One of the pleasures of being a blogger is the occasional pleasant surprise in your mailbox. No, I don’t mean the goodies sent your way for review (I don’t review products on my blog), what I’m referring to is the bloggers, colleagues, friends and like-minded people who reach out over the web, react to my work, and introduce me to theirs.

That’s exactly how I met Miho Aikawa, a Japanese born documentary and fine art photographer now living in Brooklyn, NY. Miho is currently working on a photo project called "DINNER in NY" which portrays New Yorkers by capturing one moment in their day: Dinner time.

When Miho looked through her photographs, she found that many people ate dinner with a computer screen, phone or TV in their sight, and that got her thinking: Is it that people are too busy? Do they not care about dinner enough to give it their full attention? What is a quality dinner?

Looking for some background data Miho came across my post “Americans spend more time eating, mostly while distracted”, in which I cite a study in Public Health Nutrition that shows that eating as a primary activity declined in the past 30 years. On the other hand, eating as a secondary activity rose dramatically in the past 30 years. When combining the primary and secondary eating time we see that overall we’re spending, on average, 25 more minutes daily eating than we did 30 years ago, and we now do almost 50 percent of our eating while concentrating on something else.

I will be writing a foreword to Miho’s exhibition and Miho kindly let me share a few of her photos with you (go see the entire collection on Miho’s blog). The pictures speak for themselves, and tell a compelling story.

What do you read into them? What’s your dinner time like?

Dr. Ayala

Related post: The Family Dinner: A healthy ritual to look forward to daily 

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