Table 6:

Additional Quotes About Family Meal Characteristics from the Family Matters study Stratified by Food Security Status

Theme and Sub-themes	Additional Quotes
Parent feeing practices
Rules about trying foods atfamily meals	[Their dad] would like them to eat everything on their plate. But I just ask people to try things and eat, like I’ll say, “Well, you have to eat a certain amount of bites of it.” Then I’m okay with it. That’s kind of my biggest thing. (Female, 42 y.o., FI) You have to try it before you leave it. And if you don’t eat everything you can’t get your dessert or nothing. (Female, 29 y.o., FS)
Rules about finish foods at family meals	They have to try everything I do. I’m really good at portioning them out, like I kind of know how much they eat, so I try not to put more on their plate than they’re going to eat. (Female, 41 y.o., FI) If they don’t eat enough, I would have them eat more. But if they eat too much, I wouldn’t have a concern. (Female, 24 y.o., FS)
Responding to picky eating	Whatever I cook, they eat. Sometimes if they say, “No, I don’t want it, I just need a sandwich,” then I made a sandwich. (Female, 37 y.o., FI) If they don’t like what I’m cooking that night, and they don’t want to eat that, that’s fine, they usually have the alternative to make a sandwich or noodles or something. (Female, 34 y.o., FS)
Making sure children eat at family meal	Is very important because I worry about them not to be hungry, so when I prepare it, is good to eat when it’s ready, instead of letting it sit and cold and make sure that they eat. (Female, 27 y.o., FI) I just want everybody to, you know, sit with me and want to see how they re eating, you know? If they’re cheating on their food, or they’re not eating their food, you know, if they really enjoying what they’re eating, so I can see what they like and what they don’t like, you know. (Female, 32 y.o., FS)
Making sure children don’t eat too much atfamily meals	If they’re eating too much, I’ll just say, “No more.” But I don’t think we have that problem. We do have that problem sometimes with sugar, like sweets or doughnuts, and I’ll be like, “No more. You’ve had your day.” (Female, 33 y.o., FI) And little Miss Thing over there, she can be a piggy some days, so she’ll go through a lot of food. And you know, me and her don’t always sit down and eat together, but usually if I’ll eat, she’ll eat. Sometimes I got to watch that because sometimes she eats a little bit too much. (Female, 42 y.o., FS)
Food served at family meals
More than half of family meals are takeout or pre- packaged	Well, sometimes mine are like, already made, you just got to pop them in the oven. (Female, 32 y.o., FI) Yeah, I think it’s more like quick-fix food, or you know, already prepped, and you just kind of you know. Some days it’s food that are just microwaveable. Really quick-fix food. (Female, 30 y.o., FS)
Challenges to having family meals
A shortage of money or food is a challenge to family meals	Just sometimes lack of money, you know. Um, we always can’t eat what we want. We don’t really have a lot of choices sometimes, you know. So, like I said, I’m just starting work, you know. I have a lot of mouths to feed because I have extra people in my house now, so there’s pretty much just financial situations, but that’d be the reason why, you know, we’ll have problems when we have to eat not what we wanted to. (Female, 30 y.o., FI) Yeah, cost is right now, it’s really struggling in my family, because my husband got cut hour and got cut raise and we don’t have really much income coming, but will not qualify for welfare too, so I try to tell my kids that we’re kind of poor right now. So we got rice, we have to have rice with meat, and we have to watch our portion, we cannot waste any food. So we’re kind of like watching our budget right now, what is cheaper that we can afford. So the kids understand that sometime they cannot have restaurant all the time, or what they have all the time, something expensive. So I want, at least I try to have them like have vegetable and meat sometime, grain, you know. (Female, 32 y.o., FS)
Families change purchasing habits in response to family meal challenges	I feel like I work around it, or else I’ll just substitute something, like the red bell pepper, I’ll get the green one because it’s a few cents cheaper. I mean, it’s not that big of a difference, but I feel that it really adds up. (Female, 24 yo., FI) Yeah, food shelves. I get my food stamps so that helps a lot. Sometimes friends, if we’re really down and out, I’ll ask a friend to you know buy us some groceries. Oh, we have a store down the block that, a little store, I’ve known the owner for a lot of years... he’ll let us get credit. So that really helps too when we need milk and stuff and bread. And I always come back with my food stamps or when I get paid from work, so that really, really helps a lot. (Female, 42 y.o., FS)
Families eat quickly in response to family meal challenges	If I’m late from work, if I come late from work, and I don’t have time to cook, I’m tired. I just order pizza. Or we go to Burger King driveway and get some food. (Female, 37 y.o., FI) [If we were too busy for a family meal], we would probably go grab something to eat so it would be faster. We’d probably eat it wherever is faster. If it was in the car, we’d probably eat in the car. (Female, 29 y.o., FS)
Adults role in the family meal	I do all of that because my kids are really little and my husband is usually at home. If I need help with something, I’ll ask but for the most part I’m capable. (Female, 28 y.o., FI) Yes, the children leave their plates on the table after meals.... Usually I do everything. (Female, 35 y.o., FI)