By Jacob Ward
These days, when people ask me how I’m doing, my response is always chosen from an unchanging selection of “okay”, “pretty good”, or “not too bad”. Behind the façade, though, I’m disheartened. Our country feels delicate right now, made weaker by publicized malice and bigotry. More so than I can ever remember, our perceived differences are pulling us apart with more force than our similarities can hold us together. A phenomenon made stronger by malice and bigotry, stoked publicly online and frequently overflowing into real-world violence.
I began thinking about this essay as a defense of the dinner table and its perceived power to heal our differences, and bandage over our divisions. A careful fitting of wooden slabs and legs, polished, and imbued with magic properties. I distinctly recall the dining room of my childhood; how we could shoehorn everyone to the table with a couple folding chairs and a table leaf – unusual instruments reserved for special occasions when nobody minded squeezing together. It is often said that the busyness of the US Senate dining room, where members of both parties gather for meals, is a decent indicator of decorum in Washington. The legend of the dinner table had even reached our country’s highest office. In his farewell address, President Ronald Reagan said that, “all great change in America begins at the dinner table.” For a long time that was a claim that I deeply believed. Not because I’d ever studied it, but because I liked the way it felt. I wanted to believe that we could change the world if only we’d sit down and share a meal first. I knew it was hard to spew hate with a mouthful of carbonara. I thought I’d seen the magic myself, many times over, in my own home and in the homes of friends and family. I still felt the alchemical vibration given off by those table leaves and folding chairs. The dinner table, I thought, might be the last refuge of civility, and openness to new ideas, in a world that had seemingly left those things behind. A place where we could break bread without distraction and challenge the world’s hard truths without judgement. A place where we could sit down as foes, but leave as friends.
But the longer I thought about it in recent months, the more convinced I became that this was little more than a tired adage. My witnessing it before was no testament to some mystical power. The people sitting around my table simply agreed about the same basic truths. In fact, the times I had shared meals with those with whom I deeply disagreed, the mood either devolved into bitterness, or was hushed with the awkward, unspoken resolution to agree to disagree. The dinner table is no diplomat; nor is it the provenance of great change in America. Not because it is incapable of those things, but because we expect it to work all on its own. To be anything more than a platitude, we need an entry point, and there is no better entry point at the dinner table than the food on our plates. Food gives plenty, but for food to give us anything more than our basic nourishment requires a deliberate openness. Like anything worth doing, we get out only an equivalent to the effort we put in. But for those willing to look and listen, food is an excellent teacher.
Everything on our plates can spawn a revelation, including the plate itself. Every piece of food is saturated with stories and histories. Some are conspicuous while others lie buried beneath layers of deceit and misrepresentation. Some so intertwined with other stories as to render their own histories mere testaments to the beauty and folly of humanity. The white-worn edges of a lacquered bento box can point to Japanese heritage, but are also reminders of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan. One-pot dishes like purloo and the cuisine of the Lowcountry carry the history of the Gullah people, and the forced transit of their customs from West Africa. Bánh mì thịt is now common street food in Vietnam, but came to be after baguettes followed France into its colonial invasion of Southeast Asia.
The charm of the humble sesame seed is that it tells a story of not one culture, but of cultures the world over. Nowadays grown primarily in China, Tanzania, India and Sudan, sesame is a supporting actor, if not the star, in cuisines on every continent. Combined with rice flour and fried, sesame seeds make the Chinese dessert Jian dui, subtle variations of which you might find in Japan, Indonesia, Korea and the Philippines. Jian dui with coconut makes kuih bom in Malaysia. The Vietnamese adaptation, called bánh cam, is sometimes filled with meat and vegetables. Ground into paste, sesame makes tahini, the outspoken ingredient in hummus, and the base of a range of dishes from Greece to Gaza. Toasted before it’s ground, and sesame becomes sesame paste, a key ingredient in Sichuan Dan Dan noodles. Toasted and pressed, sesame yields a flavored oil omnipresent in Japanese and Korean cooking. The seeds even find themselves adorned on hamburger buns and ‘everything’ bagels, like crown jewels in all their miniature glory.
The food we buy is a window into our lives and the things we value. It can reveal the emphasis we place on our health, our traditions, our religion, our political preferences. It’s often a measure of our wealth, or lack thereof. Shopping at Whole Foods is sometimes less about buying organic produce than it is a spectacle of status. A basketful of vegan ingredients might indicate an interest in climate change. Apparently if you buy Goya brand beans you support the president, or perhaps it’s simply what’s available in your local market.
