A Taste for Connection
How Food Bridges Social, Cultural and Economic Divides
It’s not every day that two-hundred people congregate along the banks of Akron, Ohio’s Summit Lake to sit down to a meal together. But that’s exactly what took shape early one evening late last September.
On September 28, a few hours before dusk, guests began arriving. They were people from the neighborhood, people from other corners of the city, visiting urban innovators from around the country — a collection of people from varying economic, racial, and cultural backgrounds who might not otherwise end up breaking bread together. The event included music from local musicians, remarks from community leaders, spoken word poetry by an active member of Akron’s creative scene, and dinner for 200 people who ate their meals from plates decorated with family recipes provided by young residents from the Summit Lake neighborhood.
Dan Rice, president of the Ohio & Erie Canalway Coalition and one the event coordinators, explains that “individuals from all walks of life…came together to share a meal, a conversation, and experiences about how we might reimagine our civic commons spaces for all citizens along the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail.”
To an outsider, the significance of this dialogue may not be evident. But those who live in the Summit Lake neighborhood or know much about its history will tell you that this was no normal dinner. After decades of disinvestment, distrust, and forgotten promises, Summit Lake community members often greet outside interest with skepticism. This meal served as an important step in chipping away at that mistrust.
Food is frequently a key ingredient in community get-togethers in Akron, says Rice — not simply because, well, people have to eat, but also because there’s something intimate and binding about sharing a meal together.
Behavioral scientists Ayelet Fiscbach and Kaitlin Woolley confirm that when strangers — or even opponents of some sort — chow down together, they’re more likely to forge meaningful connections. This is especially the case when they’re actually eating the same food.
People feel “closer to and more trusting of those who consume as they do,” they write in a January 2017 article in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. “In this way, food serves as a social lubricant and is especially beneficial for new relationships where people have limited information about the other person and are forming first impressions. In consuming similarly, people can immediately begin to feel camaraderie and develop a bond, leading to smoother transactions from the start.”
This is precisely what Anuj Gupta and his collaborators saw in Philadelphia, where they launched Breaking Bread, Breaking Barriers, a six-part program that occurred over the course of twelve months in 2016–2017. Designed to bring together people from communities that don’t frequently mix, the evening events — which were hosted at the city’s uber-cherished Reading Terminal Market, where Gupta is general manager — combined cooking demonstrations from each culture’s cuisine with a sit-down dinner that let guests get to know each other better. Russians and Iraqis got culinary together. Cambodians and African Americans connected over the course of a stove-top tutorial and a meal.
Because these events featured plates from each of the cultures represented, they served the dual purpose of letting guests learn about someone else’s unique culinary heritage while also showing pride in their own. And that’s important, says Gupta. “You’re not going to find a culture that doesn’t have its cuisine as a reflection of its community.”
At the program’s culminating dinner in September, 150 diners from a dozen cultural backgrounds came together to break bread and swap stories.
Even if the power of food to connect us is at its strongest when we’re sitting down at the dinner table together, food-based experiences in general take advantage of a common appreciation of food that stretches across all cultures and economic strata.
Christine Quane, wholesale market director at Detroit’s Eastern Market, sums up this point well.
“What is the one thing that every culture, every socioeconomic group, every race, and religion — every single person — has in common?” she asks. “The love of food. Food is central to our family life, to our cultures, to our everyday lives.”
Perhaps that’s why Eastern Market, which has been at its current site just east of the city’s Midtown since 1891, now attracts food lovers from near and far. Of the 40,000 or so market visitors each Saturday, Quane estimates that 50 percent hail from the city proper, while the other 50 percent is a mix of suburban, regional and tourism traffic. Through initiatives like Double Up Food Bucks — a program that doubles the value of points for SNAP customers — the market operators work to ensure there’s economic diversity at the market as well.
Eastern Market devotee Delphia Simmons says this adds up to a welcoming atmosphere that she looks forward to visiting every week. A Detroit resident who’s been visiting the market regularly for 25 years, Simmons describes the market as a magnet that brings together people through “an affinity for food” — and that, she says, encompasses just about everybody.
“I just really love the diversity of people that are there,” Simmons says. “And it’s got a vibe to it — it’s got this community vibe to it.” Visitors seem to be relaxed as they move through the open-air market. They pause at the stalls to chit-chat. They begin to recognize each other from week to week.
As our nation becomes increasingly diverse with people from a broad array of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, finding reasons to pause, look around, and strike up a conversation with a stranger has never been more important. And public places with food at their core, it seems, may play a powerful — and appetizing — role in creating the community vibe that gets those conversations started.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and local partners.
