✦ The Sharing of Loaves

Aimee Nezhukumatathil ✦ Baked Goods



Flour on the floor makes my sandals slip and I tumble into your arms. Too hot to bake this morning but blueberries begged me to fold them into moist muffins. I want our summers to always be like this — **a kitchen wrecked with love**, a table overflowing with baked goods warming the already warm air. After all the pots are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters wiped clean — let us never be rescued from this mess.

Anthony Bourdain ✦ Les Halles



You need love.

Hopefully it's love for the people you're cooking for, because the greatest and most memorable meals are as much about **who you are with** as they are about **what you are**. But love for what you're doing, and for the ingredients you're doing it with, will more than suffice. I suggested once to a maniacal barbecue professional that cooking well was not a profession, it was a calling. He laughed and went further: "it's an illness." I knew just what he meant. **You must like cooking for other people, even if you neither know nor like them.** You must enjoy the fact that you are nourishing them, pleasing them, giving the best you've got.

Julie R. Thomson ✦ Cooking For Other People



Performing an act for another human being, like cooking for them, is a form of altruism. Cooking gave us the meal and the meal gave us civilization. If you’re cooking for someone, even if they’re not present during the act, it can absolutely bring a sense of closeness in that you’re **expressing your love** and your care for someone. It’s a very intimate activity. And providing them with something that they potentially need, you’re really showing them that they have your support, your love, your backing, and that’s the kind of thing that really, really promotes well being, positive growth and closeness within relationships. It’s self care, **it’s taking care of others**, it’s physical care, it’s mindfulness, and it hits on meeting basic needs for yourself and others. There are a lot of pieces that come into cooking a meal for other people.

Louise O. Fresco ✦ Why We Eat Together



The table is a place of memory where we become aware of **who we are and with whom we are**. Around the table, all previous meals come together in every meal, in an endless succession of memories and associations. The table is the place where the family gathers, the symbol of solidarity, or indeed the backdrop to family rows and childhood tragedies. At the table we relive our youth through the recipes of the past, our hatred of endive or liver, teenage love through that first failed canard à l’orange, the sadness of the unarticulated apology, the tears of loneliness that mixed with the burnt cauliflower, the sensuality of fingers dipped in an airy sauce mousseline. Eating around a table means both *eating and talking*, if only to say a few words of praise for what is presented to us. At the table we talk about what we’ve eaten before and what we’re going to eat and everything in between. With that same sensitive organ, the mouth, **we taste and consume, speak and kiss**.

Joy Harjo ✦ Perhaps the World Ends Here



The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must **eat to live**. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on. It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women. **At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow.** We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks. Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.