Breaking Bread: A Personal Relationship with Food
Over the past year or so, I have lived in several different places between studying abroad, going to USC, working in New York this summer, and living at home. With these different experiences and places, I found it hard to get into a consistent routine. While reflecting on the changes I have experienced I thought about one thing that was a big factor in my daily life: my relationship with food. I never considered the role it played, nor what sharing a meal means in the greater significance about one’s relationship to self and those they share it with. There are unspoken rules and meanings of meals, cooking for others, and restaurant etiquette that make one’s relationship to food much more indicative of who they are, rather than just a means to an end. A figure that I became obsessed with was Anthony Bourdain after reading his book Kitchen Confidential. It inspired me to be more adventurous and explore the more mundane aspects of life along with the exciting ones, as cheesy as that sounds as I write it. Without cringing, here is a quote from him that I reflect on a lot: “food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets” (Bourdain 16).
Every day at 6pm the table was set by my sister or me. I was still sweaty from football practice, starving and exhausted. My mom would be in the kitchen cooking while the evening news played softly in the background. My dad would come home in a suit after a long day of work and I would give him a hug and ask him about his day. He would always say it was good, even the times when I could tell he was overworked or exhausted. He would respond with “what did you learn at school today?” and every time I would say “I forgot.” It became a sort of running joke that I didn’t learn anything in school. I think I took this daily routine growing up for granted. The family meal is proven to be excellent for building relationships and has other benefits such as reduced stress. It also allows for kids to have trust in their parents and confide in them, which can have a lot of additional benefits to development (CASAColumbia i). I know that I had a lot of important conversations at the dinner table with my family that were necessary for me, which I was not grateful for until later. I never really gave much thought about how my parents stressed the importance of sitting down together for dinner and making sure the TV was off so that we could talk to each other for a brief moment between our busy days. I never considered the role meals and food as a whole played in my life until I lived on my own.
Living on my own was a big adjustment, especially when it came to feeding myself regularly. I did not realize how much I took for granted having meals cooked for me, or a fully stocked fridge at my expense. I slowly learned how to cook for myself but was annoyed at how it was time consuming. This was during the peak of COVID and I was in my apartment for the majority of the day. As a social person it was extremely difficult to be by myself most of the time and I felt trapped in one place. My eating habits reflected this as I often resorted to eating out during the week. I never took the time to think about how this habit affected my health, both mentally and physically. In a way it was reflective of my situation at the time. I felt lonely and frustrated as many did at the time and missed my family a lot, especially the routine of living at home. I also felt this way during my time working in New York this summer. I would get off work, tired from the day, and come home to an empty dorm starving. Even if I wanted to, I could not get myself to go through the process of making something for myself. I would wander into the Whole Foods buffet down the street for something that was healthy and found myself eating a watered down version of the Indian food my family would make. The poems we read in class shocked me by how scarily accurate it portrayed my reality: “whole foods take out: when you are too tired to cook your own food you can pay too much for a tasteless version of your culture that promises it won’t kill you. Afterwards, a greasy crunched compostable box and debit charge so much more expensive than you budgeted for.” (Piepzna-Samarasinha 13). Afterwards I would mentally calculate the amount of time it took working to afford this meal. $23.95? For that?
Studying in Europe and having the opportunity to travel to different countries during the spring semester of my junior year made me realize how I had been missing that feeling of family dinners, something I only got when I was home for breaks. I was fortunate enough to have a close group of friends where we went to dinners or at least ate meals together pretty much every day. But there were certainly moments where I was alone in an unfamiliar place like a train station in Cologne or a random airport in Brussels. If you see someone eating at a restaurant alone, you probably would feel bad for them. That is my first reaction at least. But then I thought more about it. Is it so bad to enjoy a meal by yourself? Maybe there is something liberating about defying the social norm by sitting alone with your thoughts in between traveling or a long day of work or wherever one finds themself in that exact moment. I try to eat at a restaurant by myself every once in a while, going to a place I have been meaning to try. But when the meal ends I can’t help but think about how great it would be to share it with friends or family.
Sharing a meal with someone can come in a lot of forms. You and your roommates can have a barbecue, hang out, and listen to music. A nice release from the stresses of the days and the argument about who never takes the trash out takes a backseat in favor of more jovial topics of conversation. You can invite over the bachelor from your dad’s work for Thanksgiving dinner, forcing him to listen to your family’s painstaking and controversial gossip session that eventually delves into, God forbid, politics (my experience in 2018). You can go to a restaurant with your friends, talk shit for hours, and annoy the waitress who just wants her shift to end. If you couldn’t tell, these are some of my favorite forms of sharing a meal.
Interestingly, all of these come with a set of unspoken standards and meanings assigned to them. Mary Douglas likens meals to language in Deciphering a Meal, as a means of understanding the significance of them. She poses the simple question “If language is a code, where is the precoded message?” followed by the word “language” replaced with “food.” The logical response is thus, “if food is treated as a code, the message it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed” (Douglas 61). She asserts that food has both a biological component and a social one. There are unspoken rules that come with food, like anything else. If you are invited to an acquaintance’s Thanksgiving, you wear a nice shirt and act politely. If someone cooks for you in their home, they trust you, and it is impolite to not offer to help with the dishes after. At a restaurant, even if you know the other person will pay, it’s rude to not offer to split the bill at the very least. These customs go without saying, and say a lot about our relationships with others through the act of breaking bread. What my eating habits say about me go beyond what I am eating. It explains how I feel about the people I am eating with and how I am feeling about myself at that exact moment. To share a meal is a beautiful thing, an invitation to get to know someone, a biological connection of nourishing oneself with others that is intertwined with a deep desire for social connection and the human need for community. To annoy the reader with another Bourdain quote for good measure: “The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.”
Works Cited
Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly 1st US ed., Bloomsbury, 2000. Accessed 17 Sept. 2023.
CASAColumbia, 2012, The Importance of Family Dinners, https://www.fmi.org/docs/default-source/familymeals/2012924familydinnersviii.pdf?sfvrsn=967c676e_2. Accessed 17 Sept. 2023.
Douglas, Mary. “Deciphering a Meal.” Daedalus, vol. 101, no. 1, 1972, pp. 61–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024058. Accessed 17 Sept. 2023.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Bodymap: Poems. Mawenzi House, 2015. Accessed 17 Sept. 2023.
