Did You Know? – Supper vs. Dinner

Some people call their evening meal dinner, while others refer to this meal as supper. It is often assumed that the difference is attributed to whether you are from the North or the South. But that in’t the whole story.

Whether you’re accustomed to calling your evening meal supper or dinner is not just about whether you live in the northern states or the southern ones.

“Supper vs. Dinner”

As it turns out, it doesn’t matter where you live. When people all over the country lived more rurally and worked their farms, they ate their main meal midday as the early morning start to the day, and hard physical labor, made them really hungry by noon. And back then they called it dinner no matter where you were from. Children often came home from school and the family all ate together at that noon meal. The men were generally in the fields and the women were tending the kitchen gardens, doing laundry by hand, scrubbing and cleaning and mending or sewing so after a hard days work for everyone they had a lighter, easier to prepare meal at the end of the day and called it supper. When people began moving into cities and working in businesses rather than the fields they couldn’t leave their jobs to go home and eat at noon and children had to stay at school, so people began taking food with them to eat where they were, either at school or their jobs, by way of boxed meals they made at home and brought with them and the name lunch came into practice. So then the main meal, dinner, became what the family ate together in the evening.  

Some people think it’s a southern thing to call the midday meal dinner and the evening meal supper, but that’s because while northerners left the farms and moved into cities sooner, southerners were still working farms and living in rural areas much longer than those in the north. The practice of eating the main meal at midday remained as did the names they gave to those meals. 

As is true of many things, no matter where someone has grown up the names they call something by…supper or dinner in this case…is heavily influenced by whatever their families of origin called them. So while someone may never have been to a rural farm much less grown up on one, if your grandparents or parents called the midday meal dinner and the evening meal supper, those names may have stuck and been passed down to children and grandchildren and even great grandchildren. Also because it was common as recently as a generation ago for families to have their main meal on Sundays upon returning from church, the term “Sunday dinner” which is typically eaten around noon, has lingered. Even people who have never used the term supper, or who don’t ever attend church, will still often call a main family meal eaten on Sunday, “Sunday dinner” no matter what time of the day it is served.

So now you know. To us the greater interest in this story or explanation is the value in days gone by for families to find time to gather together around the table for a common meal and conversation. What you call that meal is far less important than the value of making time for one with those you love. Whether it is supper or dinner or even lunch, brunch, or breakfast, make a point to sit down soon to eat and enjoy the company of those you hold dear. We think you and those you love will see the value in it too.