Trapped at the Dinner Table

Dinner will be appreciated at this table, unlike Calvin.

Wasting food is not only childish and selfish, it is unpatriotic. Think of your poor father off in some strange land. Maybe he didn't have enough to eat tonight. And you turn up your nose at fresh turnips. You will not leave this table until those turnips are gone. Completely.

— Mrs. Gilford, Meet Molly

It's dinnertime at Alice's house, but there's one particular food on her plate she just won't eat, no matter what (and it's almost always some sort of vegetable). Even after her parents have tried extolling the health benefits of said food, gone on a tangent about starving children in some far-off country, and/or mentioned how hard one or both of them work to put food on the table, she still won't eat it. So they pull out the big guns: she can't leave the table until she cleans her plate (or takes a single bite of the hated foodstuff, depending on how lenient her parents are).

And so the battle of wills begins. Alice stubbornly sits at the table for hours upon hours, sometimes past midnight—lonely and bored, but unwilling to put even a single bite of the food in her mouth, staring it down as it gradually gets colder and more unappetizing. This lasts until one party gives up: either Alice decides to choke down her dinner, or her parents finally let her go to bed.

While this trope is frequently Played for Laughs, it can also be Played for Drama if the parents are really unreasonable and/or forceful about making their child clean their plate, so much that it crosses the line from discipline into abuse—for example, Force Feeding them or not allowing them to eat anything else for several days.

In Real Life, this type of punishment is starting to fall out of use, as parents have realized it's not a good way to get children to not be picky eaters, given that they can be notoriously stubborn and will end up sitting at the table for hours rather than eat something they hate. In the worst-case scenarios, it can cause them to grow up to have a poor relationship with food. Instead, other methods for getting children to try healthy but bad-tasting food are becoming more popular, such as cooking them differently or hiding them inside better-tasting foods.

Has nothing at all to do with Mummies at the Dinner Table.

Related tropes:

• Abusive Parents: As noted above, parents who use brutal methods to make children eat all their food may dip into this territory.
• Discreet Dining Disposal: One way to get rid of the hated foodstuff without eating it. (May or may not actually work.)
• Does Not Like Spam: Someone hates a particular food so much that in some cases, they'd rather sit at the dinner table for hours than eat it.
• Dreaded Kids' Table: Another trope about a kid disliking sitting at a dinner table.
• Force Feeding: Another way to make someone eat when they don't want to.
• Greens Precede Sweets: A child can't have dessert without finishing their vegetables first.
• Kids Hate Vegetables: The detested food keeping the child stuck at the table is nearly always a vegetable, although it can be some other Stock "Yuck!" like liver or meatloaf.
• Picky Eater: A child unwilling to eat their dinner may get punished with this.
• Radish Cure: Another punishment that involves forced consumption of something.
• Stock "Yuck!": Foods that a lot of people hate.

Contrast:

• Denied Food as Punishment: Being denied food instead of forced to eat food.
• Trojan Veggies: A gentler approach to getting kids to eat their vegetables—that is, hiding them in a different food.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In more than one Crayon Shin-chan chapter, Misae and Hiroshi sit on Shin-Chan's left and right side and forbid him to leave until he finishes all his bell peppers.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: In one strip, we see how much work it takes for Calvin's mom to make dinner. Calvin takes one look at the dish, declares it absolutely putrid, and refuses to touch it. The last panel shows him still sitting at the table late into the night.
• For Better or for Worse: In one strip, a young Elizabeth isn't allowed to leave the dinner table until she's finished her peas. She tries to hide them by putting them under her plate.
• FoxTrot: In one strip, Peter's mom, Andy, makes him sit at the dinner table until he finishes his tofu casserole. Peter stubbornly ends up staying there until 4 AM, insisting that he still won't try the tofu casserole... but in the next strip, he tries a little and begrudgingly admits that he actually likes it.

Films — Live-Action

• A macabre example in Dread. Cheryl can't stand the taste or smell of meat because her father worked at a meat-packing plant and his clothes would always smell like it when he molested her. Quaid, a psychopath studying people's worst fears, locks her in a room with a well-cooked steak and refuses to let her out until she eats all of it. After about a week, she finally eats it in desperation, even though it's gone rotten.

