We’re thrilled to announce our latest venture: The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our 30-minute episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel will talk through tough topics related to family meals. Pull up a chair and grab a plate — we’re serving up real talk about family dinner! You can get caught up on older episodes here.
We talk a lot about the positive aspects of family meals, but in reality, eating dinner together isn’t always the safe, warm experience we want it to be. For many people, trauma is an unwelcome guest at the table. To find out why that might be, and how to make dinner feel safer, Bri and Annie talk with therapist, author, and trauma expert Dr. Marti Straus.
Marti begins by explaining that trauma is a response to stressful experiences, not a single event. She distinguishes between what she calls “Big T trauma” and “little t trauma,” or a specific very upsetting event (such as a car accident or assault) vs. a series of possibly less noticeable, repeated stressful events over time (such as bullying at school, neglect, often going hungry, etc). Marti stresses that these repeated “little t traumas” can add up to developmental trauma in children, which can then also be compounded by mealtimes where the caregiver who is supposed to provide for the child may be unpredictable, unreliable, or even dangerous.
Marti and Annie both agree, in their roles as therapists, that mealtimes can be especially complex for children with developmental trauma because of the mixed signals — the conflict between dinner as an inherently nurturing activity, and a parent or caregiver who is not behaving in nurturing ways. The stress of that situation, they say, can follow people into adulthood and make it difficult for parents with their own traumatic histories at dinner to create a safe and welcoming mealtime routine for their own kids. Both share examples and solutions from their own therapy practices with families to help make meals more comfortable and safe for everyone.
Bri also asks Marti for insight into how neurodivergence intersects with trauma at the table. Marti explains that often, the demands of family meals can be harmful or traumatic to a neurodivergent child who is being expected to behave in a more “typical” way. Lack of responsiveness to the child’s sensory and behavioral needs can cause developmental trauma. She explains how parents can envision the kind of relationship they want to nurture with their children at the table, and how to co-regulate for more positive meals.
The trio end on recommendations for food, fun, and conversation: Bri suggests a mac and cheese bar to make a familiar comfort food more interesting and varied for the whole family, while Marti offers a quick and easy activity to help transition to the table without anxiety. Annie finishes the episode by encouraging families to talk about what makes us feel comfortable and safe.
Episode Transcript:
Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to The Family Dinner Project podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa, content manager for The Family Dinner Project. And today, joining me, as always, is Dr. Anne Fishel, Executive Director.
Anne Fishel: Hello, great to be with you, Bri, as always.
Bri DeRosa: Great to see you, Annie. And we also today have a special guest in the studio with us. We frequently get messages and comments from people who have not had great family dinner experiences.
Or who are struggling with kids who really can’t access the family dinner experience in a positive and pleasant way for various reasons, and a lot of this has to do with trauma. So today we are bringing in someone who is an absolute expert in this. And we are going to talk a little bit about the origins of trauma, how it impacts family dinner, and what we can all do to make it better, hopefully.
So to that end, we are speaking with Dr. Marti Straus. And Annie, I know you and Marti go a ways back, so I’m going to let you do the introduction.
Anne Fishel: All right, thank you. Yeah, it is just wonderful to have you, Marti, who I will call you Marti, and I will say we are lifelong friends from meals shared in baby carriages to family dinners at our childhood with our childhood families and then with our own kids growing, as they were growing up. I’m going to say welcome back to The Family Dinner Project because I interviewed you for our welcoming table project and learn so much about the many ways that trauma can affect mealtime and your positive ideas about how to make things better. Well, we just wanted to invite you back in another modality, this one, to dig in deeper.
More formally, I wanna introduce you as well. Dr. Martha Straus is a professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at Antioch University, New England Graduate School in Keene, New Hampshire, and a part-time lecturer at the Smith College for Social Work in North Hampton, Massachusetts.
She’s the author of numerous articles, chapters, and seven books, including most recently Cool, Calm, and Connected: a workbook for parents and children to co regulate, manage big emotions, and build stronger bonds. And The Lost Art of Listening, the third edition: how learning to listen can improve relationships.
Welcome, Marti.
Marti Straus: Thank you so much. It’s a delight to be here.
