ask a question at a table
fantastic people at a dinner. sean, brooksie, kam— sorry for not asking for your permission to post this.
Take art, for a moment, in its totality. Art is (in my mind) the attempted outward expression of an otherwise inarticulable emotional truth. Art is a hole, drilled hastily in the side of a high-pressure water barrel, allowing us to pour out through our own skin. Can food be art under these circumstances? That’s a tricky question. Is there an emotional truth that you can express with the perfect grilled cheese?
No, no there isn’t. The most perfect beef wellington in the world isn’t art— that is, not until the chef who’s preparing it takes a pause, for a moment, late at night behind his dimly-lit counter, to recall the smell of dough baking in his mother’s kitchen. An immaculately-battered leg of fried chicken isn’t art until the person eating it feels the existential peace that only food from their southern hometown can bring. Food isn’t art until we take a moment to attach it to ourselves. The most incredible meal from a $200/person restaurant couldn’t scratch the surface of artistic fulfillment until the diners begin to recall memories of the home-style dishes that inspired the main course, or until they begin to laugh, think deeply, and create new memories with their fellow culinary explorers. I’m trying to say this: to be enjoyable, food doesn’t need to be paired with the passion of the people preparing and consuming it, but to be profound, it absolutely does.
So how can we make a meal more meaningful? I mean, from what I’ve said, it's clear that simply scrutinizing its preparation more intensely and discussing its aromas with self-described “foodies” doesn’t help. To make a meal more meaningful, we need to think less about the ingredients and shape of the dish, and more about what the moment means— what emotional truth the meal can express. Most of the time, that emotional truth is the truth of joy and humor. Friends dying of laughter at a lunch table after a June swim are making an artistic masterpeice out of their hastily-prepared sandwiches. Sometimes, however, the emotional truth which can transform food into art is a more intense one. When we take time to ask serious questions while eating delicious food, and to listen intently to the answers, we can discover a certain, unique nirvana. For a while, my go-to question at group dinners was “what was the best day of your life?” Then, it was “what was the best night of your life?” Then, it was “What are you excited about for the next year?” Right now, I’m a big fan of “When did you realize your parents were human?” After asking a question like this, you have an opportunity to lose yourself in the church-like experience of learning the shape of someone else’s soul. That’s how a meal becomes more than food. It’s got to be paired with either our indiscriminate joy or our intentional emotional connection.
I have no idea if any of that made a lick of sense.