The Act of Making and Sharing Food: Communicating affection and story without talking

"Food, as we know all too well and food historians Farb and Armelagos succinctly observe, is 'symbolically associated with the most deeply felt human experiences, and thus expresses things that are sometimes difficult to articulate in everyday language.'"
--Maribel Alvarez, "Food, Poetry, and Borderlands Materiality: Water Benjamin at the taqueria."


“All animals eat, but we are the only animal that cooks…And because eating is almost always a group activity (as opposed to sex), food becomes a focus of symbolic activity about sociality and our place in society.”

“To feed someone is one of the most direct and intimate ways to convey something of ourselves to the impressee. We are never just saying, ‘see how we can satisfy your hunger.’ We are saying more like ‘see how lavish and hospitable and knowledgeable we are.’”

(Me: But aren’t we also saying, see how much I care about you that I took the time to produce this and nourish you in this way?)

--Robin Fox, “Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective.”

I was struck in both Dr. Alvarez's essay and Robin Fox’s essay with observations that were made about food as a way to communicate human experience that is too layered and complicated to explain in words, as a way to encapsulate and reveal values, affection, and history without actually speaking.

This struck a chord with me because of the Cajun culture I am both a part of and an outsider to. My mom, who was raised in small-town Southwest Louisiana, is an excellent cook—gumbo, jambalaya, corn maquechoux—and the preparing and serving of food has always been a huge part of who she is. It is, I realize now, something she inherited from the matriarchs in her family. My Maw Maw, her mother, always had something cooking on the stove whenever we came to visit, and all day long. From sunrise with coffee and coosh coosh (a sugary rice concoction) to midday rice and gravy or afternoon snacks of cookies, there was a constant rotation of pots on the stove, plates on the counter.

It was understood that food would always be there, and it was also understood that people would arrive to eat it. Although Maw Maw took pride in her recipes and ability to make dishes, the food was less important than the opportunity the food provided, an opportunity to socialize, to share news, to bond over common values. The food was both "the thing" and not "the thing" at all.

Cajuns are also, on the whole, not the introspective type. This originally, I believe, came from the hard work necessary to merely make it. Louisiana land was hard to make submit and they were poor. “The unexamined life is not worth living” does not apply when you don’t have the time to examine your life, when there are mouths to feed and you are the one who has to do it. Thus, as the culture evolved, one of the ways that Cajun women and men (many Cajun men are proud cooks, the gender stereotype of America does not apply here) have and continue to communicate the concern and care they have for one another, and their value in the community, is through the meals they make.

As I have grown older, I have come to love cooking for the same reason. It took me awhile to realize that I liked to cook because I do not enjoy cooking for myself. It's not because I don't think I'm worthy of elaborate meals. I don't enjoy cooking for myself because preparing an elaborate dish for me is a way of me showing the people I care about that I love them in the effort put into the food that will nourish their bodies. For me, creating meals is about the eventual communion that will happen when a loved one or many gather at my table. I wonder, is this something that we all feel drawn to? Does it have much to do with the families we grew up in?

I remember reading a story once about a couple who were having marital problems. Their problems and lack of understanding manifested in small everyday activities. The husband always gulped down his dinner and left the table promptly, leaving his wife exasperated and feeling angry that they had not taken that time to visit and share about their days. In therapy, it came to light that in while in the wife's family, dinner time was a time for sharing and for laughter, the husband's childhood dinner table was the time when his father would lose his temper and yell. The husband's residual impulse, as an adult, was to eat and leave the dinner table as soon as possible. Once they understood the different associations they brought to table, they were able to reconcile and rework a new dining arrangement that worked for them.

I guess the main thing that these articles called to question for me was the idea of food as a way to understand the cultures and families we are a part of. I feel like in some ways, we have to learn the language of the food that we eat. What associations do we bring and how can we use our own understanding of food to further come to know those around us and ourselves?

~Lisa