Dinner: Lunchtime Meal Or Teatime Meal?

Forget Leave vs Remain, X Factor vs Strictly, Prue vs Mary; long before any of these great debates came the greatest of all: what should one call their evening meal?

Ever been asked to go to the shop for tea, returning home with a packet of PG Tips only to find World War Three waiting for you and an apparent expectation that you would come back with the ingredients for a meal? Or have you ever been asked out for dinner only to find yourself arriving at the restaurant seven hours early due to an apparent misunderstanding?

The correct meanings of dinner and tea are fiercely debated up and down the country, and a recent YouGov survey involving 42,000 people has uncovered just how much of a regional divide there is between the two.

via GIPHY

Overall, ‘dinner’ dominates, with 57 per cent of the country going for this compared to just 36 per cent for tea.

Northerners – especially those living in Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Tyne and Wear – are much more likely to go for tea, while Home Counties residents are the folk most likely to go with dinner.

Meanwhile, Midlands residents are divided, with those based in Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Shropshire favouring tea, and those living in Worcestershire preferring dinner.

Across Britain as a whole, 67 per cent of working class folk and 58 per cent of middle class people say tea, but the tables turn down south, where 74 per cent of those regarding themselves as middle class and 70 per cent of working class people say dinner.

via GIPHY

But then there’s the whole issue of what you should call your midday meal too – they can’t both be dinner. However, we suppose people do tend to say ‘packed lunch’ – but would you take yours with you to eat at dinnertime? So many mind-boggling questions to ponder!

All this talk of mealtimes is making us hungry, but how do we know which mealtime it actually is with so much debate?!

You might be wondering which side of the fence we are on. While we’re not going to explicitly tell you, we’ll leave you with this question: why are they called ‘dinner ladies’, if the meal they’re serving isn’t your dinner…?