Bri DeRosa: Well, we are absolutely delighted to have you. And I, I, I think the idea of Trauma around mealtimes, although it’s very real for a lot of people, for many of us, it’s a hard thing to conceptualize. Can we start by giving some examples or setting some definitions of what do we mean when we say that trauma is impacting dinner time?
And, and what are some situations in which that might show up?
Marti Straus: So I guess I want to begin just by talking about what we mean when we’re talking about trauma, you know, more generally, because It’s a widely used word these days, and people have different understandings when they say, oh, this is traumatic.
So I would like to begin and then talk about how it applies to mealtimes. Trauma isn’t an event. It’s a response to stressful experiences. And these are experiences that dramatically undermine our ability to cope. It’s important for us to understand that stress itself is not traumatic. In fact, some stress is positive.
Stress is tolerable if you have the right support and without that support, it can become toxic, and so that’s why when we’re talking about really stressful events or adverse experiences, we’re not talking about something that maybe everyone would be affected by in the same way, and some people can really bounce back because they have resources that other people don’t, don’t have. And so when we talk about child abuse neglect, which is often an underpinning of what makes mealtimes difficult– although not the only one– we are really discussing a phenomenon that it was, probably most people would find traumatic. But I have certainly worked with kids who were more traumatized by being taken away unexpectedly and terrifyingly and having all their worldly possessions thrown into a garbage bag and being taken off to live with strangers. So, Is it the child abuse and neglect that is the source of their trauma, or the terror of not knowing what’s going to happen next, or the compounding effects of both of those things?
The second thing is that when we talk about mealtimes as traumatic, we’re probably talking about developmental trauma or complex trauma, not PTSD, not a single event. And most of the traumatic exposure that happens to kids isn’t just one thing. For example, if a child is neglected, they might not get to school regularly and then they fall behind. Then they might get teased or bullied or be put in classes that are with kids who are similarly struggling and not have good models for how to handle themselves.
And they may be hungry a lot. They may have difficulty trusting people. It’s a cascading and compounding set of events. that define what is the trauma that they’re dealing with. And for these kids, the thing that’s particularly devastating, and I think that really distinguishes what we’re talking about today from single event trauma, is that the person who they need to protect and care for them, is tasked with that job, is the same person that might be scary and unreliable. And this makes developmental trauma really different from other kinds of trauma because it takes place in the context of the caregiving relationship and that also has direct implications for what happens when you sit down at a meal with somebody who is both putting food in front of you, which is care and nurture, and is also a source of potential source of danger.
Third thing before I get into the specific meal stuff is that we are making these days a big distinction between what we’re calling big T trauma and little T trauma. And when we, a lot of people talk about post traumatic stress and what causes it, they’re talking about maybe one terrible event, sexual assault, a car accident, the sudden death of a parent. I don’t think big T trauma is usually associated with mealtime struggles the same way, but with these daily compound and cascading events that might constitute little t traumas. Being bullied and teased. Being hungry all the time maybe the loss of a beloved pet who get, or a pet who gets sick, parents who fight constantly. I don’t know. There are things that are erosive and stressful, but that might not each in event itself be considered, wow, that’s definitely a traumatic thing that happened.
But we’re seeing now for kids that these kinds of cumulative events actually are harder to recover from than some awful thing that happens once. And so the way it affects development in every way, social development, physical, emotional, cognitive development is, it’s a, it has a much bigger impact on how children show up and take on new challenges and develop resilience to try again and learn how to be regulated and self soothed.
Bri DeRosa: This, this in my mind runs to something that we talk about frequently at The Family Dinner Project, which is the idea that Your family meals are only as beneficial as the environment, right?
So you can sit down at the table five nights a week, seven nights a week, but if those experiences are belittling and scary and upsetting, and there’s pressure, all these kinds of things that can really diminish the power of the family meal and turn it into an event that is Less good for you, right? And possibly even very harmful.
So, Annie, I know this is something that you frequently talk about in your work as a family therapist, and I’m wondering if you have thoughts that would piggyback onto what Marti is saying here about how that family mealtime environment can actually create these little T traumas or, or highlight these little T traumas.
Anne Fishel: One of the things I wanna pick up on is this idea of cross wires. Food is about intimacy and nurture. And when a, a child grows up in a family where food is also about, or the parent is also scary and unpredictable and inconsistent, those wires get crossed. And it’s a very complicated experience for kids to sort that out.
