One of the hidden characteristics of food is that it is a conveyer of much more than bulk and nutrition. Secret and not so secret messages are served with food all the time.
Here, eat this: I love you. I care.
Here, eat this: I am grateful to you, I am obligated to you, I am happy for you, I am proud of you, I am scared of you, I want to control you, I want to know you.
Here, eat this: We share this culture, this celebration, this family, this memory, these hopes and fears.
Here, eat this: feel better.
Here, eat this: this is who I am.
Here, eat this: we are not so different.
I was inspired to start thinking in this direction after reading a short essay from the poet Naomi Shihab Nye. In the essay, she describes hearing an announcement in a Texas airport for someone who speaks Arabic to come to Gate 4A immediately. As she writes: "Well--one pauses these days. Gate 4A was my own gate. I went there."
After helping to calm a distressed Palestinian woman who had misunderstood her delayed flight to be cancelled, a warm friendship emerges and then expands to include many of the people waiting with them at gate 4A. A special middle eastern cookie called mamool is brought out and shared. Soon everyone around them is smiling and covered with the same powdered sugar. She concludes: "And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world."
I see and hear and feel around me a new sense of hope that we can start to share the world again. That we can begin again the hard work of discovering just how that is done. Clearly, it's not a simple process. Clearly it won't happen overnight. And clearly, we yearn for this, deeply. We know that if we can't do this, if we can't learn how to live together, then we're all quite literally doomed.
And so my wish for you is that someday you'll be sitting in an airport and someone will offer you a momool cookie. And that you'll say 'yes, thank you' and you'll eat it and experience whatever it is appropriate for you to experience: delight, connection, discovery, gratitude, strangeness and fear, curiosity. But whatever you're feeling, I hope you'll eat the cookie and participate with everyone in the possibility of a shared world. If it's not you, then who?
Here is the full (short) essay Gate 4-A by Naomi Shihab Nye. Thanks, Naomi!
Here is a mamool recipe by Katie at Little Spatula, who also took the photograph of the mamools in the oven at the beginning of this post. Thanks, Katie!
The photo to the left was taken by me on Saturday in downtown SF, just after a Prop 8 protest.
Food has always been a big connector. Once a month, I host a book club that is really just an excuse to cook for my friends. Yesterday, after hearing that I'd spent 6 hours on lunch and then making a quiche for her, a vegetarian friend said to me "How do I learn to love cooking?" I didn't know what to tell her. I said something about enjoying doing something with my hands that required me to think in a different way than work does. But this post nails it.
I don't express emotions very well so for me cooking is a way of telling people "You're my friend, i care about you" The task itself is soothing and fun but most fun when I'm cooking FOR someone. It's about making someone else happy and bringing people together. The joy that brought me to cooking was in feeding other people and seeing them happy. I didn't like cooking for just me. Eventually, the task becomes associated with pleasure and thus becomes pleasant in and of itself. And at some point, you realize that it's ok to put as much effort into food for yourself as you do into food for other people. Then you can honestly say you enjoy cooking.
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I forgot to mention that the quiche I made was the Confetti Quiche that someone entred into the pie contest. It was fantastic.
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Yes! This is what makes any cooking or baking project all the more worthwhile. Sharing food is always, always a positive experience for all.
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It's also nice to put effort into something that produces something tangible. Not all of my daily tasks do that.
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What a wonderful story! Thank you so much for sharing it!
I'm sitting here trying to motivate myself to do some work after our beautiful Sunday afternoon, which reiterates the theme of this story. It doesn't involve rescues from miscommunication, but is all about community.
We were at a 5th birthday party for a school friend of our daughter's. At one point, I looked around the table, and took stock. There was a mom from Mozambique, speaking to her American husband in Portuguese. My French husband was speaking with another mom, this one from Ghana (my daughter adores her, as they share the name -- Rose). I was speaking to a Canadian-born Aussie with a Croatian wife... kissing the cheeks of a Belgian and his Kenyan-Indian-British wife. We chatted with a Sri Lankan couple, and a Chinese man who brought his twins. Some key friends were missing today (a tummy bug is going around) -- my daughter's three "fiancées" as they call themselves, were a no-show -- the Swiss-Pakistani, South-African-American and Zimbabwean.
We were a good-sized crowd, and happily stood around chatting and eating African samosas and drinking French wines while our kids played. Most of these people have grown to be our closest friends, and our children are inextricably linked through school. But what hit me today was -- this is our kids' reality -- they know no other way of being. They are as comfortable with each other's cultures and hues as they are debating superheroes (it seems to be a batman year) and gobbling birthday cake.
Oh, and the birthday-boy? He's half-Kenyan and half-American, just like the President Elect.
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I really loved this short story. I'm doing my thesis on this very topic: Eating Subconsciously: Exploring Hidden Messages and Histories in the Graduate Design program at California College of the Arts and this article was inspiring to me. Cooking as compassion was instilled in me from my Grandmother. She was always looking for an excuse to cook for others and receiving the love and care embedded in her food had a huge impact on me as a child. I hope that through my thesis project I can inspire others to communicate through cooking.
P.S. Thanks Tiamat_the_Red for the kind words on my quiche recipe :)
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