The following article by Blaine Sergew, a program director for the Nature Conservancy, was published on Monday, September 22, 2014 in the 'Room for Debate' section of the New York Times' Opinion pages.
By Blaine Sergew
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 22, 2014
When my husband and I got married, we made two promises to each other: We would never watch reality shows and we would always eat at least one meal a day together.
Let’s just say we fared better with the second promise.
My husband and I have worked out arguments over meal preparations, laughed through botched recipes. And when we sit down for a meal we stay connected.
We both grew up in Ethiopia and are from large families. Mealtimes were often beautifully choreographed chaos. But there was never any question about everyone eating together, primarily because we Ethiopians live under the vague threat that “he who eats alone, dies alone.”
That adage was so ingrained in me from an early age that I still remember the first dinner I had by myself when I came to the United States. In my aunt’s apartment in the Bronx, I ate a plate of re-heated doro wet – chicken stew –as the exhausted rumbling of the No. 1 train kept me distracted from the possibility of dying before I saw the Empire State Building.
Culturally, food has never been just about nutrition. It’s been about community and connection. Some of my fondest childhood memories center around family feasts prepared by a small army of bustling women who would work out hazy passive-aggressive impulses in the confines of a sweltering kitchen. It was where a delicate hierarchy of women had total control of their environment.
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