Can I trust my parent? Can I really relax at dinner? And I, I just wonder about specifically what you might see a child has been exposed to a parent or parents who are both a source of nurture, but also the source of needing to be.
Marti Straus: Imagine sitting down to dinner and not knowing what’s going to happen. That doesn’t sound relaxing. It doesn’t sound comforting, does it? So you’re sitting down for dinner next to a stressed or unpredictable or confusing caregiver who’s putting food in front of you But there’s a control fear factor happening at the same time. So, talk about a mixed message, right? So, one of the things that sometimes we see in children who communicate their anxiety and fear through behavior is not great behavior.
And they are acting out their anxiety, their stress response is kind of taking over because they’re getting these very confusing mixed messages about what’s supposed to happen. And one thing’s that, one of the things that these kids often do is it looks like a control struggle and they are, but my experience is they’re anticipating in their bodies that something bad could happen and it becomes intolerable, not knowing when something bad is going to happen.
And so they may, I’m not saying this is conscious and intentional and scheming in any way, but it is a survival response. It’s actually important to think of it that way, that they may instigate something so that they know that something’s going to happen and they can’t control what that is, but they can take some control over when it happens.
So they might I mean, it doesn’t sometimes with parents who are stressed out. It doesn’t really take a lot. They could say, I don’t like this, but it is a way of triggering the events that are going to happen anyway. And sometimes it’s two seconds into the dinner and sometimes it’s 15 minutes in, but something will happen and there will be this expected and almost predicted.
They’re making it predictable explosion from something that they don’t know what’s going to happen next. So that’s one kind of component part to the answer. The other is that they will do whatever whiny, nudgie, complaining, refusing, bad manner, they’ll do whatever sequence of things that communicates “I’m not feeling comfortable and happy here.”
And, you know, so I tell parents don’t take it personally. It’s really hard not to take it personally. But. They’re communicating something deep that’s happening through their behavior. And so it’s not a personal attack. It’s a way of communicating distress that their bodies are leading the way with.
Anne Fishel: I know you have some ideas about what would be needed, what would be helpful in these kinds of situations.
Marti Straus: Well, I think regulation begins with adults. We have a much better chance to act like adults than they do. And by that I mean to be in our thinking mind and not be in a reactive place, to be in a more reflective and responsive place than just to go into reactive mode. And I see our job As co regulators, that that’s really our primary job as parents at the table and away from the table.
And so we set, we set the tone and because affect is contagious. So, if someone is upset and angry, it’s very easy for us to feel it in our bodies and get upset and angry. But so is regulation and calm contagious. And so I work with parents more than kids, honestly, on this. topic, which is that if you can develop strategies yourself for going into the meal in a relatively calm place, you have a much better chance of success.
I mean, I can’t think of a single instance when one of my kids was freaking out about something and I freaked out too, and that made it better. But the corollary is if you stay calm, you can diffuse a lot of things. And it’s a, it is sort of a secret empathic weapon that if you can stay sort of in a self compassionate and compassionate for the child place, your chances of turning the event around or slowing it down at least, or at least not escalating it are tremendously greater.
So I would say my first response to that is how do we help parents re- parent themselves by providing experiences at the table for their child that they didn’t have themselves. I have actually a wonderful example from a pretty recent case, I, I, a woman I was treating who had a very challenging, pretty neurodivergent, quirky son.
And she had come from extremely strict and demanding parents who weren’t that warm, who had many food issues. Including the whole clean plate club thing. And so they served liver for dinner, and she refused to eat the liver for dinner because what child in their right mind would agree to do that. In any event, there was a rule in the family that you couldn’t, you were not allowed to get up from the table until you completed the task.
I mean, there’s an awful demand. So she is sitting, she tells me the story of sitting for hours and hours, I don’t know how long it was, it was all evening, and finally her mother let her go to bed. And then the next morning, there was cold liver for breakfast, so awful, right? And so she had this kid who literally, I mean literally, only ate nuggets and Cheerios.
That was his whole diet and they were in a food wrangle all the time. And so my example is I worked with her to let go of that legacy trauma that she was carrying around meals and to ask her sort of through values and vision for herself of who she wanted to be as a parent and what she wanted to recreate that would be different. And we spent time talking about it, and working with him also to expand his repertoire a little bit. It’s easier to get a sensorily defensive child to expand their repertoire if there isn’t a big control battle going on and so much anxiety around food and how much you consume and what order you do it in and you have to have all the food groups or I don’t know what happens.
