"To counter the rise of the snack and restore the meal to its rightful place, consider as a start these few rules of thumb:

Do all your eating at a table. No, a desk is not a table.

Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does. American gas stations now make more money selling food (and cigarettes) than gasoline, but consider what kind of food this is: except perhaps for the milk and water, it's all highly processed imperishable snack foods and extravagantly sweetened soft drinks in hefty twenty-ounce bottles. Gas stations have become processed-corn stations: ethanol outside for your car and high-fructose corn syrup inside for you.

Try not to eat alone. Americans are increasingly eating in solitude. Though there is research suggesting that light eaters will eat more when they dine with others (probably because they spend more time at the table), for people prone to overeating, communal meals tend to limit consumption, if only because we're less likely to stuff ourselves when others are watching. This is precisely why so much food marketing is designed to encourage us to eat in front of the TV or in the car: When we eat mindlessly and alone, we eat more. But regulating appetite is the least of it: The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from mere animal biology to an act of culture."