The sit-down dilemma

In the collective imagination, it is still the heart of the house.

Here, at the kitchen table, the family gathers to eat, to talk, to fill out admission forms, to learn to color in the lines, to tote up the taxes, to argue about curfews and car payments. Here small children watch their mothers bake cakes and snickerdoodles, here they practice their multiplication tables, glue sequins onto felt, make dioramas of West African villages that involve small twigs and many rubber bands.

Here the mothers sit in the midmorning of a school day, coffee cooling. They do crosswords or talk to other mothers while the clothes dryer thumps and the canned-citrus scent of furniture polish drifts in from the living room. Faintly luminous beneath a bowl of fruit, perhaps, or the matching salt and pepper shakers and napkin holder, the kitchen table is inevitably scarred by use -- ballpoint-penned tally marks and paring-knifed slashes score Formica; a galaxy of water rings, signature imprints and scorch marks scatters over oak or pine.

The kitchen table is still alive in the artistic vision and not always laced with the syrup of nostalgia. It’s where Scout Finch brings her plate and disgraced self in from the dining room, where Stanley Kowalski’s poker buddies bray with laughter when he gives Stella a swat as she passes, where Jack Nicholson grinds himself against flour and Jessica Lange in “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

Etymologically, the term “kitchen table” has become shorthand for home-grown integrity -- kitchen-table politics, kitchen-table publishing, kitchen-table research -- something not to be confused with the profit-driven, the marketed-to-death. Poet and essayist Audre Lorde named her publishing house Kitchen Table Press, a nod to a touchstone of modern feminism -- the place where, in the late ‘60s, suburban coffee klatches gave way to consciousness-raising.

The kitchen table remains in our speech, our books, our movies and our memories.

It just isn’t in our kitchens anymore.

Instead there are islands, there are eat-at countertops, there are -- among those redone kitchens that fill so many magazine pages -- long and lovely trestle tables, used more by designers to divide space than, say, by new parents looking to ensure intimate family dinners.

In the last 10 years, the American kitchen has undergone several transformations. It has been upgraded -- the eight-burner cooktop, the double oven, the Sub-Zero freezer. It has been extended -- traditional walls have been destroyed to create the “great room,” a combination kitchen-family room-dining room-office. And it has been invaded -- by televisions, by computer screens, by granite countertops and by 6-foot-high cabinetry. In all its new incarnations, the first thing to go is the traditional seats-five, six-in-a-pinch, kitchen table.

For years now, sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists have been pointing in horror to the disintegrating family dinner hour. “Yes, yes,” muttered working parents juggling junior soccer schedules and Spanish lessons. “Yes, we need more family time.” And so designers tried to make things easier, tried to accommodate all the various activities that take place in the kitchen.

The result is rooms that are more multipurpose and efficient. Yet some argue that without that small-but-sacred table, the kitchen may be bionic, but it isn’t quite human.

“There definitely seems to be a trend away from the kitchen table,” said David Kratzke, spokesman for the National Kitchen and Bath Assn. Instead, in the organization’s design competitions and in the work of its members, he usually sees kitchens that have a big island with an overhang to accommodate stools. The higher-end versions can include an island and a long trestle table often in lieu of a formal dining room. “Or there will be a workstation,” he said, “with a computer or a flat-screen TV that would compete with a kitchen table. Sometimes people will have a table attached to the island, but we don’t see as many free-standing kitchen tables, or dining rooms.”

In the year and a half since Boffi, a high-end kitchen design company, opened its Santa Monica showroom, not one single client has requested a stand-alone kitchen table.

Kratzke thinks the reason for this is fairly obvious. Kitchens are designed now for efficiency because everyone and everything is moving much faster.

“When I grew up, we still had dinner at the kitchen table with our siblings and our parents,” he said. “But you don’t see so much of that anymore.”

What you do see, though, is a whole lot more folks redoing their kitchens, and calling on designers to help. And the island, or the L-shaped counter with an overhang -- has become a bit of an industry standard. For a reason.

“The kitchen table was inconvenient,” says Don Silvers, a Los Angeles-based kitchen designer and author of “Kitchen Design With Cooking in Mind.” “It required something like 18 or 20 square feet that you were constantly walking around. It was only good for one thing.”

According to Silvers, who has taught cooking and kitchen design at UCLA for many years, the kitchen table has been slowly dematerializing since the 1950s, when tract homes built to greet returning GIs began adopting a standard triangle design -- the points being stove, refrigerator and sink. There was no space for a central kitchen table in this room and so it was either shoved against the free wall or confined to a semi-enclosed breakfast room.