So that’s an example.
Bri DeRosa: That’s a great example. I mean, there’s so much in your response there, Marti. What I really picked up on when you were talking was this idea of the trauma is not just for the kids. It is long lasting. It follows us into our adulthoods. And then we have this task, Potentially having to really re pattern our behaviors and the way that we even think about and approach family meals with our own children, but the modeling has not been there.
And so, I’m kind of wanting both of you, maybe, to weigh in, whoever wants to chime in first, on how do you even start? With trying to create a family meal structure and a routine and a ritual that feels positive and is nurturing of both you and your children, if you have had zero modeling around what that type of environment looks like?
Marti Straus: I was thinking about this idea of food as comfort and that if sometimes people turn to food when human relationships are not as reliable and predictable, that favorite foods or that soothing foods or the way people use food to feed their emotional needs in lieu of having reliable human beings do it.
And so one of the things I was imagining when, when you were asking that question, Bri, was having adults Take time to savor something and getting people back into relationship to the pleasure element of it. That, so one of the body legacies, biological legacies of traumatic exposure for children is a disconnection from their bodies and their physical sensations, and we survive. It’s another amazing survival. If your body is being assaulted, it’s a very clever thing to disconnect from that pain.
But then when you’re being given nurture through food, you might not know if you’re hungry. You might want to eat as quickly as you can to get the heck out of there. You might hoard food because if you have deprivation, there might not be enough. And so our relationship to our bodies and to the pleasure of nurturing and feeding our bodies gets all thrown off. And so that would be a, It’s sort of a repair process with the adult, so that they first even know what it is they’re aiming for.
I say this about regulation in general. It’s very hard to co regulate with somebody if you don’t know what it feels like to be regulated in the first place yourself.
Anne Fishel: Love that, those ideas, Marti. I had much more sort of mundane response to that, which is that when I work with parents who’ve had trauma and really can’t imagine, initially, imagine a pleasurable family experience with their kids.
They can go through the motions. They can cook the meal and bring it to the table, but they don’t even want to sit down for fear they’re going to communicate how their own legacy of their childhood dinners. With them, I’ll start with some of the aspects that don’t have to do with food. I’ll start with Are there other sensory elements of the dinner, like lighting candles or playing music, that you could lean into and make kind of the food secondary, as you imagine the kind of family meal that you want to have with your kids?
Or do you want to kind of lean into playing some games at the table with your kids and not, again, not focus so much on food and just try to remember not to make your kids eat anything, you know, can you just focus on that, you know, let’s forget about the clean plate club that you were raised with just make a food that your kids will probably like and try not to talk about it very much and focus on some other things.
So that’s, that’s sort of the the way that I think about working with parents.
Marti Straus: Annie, I have a question for you about the table itself. Why do we have to sit at the table?
Anne Fishel: We don’t. I mean, that, I think that’s a really easy visual, physical thing to do differently. So if the table was the place that has so many terrible memories, let’s picnic on the floor.
Spread out a blanket on the kitchen floor or the dining room floor and have meals there or sit on the comfy couch or chair. Let your kids recline and have some ease in their bodies.
Bri DeRosa: I think what I, what I’m hearing is the importance of agency, really, in all of this. And that’s, that’s one thing that I think we don’t maybe talk about enough, is how do you allow the whole family To feel a sense of agency and autonomy during mealtimes, even though there may be some sort of you know, routine ritual and expectation, right?
So, which we should point out routine and ritual and expectation can also be very grounding and calming if done properly. And if people are ready for it, and if your nervous systems are are aligned. I think in terms of of trying to allow for that agency, one place that I think we really fall short as parents at large is in this food piece.
Marti, you said something about your client’s child being extremely neurodivergent and having a very limited diet of nuggets and Cheerios. And I think with many kids, but particularly our neurodivergent kids, that sense of agency and autonomy around the actual eating. It’s a place where we really sometimes run into trouble.
So I wonder if we can maybe turn, turn a little bit towards that and talk about there is a lot of overlap between neurodivergence and mealtime trauma. Can we make that connection a little bit more strongly for our listeners?