Food is powerful because it is a common thread between issues of racism, immigration, and welfare. We also need it to survive. And in that way it can be unifying, which I think is the subtle notion that makes the adage of the dinner table so long lived. Deprived of food for too long and anyone of us would perish. So it is remarkable the level of implicit trust we place in those people who cook and carry and cultivate our food. Food can unify a fractured people if we together remove the veil of politics and look hard at the system by which we all exist. But food isn’t just a means to nourishment; it is also an entire industry that is extremely complex and highly politicized.
According to the USDA, only a quarter of all crop farmworkers – those who cultivate our fruits and vegetables – are US-born. Half of all crop farmworkers in the United States are here without legal status, although non-government sources report this number closer to 75% (people here without citizenship or visa are often reluctant to say so to government statisticians). 64% of all farm laborers are Hispanic. In restaurants, the majority of people bringing us our food are white. But the majority of those preparing it are people of color (except in “fine dining”, where you’ll find that 8 in 10 employees are white). Women and people of color more often employed by fast food restaurants, where wages are low, than they are by fine dining establishments where wages are high. Simply put, to eat food in America is to benefit from the toil and creativity of people of color, and of people who are told, and walled off, and arrested, and intimidated to stay out of this country.
To anyone who claims immigrants and migrants, legal and otherwise, are robbing US-born citizens of their jobs – a common defense of hardline anti-immigration ideology – look no further than food. The federal H-2A visa program is a program farms use to hire seasonal foreign laborers. Before a farm can hire a foreigner through the program, it must first prove that it was unable to hire a US citizen. Since 2005 the number of H-2A visas issued has grown by 430%. Which means one of two things, if not both: US citizens don’t want to do the work themselves, or the wages offered are too low. In fact, wages for a farmworker are typically half of the average wage of a non-farm worker. A study from the Economic Policy Institute, using 2015 figures from the US Department of Labor, estimates the average take-home pay of a seasonal farmworker is less than $18,000 per year. The full-time equivalent wage of $30,000 is just about half of the average off-farm wage. If you’re frustrated by the slow 3-4% growth of your wages over the last three decades, consider that the average farmworker has watched their wages grow by 1.1% over the same period. US citizens can take their work elsewhere and enjoy higher pay in vastly more comfortable conditions. Our industrialized food system is utterly broken without those who work for unlivable wages. Those who, more often than not, are people of color born outside of these United States. Because of them, not only do the rest of us get to eat food, we do so at a bargain. To our great shame we treat this country’s foodworkers to a subhuman respect, all while eating food brought to life by their hands. Those people who work in extreme outdoor conditions, and in the showering heat of cramped kitchens, so that we might eat. They deserve the salaries and dignity of public servants, yet they work for pennies.
Food is a miracle. It grows by water and sun and soil, but it does not get to our plates without the work of human beings. Food without human intervention is just a plant in the ground. But considered through an empathetic lens, one unclouded by political tribalism, food offers us all a doorway to change. The dinner table is broken because our food system is broken, because our immigration system is broken, because our politics are broken, because our relationships are broken, because we’re broken. For all of those things our Union feels broken. And for the first time in my life the tenuousness of our bond as Americans feels exposed. Rhetoric seems a lonely soldier, swinging swords at an enemy long left from the battlefield. Instead my hope lies with empathy, that we might use something as routine as food to see one another more clearly, and come to celebrate our differences rather than disparage them.
Empathy is in some ways built by realizing our proximity to, and the trust and reliance we unknowingly have in others. Food is impartial, but it is not without a tale. Food is information unfiltered. It carries forever the imprint of the person who picked it, sorted it, washed it, drove it, cut it, steamed it, froze it, and stocked it on the shelf; a person who often looks, thinks, and feels differently than we do. Empathy is recognizing that 1 in 8 families in the United States struggles to find its next meal. It’s recognizing that “voting with your dollar,” politicizing, and boycotting food is privileged, no matter the circumstances.
Sitting around a table alongside the people with whom we disagree often ends in disagreement. I don’t mind disagreement. In fact, I think it’s very much necessary. What I mind is hate. What I mind is a mind permanently closed to other perspectives, a mind that selectively filters the information it doesn’t want to acknowledge. I mind a mind that reads the information herein and says, that’s the way it is. So long as that’s our attitude, that’s the way it is. The dinner table is broken, but empathy is not. Next time we sit for a meal, let’s consider the hands that made it. Wouldn’t we all be a little better off for it?