Literature

• American Girls Collection: In Meet Molly, when Molly doesn't eat her mashed turnips at dinner, the family housekeeper Mrs. Gilford scolds her for wasting food during wartime and refuses to let her leave the table until she finishes them. She ends up sitting at the table for nearly three hours, but when her mother comes home from work, she is more understanding about the situation and adds sugar, cinnamon, and butter to the turnips to make them taste better. She also tells Molly a story from her own childhood, when her mother wouldn't let her leave the table until she'd finished her dinner of sardines on toast, so she secretly wrapped the sardines in a napkin and put them in her pocket. (Later, the family's cats smelled the sardines, pulled them out of her pocket, and ate them all.)
• Dear Dumb Diary: At Jamie's school, Thursday is always Meat Loaf Day in the cafeteria. The meatloaf is so disgusting that nobody ever wants it, but Miss Bruntford, the cafeteria monitor, is always scolding the students for not eating it. One time, she gets so fed up that she announces that nobody's allowed to leave the cafeteria until they've finished the meatloaf. Somebody throws a hunk of meatloaf at her, and she furiously starts demanding to know who did it. Since Jamie is trying to get into the principal's office to steal Angeline's permanent record, she claims to have done it.
• Mommie Dearest: Joan Crawford has black market meat at her dinner table, served rare and bloody. Her daughter Christina refuses to eat it, claiming it looks raw. Joan tells her she won't be getting off the table until she eats it. Eventually, Christina is allowed to put her plate in the fridge...only to find it in front of her for the next meal. This lasts for three days.
• Portnoy's Complaint: Alexander Portnoy, on the analyst's couch, recalls how his mother Sophie wouldn't take no for an answer when it came to finishing his dinner. Once she even pulled a knife on him in order to make him comply.
• At the beginning of Small Persons with Wings, five-year-old Mellie's parents won't let her leave the table until she eats her squash. Fidius enchants it to look like candy corn. Mellie gulps it down, realizing too late that it still tastes and feels like squash.

Live-Action TV

• Everybody Hates Chris: In the episode "Everybody Hates Sausage", the titular B-Plot involves Julius buying a huge crate of sausage and both him and Rochelle forcing the rest of the family to eat sausage on all meals, a thing that leads to Tonya rebelling. Among other methods to force her to eat sausage, Rochelle makes Tonya stay at the table — and the scene does a Time Skip to three in the morning, Tonya still sitting there and everybody else is asleep, but Rochelle is enough of a light sleeper that when Tonya tries to move away she yells, "You are going to eat that sausage if you wish to sleep, young lady!" from her room.
• Supernanny: In "The Van Acker Family", three-year-old Dylan is anemic due in part to being a picky eater. When Jo helps Kevin and Jessica enforce discipline, they serve him a dinner of chicken and peas because they are rich in iron, and refuse to let him leave the table until he eats four pieces of chicken and two peas. Dylan throws a huge fit and makes excuses to avoid having to eat his dinner.

Music

• The Sandra Boynton song "O Lonely Peas" is a silly food song sung by a hippo child to the peas on his plate, which he hates but his parents insist he eat.

Poetry

• In the poem "Summer Squash" by Donald Graves, the narrator is forced to sit at the table until he eats a bite of summer squash (described as "the kind of squash with yellow warts, seeds and white guts" and a "watery mash with seeds and strings"), while his brother gleefully eats his entire portion just to rub his punishment in his face. His mom wants to finish the dishes and forces him to have a bite, so he holds it in his mouth until she leaves and spits it out. Finally, he tries to get rid of it by feeding it to his dog, but even she doesn't like it.

Web Video

• Jimquisition: In "You Didn't Finish The Game", Jim recounts how the one time their asshole stepfather tried to make them eat liver and onions, they sat at the table all night rather than eat it. After their mother had a long chat with him, the family never had liver and onions again. This segues into the episode proper, wherein they argue that being forced to play an entire game that clearly sucks (and you can tell 5 minutes in that it's garbage) in order to validate your criticism of it is just as asinine as forcing someone to sit there until they've eaten their liver and onions.
• SuperMarioLogan: A variant in "Uh-oh SpaghettiOs!"; Chef Pee Pee serves Bowser Junior SpaghettiOs for dinner, and although Junior enjoys eating them, he wants to eat them in his bedroom, just like his father. However, Bowser disapproves of this idea and threatens to beat Junior up if he catches him eating his dinner in his bedroom. He also gets Chef Pee Pee to ensure that Junior does not leave the table, and Chef Pee Pee threatens to tell Bowser if Junior leaves the table without finishing his dinner. To get around this, Junior makes a decoy of himself with his dinner from paper and crayons, which leaves Chef Pee Pee fooled for the rest of the video.

