Conviviality is its own reward

Gathering around a table as environmental advocacy

Posted by Kurt Michael Friese (Guest Contributor) at 6:32 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Read more about: slow food | food

dinnerparty Gazing over the muddy brown expanse that the abating snows finally revealed in mid-March, it has been hard for me to imagine the lush greenery and flavorful bounty that our gardens will yield in just a few short months. But even by the time you read these words, radishes and spinach will have sprouted again. The curly tendrils of spring's first sweet peas will be stretching, aching for a grip on a trellis and an arc of precious sunlight. The warmth will return, as it always does, and with it, the promise of a table full of delicious food surrounded by the people we love.

It is an old word: convivial. Its Latin roots refer literally to "living together." We are drawn to conviviality by our very human nature, our need for companionship and warmth. Yet in today's fast-paced, technology-driven, I-get-mine-first world, we regularly sacrifice that which made us human in the first place, that which built our society -- our fundamental need for food and the camaraderie that was born of that need.

In just over a month, May 3 to be precise, I've been asked by the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa to speak at their annual EcoFair on this very topic. Some may think this may be simply an acknowledgment that one can only hear so much bad news about climate change and pollution, and attendees to an environmental conference need a change of pace from wind energy lectures. Quite to the contrary, this year's EcoFair is entirely centered on the subject of food and its impact on society, both locally and globally. Above my name on the marquee will be luminaries such as renowned cookbook author Deborah Madison and also Sherri Brooks Vinton, who wrote The Real Food Revival.

Essential in the weekend's festivities is the message that food's impact on our lives goes well beyond our waistlines. Not only does industrial food production have enormous impacts on our environment and detrimental impacts on our health, it removes us -- Happy Meal by Happy Meal -- from the vital connection we make between each other as well as our bond with the earth.

So many of us now feel trapped in a society which, as the original "Slow Food Manifesto" described matter-of-factly, "first invented the machine and then took it as its life-model." This, it continues, leads to a "contagion of the multitude that mistakes frenzy for efficiency." People too often treat their bodies, and their family members' bodies, in much the same way they treat their cars: drive up, fuel up, take off. If we truly are what we eat -- and I believe that we are -- then that means that too many of us are fast, cheap, and easy. Perhaps, more importantly, it means that whomever owns your food owns you.

There is something so vital, so spiritual, so essential to gathering around a table with our friends and loved ones. It is why nearly all religions have rites centered on food, why so many holidays are celebrated with a feast of a home-cooked meal. There need to be stronger connections between each of us, something that gathering around a table can almost always accomplish, and we feel that in our very cores.

At the EcoFair in Fairfield this spring, let us endeavor to create conviviality; to make more of those connections, not the least of which is the connection between the environmental activists and the food activists. So much of one depends upon the other. Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini once famously said, "A gastronome who is not also an environmentalist is an idiot. An environmentalist who is not also a gastronome is, well, sad."

For story: Conviviality is its own reward
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"the people we love"

"Love is a many splendoured thing," we are told. And yet, can we always count on there being enough love, to sustain the ideal of the happy meal?

Does KMF's penultimate paragraph, beginning with the disgracefully uncritical assertion, "There is something so vital, so spiritual, so essential ... ," really make sense to us, once we cut through the sentimentality, and start to ask what the words mean, and what they imply?

Holiday meals, associated with religious feasts, are indeed supposed to be happy occasions. Tomorrow, the Jews celebrate a minor feast, Purim, connected to a happy biblical story, the victory of the Jewish heroine Esther over genocidal Gentile foes; I do not know if a holiday meal is in order, but there are certainly delicacies associated with the holiday, especially Hamentaschen (filled cookies/pastries, variously spelled) among the Ashkenazim.

In a month's time, there will be Passover (Pesach), which is the meal-oriented major holiday above all others. My understanding is, the meat served usually in North American Jewish homes is chicken.

