Our family was in the market for a table. With young children, we immediately focused on function, durability and budget. My wife asked me to provide some suggestions for consideration. I understood that would be about where my decision power would end. I jumped on Facebook marketplace for some inspiration. A quick search input for “dinner table” returned 11 material categories from wood to stone to metal.

Browsing through the listing of pictures of dinner tables, I noticed so many were captured in kitchens and dining rooms across the country. I imagined the history of meals at each of these tables. I reflected on the dinner table I had growing up. That 35+ year old oval wood table absorbed the spills of toddlers, family game night, fist pounding family arguments and made 5 new kitchens feel like home. I had never thought deeply about the contribution of a table to the meal experience.

Origins – The Dining Table

Early Man – Cooking Calories

Early man did not eat around tables. I can imagine meals around a fire 790,000 years ago probably looked a lot like Naked and Afraid dining with roughly fashioned wood skewers. Fire and cooking allowed primitive man to take in calories more efficiently. As a species, cooking enabled us to shift energy to brain development versus spending the day chewing and foraging. Suddenly, we had free time. So, when did we start dining at tables? Turns out the origins of the dining table go back at least to 7th century BCE.

Early Table Design

Table shapes and materials were varied from the beginning based on resource availability and craftsmen skill. Egyptians used wood, Assyrians metal and Grecian tables of bronze. The dining space often dictated the table construction.The archaeological record points to Roman Triclinia as early examples of a dining space defined by carefully oriented movable couches. The room was a seasonal selection; al fresco scenic vistas for warmer occasions and cozy rooms for cooler occasions. Picture rich Romans lounging around on couches, lazily eating while they entertained themselves by maiming or killing their slaves. The tables were low so food and drinks could be easy reached from the couches.

Middle class Adoption

The Middle Ages brought the gradual shift from large tables for royal banquets to more intimate dining tables. As common Europeans started to adopt dining tables, limited home space left table seating to men while women and children sat on the floor or stood. By Elizabethan time, dining tables were commonly embraced in many parts of Europe. Carried over by the wealthy to America, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello was one of the first American homes with a specific dining room. This infiltrated to the American middle class and advancements in industrial processes brought new synthetic materials to table design.

Modern Table Designs

And today we see the blend of materials and great engineering into dining table design.

Dining Tables Losing Popularity

Thematically, we can see our dinner tables are strongly influenced by innovation in cooking processes, the space we are eating in driven by human connection and our financial means. These factors are driving a major transformation in the dining table that is underfoot today. As tables are getting better, we are using them less.

In most nations there is a strong growing middle class. In fact, there are now more people in the middle class than are poor. The middle class is busy, working >45hrs a week. Demand for convenience is high. Fortunately, we have seen a food tech explosion in technologies that offer convenience and abundance. We can have food made for us or delivered to us with a phone call or online order. And increasingly, this convenience is offered anywhere with GPS enabled food delivery. So, globally, the majority of people have some disposable income, are in a hurry and can get food wherever they want.

Human connection drove dining table design in the past. From grand gatherings to more intimate settings. Now, I argue technology is filling the gap for human connection at meal time. Enabled by convenience in food tech, we are eating with our TVs and phones versus other people. A recent survey shows eating on the couch grew 28% and in bed grew 11% as the primary eating space. Increasingly, we are eating in these spaces alone.

I don’t buy all the hype that eating alone is bad for you or that using technology while eating is always bad. Eating alone is bad if you’re finding yourself frequently wishing you weren’t alone. Technology is bad if you’re constantly phubbing friends. Try the nomophobia test. Eat a meal where ever you want with out using your phone. How do you feel? Be honest. Maybe we should put the phone down a little more?

Future of the Dining Table

Convenience in food technology will continue to advance. The middle class will continue to be busy, hopefully less with work and more with new activities. I can see these forces continuing to drive meals away from the traditional dining table concepts of the nuclear family. How can we reinvigorate the dining table for the modern human?

On Demand Food

Let’s embrace food on demand services and let the dining table be any space we want. We have the freedom to continue to build meal spaces around cool activities or great locations. Since transactions can be tied to GPS, one can imagine networks of providers servicing specific zones. Access to food variety in a space that is not necessarily tied to a building.

Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles will certainly increase meals in cars. Most concept cars include table spaces. Meals on the go without the danger of attempting to knee steer while reaching for french fries.

Virtual Dining Tables

Why not virtual dining? With the growth of eating alone from our couches and bedrooms, we can find the human connection in the virtual world. VR and AR offers paths to boost our meal experiences.

It is wild to think about how gathering around a meal served such a pivotal role in our evolution as a species. We can see from looking back, the intentional and creative space of the dining table provides a lens to culture and technology. If you think that human connection is core to our evolution and happiness, it is hard to imagine a better space than the dining table. No matter what the table of the future is, I hope we find a way to continue to incorporate human connection as part of it.

What serves as your most common dining table?

What are your ideas for the future of dining tables?

Author

Dan Kurdys is a dad that cooks at home for his wife and three daughters. Growing up, meals were a critical part of Dan’s learning and family bonding. He feels the struggle of balancing a full time job and preparing family meals that are convenient, on budget and healthy. He started his side hustle blog Meal Genome in 2018 to discover insights for better meal experiences. The approach is to use skills from career experience in corporate strategy, a MBA and a degree in Economics toward analytics of meal experiences.