How sharing food makes family, friendship and community stronger
“If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with him… the people who give you their food give you their heart.” — Cesar Chavez
Some of my earliest and best memories lie in sharing food with family and strangers, with new friendships growing from the experience. My work involves researching what makes human connections stronger, cities more liveable and communities more robust, and I am always struck by how little has been covered about the place of food and hospitality in bringing people together.
I remember a scene repeated on several family holidays — whether I was seven, eight or nine years old, its not material — the warmth and feeling of well-being glowing from the memories are the same, when being with my family on one of our annual car touring holidays of Europe.
We are in a small town on the Mediterranean coast. It is a warm Summer evening. There are lights twinkling in the trees and warm street lights glowing around the square, enhanced by welcoming light spilling from the windows of cafés and houses around the square, or along the street either side of the café where we are sitting.
Also along the street, local people are taking their ritual evening promenade — to see and be seen. They are walking in couples or family groups, or meandering slowly on their scooters, greeting each other as they pass, on their way to their own dinner with extended family or friends at home or in another local eatery.
Many of them are progressing slowly to the next cafe on their regular routes for enjoying Spanish Tapas, a French Apéritif or Venetian Spritzer and Cicchetti, before they sit down for a later meal together. The promenaders are following the well-trodden foot and food pathways, which generations of their forebears have followed.
Random music is coming from a radio in the café kitchen in the background, accompanied by cicadas in the trees with the sound of the Mediterranean sea lapping on the beach or wharf in the distance. Rising above everything is the laughter, chatter and banter which makes up the sound of humanity of all generations, sharing life and having fun around us, catching up on their day at work or school, and above all else, enjoying sharing their evening meal together.
There are delicious smells of cooking wafting through the warm mediterranean air, being appreciated by the large tables of families and groups of friends and neighbours around me, as I sit with my own family. We are enjoying (depending on where we are) pasta in ragout sauce and bruschetta.
Or it could be sharing large bowls of salads, hummus and tzatziki with fresh grilled sardines or squid, caught that morning and brought from the neighbouring wharf straight to the restaurant kitchen door; or seafood paella cooked in huge pans over the fierce outdoor wood fires near our tables; or hand-thrown pizza cooked in the open-air terracotta oven, with a thin light crust and slightly charred bits on the base from cooking on the bottom of the oven, covered with sliced sweet tomatoes which taste of sunshine, drizzled olive oil, basil and buffalo mozzarella, bought fresh from local farms and growers, surrounding the town.
The food, wine and location may change, but the life, soul, warmth and generosity of spirit of the people enjoying it together, are the same.
The owner of the café and people at other tables sometimes share tasters of their food with us, and welcome us to their group, since they wish to share their community and joy of life with us. We connect with them using our very sketchy language skills, but mainly through smiles, gestures, laughter and shared enjoyment of food, wine and good company.
Food “hurdles the language barrier, makes friends among civilized people, and warms the heart.” (Samual Chamberlain, author of Clementine in the Kitchen).
All of this scene — the food and wine, the smells of trees, and the stone buildings and the warm Mediterranean evening, the sound of the sea lapping against the wharf, the glowing lights and most of all, the sounds and warm feelings created by people coming together to have fun, share life and laughter — these are some of my best memories as a child, and have become embedded in my core.
So why is sharing food so important?
For me, such opportunities to experience life and share food with family, and with strangers who become friends, are a major part of what it means to create strong community. Such shared places and experiences are what enable humans to come together with generosity of soul and spirit, and to be at their best. In essence, the concept of breaking bread together is what also breaks down barriers and creates common ground and an opportunity for discourse and connection.
The joining of food and place enable us to connect the bonds of our human life-force. The sense of community and welcome which we create, through sharing hospitality, and coming together as people have been repeated over hundreds of years, thousands of times, wherever people have the opportunity to gather together.