Marti Straus: Yes, I have, I have a couple things to say about that. I think in terms of the agency piece, I think I want to piggyback 1st on on that with you, which has to do with how much this is a collaboration.
So thinking about asking the child where they would feel safe and comfortable sitting or eating or what the foods are or engaging them in the preparation and in the menu planning and the DJing or the setting the ambiance for the meal, you know, that the more they’re engaged, that’s agency. The thing, and I don’t know if I’ve said this, but I want to say it again, even if I did.
The thing that makes an event that is stressful, potentially traumatic, is how unexpected it is, and it is the degree, the element of surprise that gets us. And it gets all of us, but it gets people who have had too much bad surprise in their lives even more, so that for children who, and I think this is true for people in general, who need predictability and consistency to feel safe. Whether it’s because they benefit from routine and ritual because of the way their brain is organized or because of traumatic exposure, it doesn’t, I agree with you, it doesn’t matter as much as having a really clear sense of what’s going to happen next.
And whether they’re involved in planning it, so they know what’s going to happen next, or someone says to them, this is what is happening. This is what we’re going to do. This is what’s going to happen. It might even help for the parents who are trying to organize something while being a little bit activated themselves that will all just take a deep breath and say, This is what’s gonna happen.
Bri DeRosa: What are the ways in which neurodivergence might actually either cause or exacerbate table trauma? And, and what can we kind of do to mitigate that?
Marti Straus: So, we didn’t talk about ACEs, which are adverse childhood experiences. And the reason I’m bringing it up now is that if we had aces for neurodivergent kids, the list would be different and those are adverse experiences for them that might not be considered adverse for neurotypical people, for example.
Some kids need to have self stim rocking, holding something in their hands that they want to take with them as a transitional object they might want to tap or do some kind of rhythmic something that is not permissible at a neurotypical table. And the expectations for behaving in a particular way are traumatic for them.
I’m gonna, and there’s research supporting this now, so that certain kinds of expectations for managing transitions, for performing in a certain sequence them thinking of kids who don’t want their food touching. I mean, there’s all kinds of things that, that demanding of them to function in our world is additional, is an additional source of traumatic stress for them. And so when we’re thinking about meal times for these kids, it isn’t. It might also be all of the aspects that we’ve been talking about with kids with traumatic exposure. And in addition, or maybe instead of. It will be maybe some of the demand for them to not need what they need to feel comfortable.
I, you know, take off your headphones or I don’t know, whatever the, whatever the need from the adults or the family is to, to behave in a less neurodivergent way can be traumatic for them. That, just that that set of expectations for performance.
Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s a really valuable point that it, you know, it’s not so much about the child as it is about our expectations of the child, right? What we, what we think they should do does not match what they are able to do comfortably, and that we really need to be examining that.
We do always finish our podcasts on food, fun, and conversation, because those are the cornerstones of The Family Dinner Project and of a hopefully non traumatic family meal. For food today, one of the things that we’ve touched on is the idea of kind of safety and comfort and pleasurability. And, so, one recommendation I have for parents is a way to make a safe food for many kids, a little bit more exciting for the family.
So you might do a macaroni and cheese bar where you can make it whatever mac and cheese your kid likes. If it’s Kraft from the box, that’s great. If you’ve got some instant pot thing or easy stove top thing, that’s fantastic. Whatever your child’s preferred comforting mac and cheese is, you can serve that for dinner. Make them happy and comfortable, no guilt, but then you can have some interesting things to go on top of it or alongside it that others can add, right?
So you might mix in some broccoli or you might mix in some chili crisp for the adults or you might have bacon bits or little pieces of tomato or some little bits of grilled chicken. You can do lots and lots of different ideas and if you put everything out separately on the table and let everybody make their own plate, That provides the agency piece, it provides the comfort piece, the pleasurability piece, and then everybody’s happy.
So that’s my, my food recommendation for today, to keep dinner comforting and safe for everyone. Marti! What do you have for, for families for an activity or an idea around fun?
Marti Straus: Well, I think, I love the make it yourself, the sort of the buffet style where you assemble your own meal. I think that meets a lot of the topics that we’ve covered today actually in terms of agency and creativity and it takes the pressure off.
