Food Snobs Don’t Build Longer Tables
We all know how polarized we are, but signs of it appear everywhere and keep catching me off guard. We have certain taglines in our little circles. Build a longer table is the progressive foodie’s phrase of resistance to those categorized as wall builders.
In the past few years I’ve heard this phrase over and over again, often referring to a benevolent celebrity chef who uses their platform to feed the hungry or survivors of natural disasters.
What does it mean to build a longer table — practically — for us?
I look, of course, to the Italian family dinner table, which shaped not just my palate, but my ability to sit and listen, to wait my turn, to set my own limits, to raise my voice when I needed, and to see how different each voice, each perspective, and each person was — all at the same table.
Italians have a particular gift of not just bringing people, but events together. Need a last minute party to look fabulous? Call an Italian. But an Italian meal is more than festive optics thrown together. This is a carefully orchestrated process that, done with intention, could unify even the most divided crowds. It sets the stage for unity. Left unchecked, the Italian dinner table could stretch for miles.
From the individual greeting of intense hugs and kisses to aromas from the kitchen and would make anyone with a nose salivate, to the sense of abundance — all needs cared for — and the happy chaos that invites the loudmouth to yap and the introvert to sit by and watch, happily entertained.
There will be music — recorded or sung by a family member. There will be alcohol — with and after the meal. There will be a fight. There will probably be tears of sadness and joy. There will be indigestion. Someone long forgotten will be remembered in a shared poignant moment. Most of the differences in the room will melt away with some laugher and limoncello. And aside from one of the uncles making a shady deal in the corner of the yard with some slicked-hair dude in a white fake leather jacket that nobody’s met, it’s all there for everyone to experience.
It sounds old-fashioned when we realize most of our gatherings now are lonely as fuck because we are glued to our phones, in our own little worlds, barely even able to take one another in anymore. We are losing patience for the beating and bleeding hearts right before us, trading them in for an illusive reality on a screen but barely looking at and listening to each other.
Those of us who try to translate the lessons transmitted to us through food and family find ourselves in a world of cheap talk and even cheaper invitations to a table where the placard at your place setting can quite easily be replaced by one with someone else’s name on it…
…Someone more authentic. Someone with more followers. Someone who looks like a chef by day and a porn-star by night. Someone willing to grease up their thighs and sit on a beach in southern Italy having sex with a piece of pizza in February…because…uh…that’s real. Not.
Choose the real people. Invite them to your table.
There’s a race to be the most woke, to cover ourselves with all the trappings of being a food expert, to shame the one who takes shortcuts, and to steal each other’s ideas even if a few extra likes will cost a relationship.
The truth is that as long as as we shame people out of the kitchen, our table will never grow. As lovers of food and cooking, the thing we should take care to be most authentic about is our welcome — welcoming people to cook with us as we share our labors with them, and they share themselves with us, nourished by our presence as much as by our food.
Traditional Italian dishes vary so much from region to region and village to village that it’s almost impossible to quantify them without meeting every family in Italy. My recipes reflect the traditions of Italian cooking and sometimes include shortcuts because I believe that if we want to be practical about this table-enlarging we speak about — if we want to invite and include more people at the table — we need to be able to adapt and meet people where they’re at.
That girl with all the sponsors and the glossy cookbook full of recipes nobody will actually cook? Six pack pizza person on the beach in the winter? The troll shaming your recipes for not being “authentic” enough? It’s all Pizza Hut in terms of being “authentic.”
I’ll show you authentic: Sit down, shut off your phone, and break bread with me. Listen to me. Listen to yourself. Soon our hunger for more will go beyond food and to the “other” we’ll say, “pull up a chair”…and the table will grow.