Western Animation

• Big City Greens has a variation. In the episode "Tilly Style", Bill ends up growing too much zucchini, so he makes Cricket eat a bunch of it so that it doesn't go to waste. One day, Cricket ends up getting fed up with the zucchini and refuses to eat it. However, Bill makes him, and tells him that he can't leave his chair until he eats it. However, Cricket interprets this the wrong way, and ends up taking the chair with him wherever he goes.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends:
  • A variation in the episode "Dinner Is Swerved", where Mr. Herriman won't let anyone eat until Bloo and Mac (who are currently lost in the home's labyrinthian hallways) are seated. As the wait gets longer, Madame Foster sneaks food to the other friends from beneath the table, and by the time Bloo and Mac arrive, everyone else is already full.
  • In "Crime After Crime", Bloo finds out that Frankie is making "it", a dish that he describes as vomit, so he tries to get sent to bed without supper on purpose. Because Bloo is a moderate Jerkass, he Can't Get in Trouble for Nuthin' and, thanks in part to Mr. Herriman trying to cover up his carrot addiction, he manages to get everyone except Bloo sent to their room without supper. Frankie takes particular delight in dumping the entire bowl of "it" onto Bloo's plate since he's the only one who hasn't "gotten in trouble." During the closing credits, Frankie brings Bloo more of "it" to punish him for all the things he did to try to get in trouble, including filling the hallway with banana peels and spraying condiments on the couch.
• Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids: In "The Spaghetti Man", a boy named Timothy King is always throwing fits at the dinner table and refuses to eat his meals. One day Timothy's mother has finally enough of his bad behavior and refusing to eat his toast so she makes him stay at the dinner table until he has eaten it.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Beat Your Greens", when the Girls are refusing to eat their broccoli, the Professor states that they won't be allowed to leave the table until they've finished it. He doesn't get to follow through with his punishment because, a few seconds later, the mind-controlling spores inside the broccoli he just ate put him into a hypnotic state, as part of the Broccoloid aliens' plan to conquer the planet.
  Professor Utonium: Now, girls, eat your broccoli. It's exactly what growing superheroes need to charge up their powers! (flexes his muscles) Oh, it's packed with all kinds of vitamins and minerals, and mmm-mmm! It's so good for you!
  Buttercup: Too bad it tastes so nasty.
  Bubbles: You haven't even tasted it yet.
  Blossom and Buttercup: Shhh!
  Professor Utonium: Well, you're not leaving the table until your broccoli is all gone. And the only way to get rid of broccoli is to eat it all up, like this! (lifts broccoli toward his mouth with his fork)
  Girls: EW! Professor! No!
• The Simpsons: In "The Wreck of the Relationship", Homer is mad that Bart doesn't respect his authority. When Bart refuses to eat his broccoli, Homer makes him sit at the table until he does. Since neither will give in, they each spend 46 consecutive hours sitting at the table. Lisa comes up with a solution of making two fruit smoothies, one that has the broccoli and one that doesn't, and having them both drink them so it can be even. Bart spills both smoothies on purpose.

Real Life

• In this Reddit story, when the OP was a child, their parents served Chef Boyardee Beefaroni at least twice a week because their younger sister loved it. They hated it, but every time they refused to eat it, their parents refused to let them go to bed until they'd finished it, so they would be forced to sit at the table for hours and any attempt to actually eat the stuff would result in "exorcist level projectile vomiting". Many years later, when they were studying at university, they smelled someone microwaving a can of Chef Boyardee Beefaroni and promptly threw up in their coffee cup in front of several students on a campus tour.
• Geri Halliwell of The Spice Girls writes in her autobiography how in her poor childhood home, she vomited up food she did not like and was made to re-eat it, with her mother holding her jaw shut. Later, she had problems with bulimia.
• Some eating disorder recovery programs will use this practice with patients who refuse to eat: if a patient does not finish their food or, in more severe cases, won't have any of it, they must sit at the table until the end of the scheduled meal time, at which point they are sent back to their rooms. It's considered a more humane practice than force feeding or intubation, as it gives patients a degree of freedom while also providing firm consequences for their choice to not eat.

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