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Does Your Favorite Food Have a Deeper Meaning?
How a humble bowl of beans holds my family together.
What is your favorite food?
If I had to guess, I suspect it has something to do with a happy childhood memory. A time of gathering around a table with people you love and they love you.At those special times, this dish will be present. A dish that everyone knows is required at a family gathering. It somehow reinforces this is a place where you belong. Something would be off, out of sync if your favorite food was not on the table.
I would further guess your favorite food is also a culturally relevant dish. And I mean culturally relevant in the most micro sense of the word. Your family culture. Yes, it is may be part of a larger identifiable and named Culture, but your family does it in a way you have made your own.
For me, this cultural food that invokes special memories is ham and beans at the annual family reunion.
Once a year, in the heat of the summer, we all gather at my cousin’s home. Family members travel from across the United States to reconnect with their siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and relations so many times removed we just refer to each other as “related”. Reunion has been a ritual since the 1980’s.