In other cities and communities around the Mediterranean, in North and East Africa, in China and Asia, in South America, around the world — in the oldest cities on our planet, for thousands of years people have lived their lives on the streets — in courtyards, in squares, plazas, piazzas, on street corners, in cafés, tea houses and local shops…people have shopped, shared gossip, shared food, and touched each others lives.
“Cultures and climates differ all over the world, but people are the same. They’ll gather in public, if you give them a good place to do it.” (Jan Gehl, Life between Buildings)
Communities need such ‘good’ common places and rituals, which connect them. They need places to enable them to linger and enjoy, rather than rushing them on and stopping them from sitting down, sharing food and building common ground with each other.
It can be benches and tables in a park, where elderly people go to play chess, mahjong or dominoes, share their news, and check-in on each other. Humans seek the company of others, to build connections, memories and reinforce common society. We find our true strength in our personal connections, and at the most challenging times — it is such commonality which will see us through.
“If you want to seed a place with activity, put out food” (William Whyte, the social life of small urban spaces).
It can be the local corner shop or tea shop/cafe, a Venetian bacarro or snack bar, a Parisian café, or a shade tree and benches in town squares next to the local fountain…wherever it is, every community needs such places and rituals which make them stop, sit and observe the world — these places act as the lifeblood of healthy, safe and cohesive communities.
What do we lose when we lose such connection?
This community connection and cohesion began to go wrong, when the planning and building of cities started to change after the Second World War, influenced by the cheap-to-produce conformist Modernism of Bauhaus and his era. Communities around the world are still suffering the soulless mistakes of 1960s Modernist and post-Modernist style city planning and building, including multi-lane highways, huge edifices and large-scale suburban development.
Over the last 50 years (as Jan Gehl, Architect and Rob Adams, Melbourne’s Director of City Design have highlighted) suburban sprawl has spread exponentially creating isolated individuals and generations of families becoming disconnected from their communities and cities, where people have one, two or more hour commutes to fringe suburban developments.…this has also led to cities dying from their centre out.
In such mechanistic city environments, where the focus moved to building multi-lane roads which only serve fast-moving cars, and which discourage people from coming together at a human pace, there has been a marked breakdown of social and societal cohesion. Such devotion to serving the needs of cars not people, also adversely hit the tradition, ritual, and human-scale of local food sharing as part of life being led on the street as a community.
Fast cars and fast food don’t make stronger society
It pushes instead the growth of faceless fast food burger or fried chicken drive-throughs, which grew up at the same time as cities fixated on building large scale roads, retail complexes and suburbs which de-humanised the centre of cities. In this post-Modern world, food became something to be gobbled down whilst driving at speed, with no thought to its content or value, and with all its’ other social, resource and health ramifications. This does not enable people to connect on human-focused streets, nor does it create lively communities or liveable cities.
So how do we fix this?
By going back to our pre-Modernism human core, living life at a human scale, connecting as people in urban spaces and at a pace which enhances our sense of community in plazas, piazzas and on our city streets.
For William Whyte “the street is the river of life of the city. People come to these places not to escape but to partake of it”. (William Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces).
Whyte’s 1979 Street Life Project, which developed into the documentary The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces studied what made plazas work well for urban population, highlighting where food, accessible seating, public entertainment, shade trees and retail shops.
Most importantly for William Whyte “a good plaza starts at the street corner. If it’s a busy corner, it has a brisk social life of its own” which will also work to bring people together.
Examples are growing around the world where city planners have recognized the human need for shared experiences in such urban spaces. They are starting to also see how creating places where the sharing of food brings people together and aids the revitalisation of communities and city centres — like the Melbourne Laneways and New York sidewalk café scene rebirth. This makes community and commercial sense.
Planners have found that, by encouraging people to come together in cafes and on sidewalks to share food, share their stories and lives, and watch the world go by, they contribute to the regeneration of their CBDs. Such common places created for people to share food and life, bring new energy to city centres, and are part of building a city’s ability to effectively support increases in population (which is going to feature in another article).
So, what are your best food-sharing memories, and how can you bring those into your current world experience, to bring your family and community back together? What can you do today to make this happen?