Up until the 1980s, he said, kitchens were quite small. They were considered, by and large, the province of women, and strictly utility spaces. The foodie boom brought more men -- with their predilection for gadgetry and tools -- into the kitchen and made gourmet cooking a group activity. Bantering couples, who previously would have spent the pre-dinner hour sipping cocktails on the patio while the hostess slaved inside, now slice ginger for the sea bass and shake out organic arugula at her side.

The increasingly popular island, Silvers says, is a multitasker’s dream -- chat, read, cook, serve and eat all in one place. “The kitchen table was 30 inches high,” said Silver, making it an uncomfortable work surface. “The island is 36 inches, and that’s an important 6 inches.”

It is an important 6 inches, because it marks the difference between sitting and standing. Or perching on stools. Coming to the kitchen table required a physical commitment that an island or counter overhang does not. Chairs were pushed back, legs slid entirely under the table. People settled in, stayed awhile, whether eating a Salisbury steak or chatting over milky tea.

Dinner at an intimate table has a formality that dinner at a counter, or the end of a trestle table, does not; whether physically enclosed in a breakfast room or not, the kitchen table had a set of boundaries that defined the meal and the family.

“The meaning of the kitchen table in American culture is homeyness,” said Eugene Halton, co-author of “The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self.”

“It means family communion, a talk place as much as an eating place. I think of an image I saw once of some Frank Lloyd Wright chairs; their backs literally created a wall around the table, it was a separate space,” he said.

Many things in today’s culture threaten the long-hallowed dinner hour. Though most everyone agrees that eating at least one meal together strengthens any family or couple, statistics increasingly show fractured meals consumed in shifts. And even if everyone is physically present, the blare of the TV and bleat of the cell phone often make real conversation difficult.

“The kitchen has been colonized by the television, the telephone and fast food,” said Halton, who is also a professor of sociology and American studies at the University of Notre Dame. “People are giving up the social practice of family meals, and this is what the kitchen table is disappearing into.”

Kitchen islands, or even those trestle tables, can certainly fill some of the same social needs as the kitchen table, he said. The central eating table has morphed and morphed again over the ages -- it was part of a wall in some eras, folded up and put away after the meal in others. But people designing their kitchens for efficiency or aesthetics need to take the room’s social and emotional aspects into consideration.

“You wonder what are the rituals of politeness in these ‘great rooms,’ or at an island,” Halton said. “A kid can just get up and wander around where once he would have been told to ask to be excused. There is a micro-formality to the kitchen table that is important, especially to children.”

As director of UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families, Elinor Ochs has been studying how Americans live and eat for years and she believes that mealtimes are the most sustained way humans have of creating a group. The fluidity provided by the island-centric kitchen or the great room may be more efficient or casual, but intimate conversation requires intimate space.

“You need something that will bring people into face-to-face alignment,” she said. “And people need to sit when they eat. The closer they are physically, the more intimate the conversation tends to be.”

Without these regular face-to-face interactions, she said, the family becomes fragmented. “You don’t know who your kids are or who your spouse is. The fluidity is nice because it is less formal -- we don’t ring a bell to have dinner brought in. But while it’s possible to have a conversation while someone’s eating at the counter and someone’s working on the computer and someone else is on the phone, it is not going to be an intimate conversation.”

But formality, micro or not, may be just what the new kitchens are trying to get away from. Renee Behnke, president of Sur La Table, a kitchenware chain, fears more for the dining room table’s health than the kitchen table’s.

More people are eating in the kitchen than ever before, she said, although they are doing it in a more casual fashion. “They want more casual dishes, glassware, things that don’t chip in the dishwasher.” She sees fewer round kitchen tables and virtually none of the built-in booths her grandmother had, but a retro Formica-topped table the company featured in its catalog a few months back sold very well.

“I think the street-of-dreams kitchen absolutely does not have a table,” she said. “It has an island and that long trestle table. But the majority of houses do not have that kind of space. So you also have single moms who might have a tiny table that seats three, and the middle-class group where they’ve fixed up their kitchen. They might have an island but they also might have a small table.”

Everyone remembers some kitchen table, one where their father’s elbows had worn blind ovals in the cracked-ice Formica or where their grandmother and her friends put damp glasses of iced tea on little plastic-lace coasters while dealing bridge, or where at least one of six sisters wound up slipping the loathed lima beans out the nearby window.

Even UCLA’s Don Silvers, who doesn’t have a kitchen table, wouldn’t have a kitchen table, loses that classroom clarion ring when asked if he’s actually “anti-kitchen table.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m 73 years old. I remember my mother’s kitchen table, can see it right now, the oilcloth tablecloth. I remember brushing the crumbs onto the floor when she wasn’t looking and hoping she wouldn’t see.... The older you get,” he added, “you think what we had then was better than what we have now. And sometimes it was. In this case, it’s not.”