Meanwhile, Western Christians will be celebrating Easter (really Pascha, the Aramaic form of Hebrew Pesach) this Sunday, and Eastern Christians, following somewhat different calculations, will be celebrating it in a month, close to Passover. In both traditions, meat (lamb?; ham?) is an important component of the Paschal dinner.

So: what do we do with these relatives whom we do not often see? Barack Obama has recently reminded us of embarrassing uncles, and grandmothers; he remembers his own mother very well, but some of us would at once add even our mothers and fathers to the list of hard-to-take relatives. Is the loving tolerance that we practise at these meals the product of the food itself, and the convivial eating of it? Or, is something else going on?

One wonders what happens at Passover Seders, if you have people enunciating any combination of such opinions as these: "Pharaoh was a pig, and the Egyptians had it coming to them"; "Yahweh was a monster, who should never have slaughtered the Egyptian first-born"; "The Israelites deserved everything that happened to them, because they abandoned God"; "The Israelites deserved everything that happened to them, because they were too wimpish to fight back"; "Moses was a dope, who trusted God and Pharaoh too much"; "Moses was in it for his own good": "Moses' mother wasn't the Hebrew slavewoman, his mother was the Egyptian princess, and he was the Manchurian candidate."

And so forth and so on.

"Love is in the air!"

As for what is actually on the dish, we should note that holiday dinners in religious traditions are, well, traditional. The menu does not change much, and the very conservatism often is a source of consolation to many of us.

But nowadays, we have gastronomes, Slow-Food-ists, locavores, organic-foodies, and veg*ns, all requesting reforms of one kind or another.

So, can the traditional holiday meal survive?

And, what part does love play?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 9:04 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Home is where you hang your hat

and love is where you find it.

I'm sure we all have "family" dinners in our memories that make us cringe: Thanksgiving when I was a kid consisted of my stressed-out Mom up at 4am to make a bird that would never be good enough for her mother-in-law; said mother-in-law, my grandmother, spewing pearl onions & vitriol, in equal proportions, while she railed about the "G*d damned Jews and the Eye-talians;" my brother, sister and me, uncomfortably dressed up and frantic lest we scratch the dining room table or chip one of the "good" plates; and my Dad, miserable at the misery that his mother caused us all.

But family dinners change, as do families, as do traditions. I'm attending a "family" dinner on Easter Sunday, at which there will be no one who is actually related to me by blood, but everyone who is attending is "family." Yes, there will be bickering, as is the nature of all families it seems. Yes, an animal or two (likely chickens) will be killed for this meal - around this table, most are omnivores, except the matriach who is a devout carnivore (she claims to hate vegetables in any form). Yes, there will be traditions, such as a pot of spring flowers for the table, and chocolate Easter eggs for kids and grown-ups alike. But, traditions with a twist.. the flowers from a local, organic greenhouse and the chocolate eggs fair trade from Divine.

Slow Food, gastronome, organic, locavore.. they all have similarities: the celebration of fresh, wonderfully tasty, healthful food. It truly is a joy to gather people you love (blood "family" or not) and spend a day cooking with fresh, wonderful ingredients, preparing a meal simple or elegant, and sitting down together (at the table, or around the fireplace, on the deck or in the yard) to enjoy the fruits of your labors. Traditional meals are the perfect setting for the Slow Food, gastronome movement... it gets more difficult for vegetarians, and even still more challenging for vegans, but I'm sure with a little persistence, it can be done. I believe that part of the point of this post is not to save "family" meals for 2 or 3 times a year.. that food and eating connects us in more ways than we realize and that to eat with a person is to know who they are, and understanding, and yes, even love, begins with knowing.

by kmp at 10:08 AM on 20 Mar 2008

Fulfillment

Amen. I think having fulfilling familial contacts will provide many positive impacts. If we are satisfied by loving relationships, then where is the frantic need for all the unnecessary consumer artifacts? Save that money for something important, like the OAEC plant sale. Now gardening, there's something that feeds the soul. And the family, genetic or otherwise.

Eat what you grow, grow what you eat

by PermieWriter at 1:34 PM on 21 Mar 2008

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