So you’re serving yourself what you want. It’s pretty empowering. I think that what I’m adding on here is the anticipation of the food buffet and how we set the stage for success, not just in saying this is what we’re going to be doing, but what is something that people can do to come to the table regulated and co regulated and have the transition because this is, in fact, another Thing that neurodivergent children and children with traumatic exposure also have in common, which is they don’t transition very well.
So I think that coming up with a transitional activity, so we’re going to go to dinner in a minute. Let’s just take a minute and take a deep breath and look around and name three things we see, two things we hear and one thing we’re looking forward to tasting.
Anne Fishel: That’s so nice. I love that as a transition.
Yeah, it’s so much nicer than, okay, come on, let’s wash our hands and, you know. Get away from the computer and you know
Bri DeRosa: I’m laughing because in my house we have a a thing where when I’m done in the kitchen And food is ready, I sort of yell out “all right, people!” And every night when I do that one of our dogs goes completely insane and barks her face off. And it makes for this incredibly chaotic transition to the table. But if I try not to go All right, people, and I try to find a calmer way to get to the table, my teenagers freak out, and they’re like, Come on, mom, you didn’t say the cue words. Like, they like this weird, chaotic, barking dog tripping over each way of getting to the table, and it’s like the opposite of this co regulated thing.
Marti Straus: No, no, I, I, can I challenge, I want to challenge that. Actually, you’ve just given a perfect example of what I’ve been trying to say more abstractly, which is the ritual and predictability of it. These are kids who are teenagers being called to the dinner table as they are every night. These are, you know, this is not food trauma, but what they love is that this is the way it works. This is, this is the call to the table is the same. And the dog loves it too.
Bri DeRosa: Thank you for that. I’m gonna, I’m gonna feel so much better about screaming all right people from the kitchen.
Marti Straus: If, if that’s your jam, don’t stop it.
Bri DeRosa: I love it. All right. And so, Annie, finish us off here with some conversation. What do we, what do we want to be talking about? What, what’s in your mind as you think about conversation and family dinner and everything that we’ve talked about?
Anne Fishel: So, here’s my question. What song or place or food or smell makes you feel calm and comfortable in your own skin? I think it would be help, it would be interesting for parents to answer that themselves and to hear what their kids say and for the kids to hear what their parents say about that. It may, it might expand the repertoire of what might be calming.
Marti Straus: And it’s a, it’s meal adjacent which is, which is this idea of relationship as a potential source of safety and comfort also. And so you’re identifying ways that without relationship to other people. That we might experience comfort and I was wondering, maybe to expand it, not necessarily at the table, but to have people talk about when they are safe with another human being, what do they notice? I mean, what is happening in that relationship that they’re identifying? How do you know when you walk into a room or you’re in a conversation with somebody that you feel safe and that you’re going to be okay?
And that’s, I think, adults who have their own legacy need to be able to envision that and name it because they’ll, they’ll often say something like, well, it’s the person’s really calm and they listen to me and they don’t judge me. And all the things they’re talking about, I’m like, yeah. And if you could do that, you know, I don’t say this, but I’m thinking if you could do this at dinner, your dinner would be a lot better.
Not, you know, your child would appreciate that too. So to begin, so maybe to what Annie’s saying, and then add on kind of relational kind of questions about what is it? How do you know? How do you know when you’re okay in your body?
Anne Fishel: And once you know, how can you replicate that for your own children? Yeah.
Marti Straus: Or for yourself.
Bri DeRosa: That is so wise, and thank you both for those fantastic questions. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here today. It’s been such a pleasure and I’ve learned so much.
Marti Straus: Thank you, it’s been a lot of fun.
Bri DeRosa: Thank you, Annie, as always. Always a joy to have you on and really fun to have you and Marti To talk and play off of each other and enrich each other that’s, that’s been a delight as well.
Anne Fishel: It’s been so much fun. I always learn so much and have such a good time with Marti from all these decades.
Bri DeRosa: I’m gonna wrap it up now and say to our listeners, That if you have other questions or are, are wondering about trauma or neurodivergence at the table, I always recommend that you go to our website and search up the welcoming table where we have lots and lots of articles and videos and resources around these topics. And we’re always adding to them.
So thanks for listening. And we hope that we will have you back another time on The Family Dinner Project podcast.