More than a meal

I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately. Ok, I think a lot about food full stop. I think about it more since being married to a diabetic (keep him slim, help his heart/kidneys/arteries etc) and now that I’m a mum (make him grow, make him chubby) which are quite different missions and require some brain space to plan for on a daily basis. I walk around the supermarket with the words ‘cheap’, ‘healthy’ and ‘ethical’ swarming round my brain like a cluster of angry bees and food can be reduced to something stressful and worrisome.

The more I think about food, the more I talk about it, and the more I talk the more I realise how much people in general love this topic regardless of gender, age, stage, background, religion or profession. We all love to eat and then we love to talk about it!

This week the month of Ramadan begins and as it approached I asked some of my Bengali mum friends how they feel about it and the response is invariably the same. Despite the impending hours of hunger through the heat of the day without a drop of liquid to quench their thirst from when the sun breaches the horizon at daybreak to when it sinks behind it late at night, the response was always ‘I’m excited’. I looked at them unblinking, trying to show the respect I felt inside rather than the bewilderment.

They talk about the joys of sharing food together as family, how glorious that first drink of water is after a whole day of longing for it and the unity they feel battling the hunger and thirst together. One of my neighbours told me how strong his craving for a cigarette becomes once he’s had his first bite of food at the end of the fasting (‘that’s the devil in you’ his sister interjected wryly from the corner of the room). They talk about the excitement of Eid, the celebration that culminates the month of fasting when they spend the day in and out of each other’s houses feasting on food they’ve been preparing for days dressed in beautiful outfits of coloured silk, crystal beads and chiffon. Their appreciation for their sustenance is so heightened by the absence of it in that one month and they seem to relish that new level of enjoyment.

A meal shouldn’t be reduced to a box-ticking activity focusing only on what needs it meets but rather should be a joyful event focused on good food and relationship. Some wise and wonderful friends of ours who are lecturers at Regent College in Vancouver taught us about the layers of meaning you can find in a meal. We had the pleasure a few years ago of eating a meal with them where they could tell us the life stories of the people who had made the crockery we were eating out of and there wasn’t a single food item in the meal which we hadn’t planted, watered, nurtured and harvested together in their back garden. They even hand made their own pasta. It may sound strange but it was a pretty emotional and dare I say it, spiritual experience. In identifying the various links in the chain (namely the people involved) and the hard work that brought the food to our table, it enabled a whole new level of appreciation for the food itself and the communion of eating the meal together. I know in many cases people don’t even have the time to tie their own shoelaces let alone make pasta, but just sitting down in our families and communities and sharing food once in a while is always worth slowing down for.