The Daily Meal's Readers Are Stressed By Dinner, And Like Using Frozen Foods

What's the most stressful meal of the day for you, the readers of The Daily Meal? Dinner, according to our recently conducted Family Study of The Daily Meal audience.

We got nearly 15,000 responses about your mealtime habits, grocery shopping preferences, and methods of simplifying your household duties — and some 45 percent of you named dinner as the meal that induced the most stress. Breakfast was second, with 13 percent of the vote, followed by lunch at 9 percent. The remaining 33 percent of our respondents told us that no one meal was any more stressful than another.

Perhaps as a way to help ease mealtime stress, a third of our readers chose frozen foods as the tool that helped their households run more smoothly, while the remainder of responses were divided among online meal planning and shopping lists, and meal and grocery delivery services. 

According to our Family Study, 53 percent of our readers are from one- or two-person households, while approximately 27 percent of you have households of three or four people. The remaining 20 percent of readers come from households of five people or more.

Mealtimes aside, although more than a third of readers (38 percent) said that no particular part of the day was more stressful than another, 27 percent of you chose morning as the most stressful time for your household. For another 25 percent, evening was called the most stressful time (something to do with dinner?), while the rest chose afternoon or nighttime.