm to 11:30pm, moving between the kitchen and dining table, doing food prep, eating, talking, discussing, washing up, watching news and a huge variety of other stuff on our 43 inch teevee, surrounded by gorgeous surround sound from 7 speakers and 1 subwoofer, that, acquired over the past forty years, would cost less than $3,000 in today’s money.
We are not lavish spenders. We drive an eight year old Subaru Forester and don’t spend a lot on transport or eating out.
To me, one of the great and relatively inexpensive benefits of life in America today, available to anyone with decent income, is having great audiovisual equipment and tremendous access to a giant variety of content through broadband. Greater access to great musical performance than any emperor or monarch prior to year 2000, in a huge number of genres, from Asia, Americas, Europe, Africa.
At the dining table my wife and I sit side by side about two feet apart, sitting on comfortable typist’s chairs, that are designed to allow humans to sit for eight hours a day, and swivel nicely so we can face each other so that I can comfortably rub my wife’s feet and legs, and she can do the same with mine. There are great benefits to this kind of proximity to your loved one.
The chairs were not expensive. Two of the chairs were given away by my wife’s office when they remodeled, two were purchased from a used office supply place, and two were acquired on Amazon. The dining table sits six people comfortably, eight squished together.
There is something about a large table — ours is 8 feet long and 38 inches wide — that facilitates discussion and cooperation and gives a great working surface. During dinner I usually have paper and pencil to make notes, and a laptop on the table to answer questions that arise when chatting with my wife — where is Cox’s Bazar? Is Paul McCartney still alive? What about Ravi Shankar? Comparing per capita medical costs in UK and USA.
Between the dining table and the kitchen we divide our time between food prep, eating while talking or watching teevee or stopping the teevee in order to talk — which is now greatly enabled by watching streaming teevee you can pause as long as you want -— , then washing up. My wife usually has about four ounces of Franzia box wine while eating, and after dinner has bout two ounces of brandy or rum or whisky. I typically have about four ounces of box wine drowned with 16 ounces of tap water and ice cubes, in a giant 20 ounce mug purchased for $1 at a Dollar Tree store — my doc keeps bugging me to hydrate more. A box of Franzia containing about 150 ounces of wine now costs about $22, so at 8 ounces of wine per night a box should last about 20 days. Or if we double our rate of consumption to 16 ounces per night, it would last about 10 days.
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UPDATE: Recent blood test reveals that my kidneys are in the danger zone with an eGFR between 45 and 60 -— pre diabetic. eGFR (Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate) is a key indicator used to assess kidney function. It estimates how well the kidneys filter waste from the blood. If eGFR is less than 15 it’s dialysis time.
To help my kidneys and general health I have recently abandoned wine and started drinking much more water.
To help avoid more muscle loss I’m going to the neighborhood YMCA to exercise with a fabulous range of machines, $35 a month and well worth it. To help avoid muscle loss you need adequate protein. But kidneys find many proteins hard to process and my doc has recommended a protein intake to below 80 grams per day. To measure protein intake I have been using a great piece of software called MyFatSecret, which allows me to very precisely enter what foods and drinks I consume, and gives a readout of protein, carbs, fats, total calories for each day.
To keep track of muscle change -— trying to avoid muscle loss — I have been using a $25 Etekcity “smart scale” that reports the following indicators when linked to my iPhone: Weight, Body mass index; Body fat; Subcutaneous fat; Metabolic age; Basic metabolic rate; Fat free body weight (pounds); Visceral fat (wraps around organs); Body water; Skeletal muscles; Muscle mass; Bone mass; Protein mass.
A highly qualified dietician friend working for Mayo Clinic Diet Plan advised me to use this “smart scale” saying that the best of the inexpensive smart scales are not as accurate at measuring levels of body metrics as the gold standard Dexascan devices used by medical labs, but are reasonably accurate in measuring trends, and will give me a pretty accurate picture of whether my muscle mass is decreasing, stabilized, or, hopefully, increasing in response to correct diet and exercise.
There’s a lot of stuff I still want to do.
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