Review of Dinner with Dad by Cameron Stracher

I was intrigued by the title and sure it would be on my reading list before I ever checked reviews or sales rankings for Dinner with Dad by Cameron Stracher. A lawyer, professor and author in New York, Stracher tells the story of his hurried life, saying:

As my salary increased, my appetite grew, until I needed every dollar I was making and lived from paycheck to paycheck. I was trapped in a cycle of my own making from which the chances of escape appeared dim. But I could stop the carousel if I wanted. I could get off.

The author is caught up like so many in chasing success and avoiding life but eventually promises to turn it all around. With his wife and two young children at home, he deeply desires to return not only to his family, but to his favorite pastime: cooking. The book is framed through the story of planning for, preparing and cooking dinner, and then sharing meals together at least five nights a week including weekends, for one year.

I thought he presented the experiment beautifully, even without possessing a basic appreciation for the Zen of cooking myself. I underlined several well-told lessons that I found intermittently woven throughout his story. He tells of the inescapable trade-off between family and work, later alluding to Eugene O’Kelly’s Chasing Daylight (another one that I’d recommend), and speaking of the inability to control the future or the outcome of one’s own dreams. He describes his role as father: “Who [my children] were what they would become, [was] a function of who and what I was and how I lived.”

At times the book takes long stretches to describe the process of preparing meals with detailed descriptions and list of ingredients that I’ve never heard of, and also at times feels like grandstanding for his recent noble efforts, sometimes minimizing his wife’s attempts to contribute to family meals, and making sure to describe the newfound admiration he receives from others. But if the reader shares Stracher’s passion for cooking and his promise to be a better family man, then the book might be a most inspiring.

Here’s the best excerpt for making the correlation between cooking and working:

Unlike my jobs, which nourish my family in their own way, putting a plate before my children is direct, visible, and tangible. The results are immediate and clear. Working is abstract and conceptual, while cooking is concrete and corporeal. Work takes me away; cooking brings me home. The former is necessary but not sufficient, the latter essential and primordial. One is absence, the other presence. On his deathbed, no one has ever prayed for more work. Plenty have died from hunger, however.