Community and Food

The other day as I was walking to my car after yoga with a grumbling tummy, I found myself struck with memories from when I was an undergraduate student at SUNY Albany. I had been a part of the Women’s Studies Teaching Collective during my time there. As part of the Collective, I had the opportunity to aid in the development of an introductory course to feminisms (which we did as a group of 30) and then team teach the course (I taught with 2 other girls and we were overseen by a graduate student). It was a very unique experience not only because the department let undergrads teach other undergrads, but because so much of our time was spent building community. Our main source of community building was a series of monthly pot luck meetings outside of our regularly scheduled class periods. We rotated the location, sometimes meeting in someone’s apartment off campus, other times meeting in someone’s dorm room (this was reserved for those of us who lived in the larger apartment style dorms since the whole group of use with all of our various foods would never fit in a regular suite style room). The locations allowed us to relax and to get a glimpse of someone else’s real life , but I feel it was the food that really bonded us.
When we prepare food for others, we open up ourselves and offer a piece of us alongside a morsel. It is a gift of our time, our energy, and our affection. The dishes that appear at pot lucks can also tell a lot about the bringer/preparer. We tend to bring comfort foods, foods we are proud of, foods that remind us of our families and traditions. Even people who are too busy to make food, but who bring crackers and cheese or chips and dip expose a part of themselves – that they are busy and that these are the types of foods they gravitate towards, perhaps even as a comfort.
I can think of other instances as well that support a linkage between food and community. When my ex was working on Casey Farm, we would attend periodic pot lucks where all the local farmers, their families, and pets would bring veggies fresh from the pasture, meats that had grazed in their fields, oysters taken right out of the bay, and seasonal berries fresh picked only hours ago. There was the common element of the love of the Earth and the love of fresh foods, but it was the presenting of that food and the sharing of the meal that made conversation, music, and tomato tossing possible. And now, as a single lady looking to establish my own community in a state that is still very foreign to me, I’ve found a book club that comes complete with pot luck brunches once a month.
You may be asking by this point what the connection of food and community has to do with the Writing Center. Ideally, I would like to offer up the suggestion of a pot luck send off, a celebration of the time we have spent together and an offering of ourselves to the community we strive on a daily basis to shape and form. With such little time left and the chaos that the end of the semester brings, I’m not sure that it is even feasible to strive for such an event, so perhaps it is more of a suggestion for future orientations, as the community continues to grow and change, food can provide the catalyst to new conversations and opportunities.
But, as this idea has stewed, I also wanted to connect food and community to writing. In “Consuming Prose: The Delectable Rhetoric of Food Writing,” Lynn Bloom quotes food historian Massimo Montanari discussing food as a type of discourse:

"“Just as in verbal sentences, one or more protagonists,” the principal
foods, whether meat or grain dishes (equivalent to nouns), “are in the
center of the action,” accompanied—in their syntactic place—by appetizers,
side dishes, desserts.Condiments serve as the meal’s adjectives and adverbs.
“Food acquires full expressive capacity,” concludes Montanari, “thanks to the
rhetoric that in every language is its necessary complement. Rhetoric is the
adaptation of speech to the argument,to the effects one wants to arouse or
create. If the discourse is food, that means the way it is prepared, served,
and eaten”. "(Bloom 347)

So perhaps in preparing a dish for a pot luck, one is intrinsically creating a story about themselves. It may be an introduction of the self to a new community or it may be a reinforcement of who the individual is – especially when calling upon grandma’s famous apple pie recipe or traditional hot tamales!

You can take this as food for thought or let it marinate a bit as I did to come to a better grasp of what the presentation of food can mean for the presentation of self and the building of community. After all, when we define community as a group of people with some common interest or aspect, what greater commonality do we have than the need for food?