Food can drive the power of community

It’s easy to get caught up in the endless obsession with food, you are what you eat and all that. 

It’s hard to turn on the TV or open a magazine without seeing recipes featuring sweet potatoes, avocados and acai berries, don’t eat sugar, don’t eat bread, stay indoors and go to bed.

I was told in the gym that the belly won’t go as long as I drink beer, so I considered staying home all the time rubbing my flat stomach and having no fun at all.

There must be a middle ground surely? Bad diet, processed food and a complete absence of exercise will inevitably lead to poor health, unless you are one of those people born with a cast-iron constitution.

I envy those people by the way. Also, I’d like to add that if I was given a week to live I would drink champagne and eat nothing but sausage rolls from a service station. I probably would only have a week to live after that, but a happy one.

Our bodies are stronger than we think and while it’s important to nourish them well and aim for good health, it isn’t just what we eat that matters, it’s how we eat and with whom.

While bad diet might get blamed for ill health and even heart disease, social isolation and loneliness are far more likely to make you put on weight and develop heart disease as a result of feeling unhappy and disconnected, raising your cortisol levels and so on.

In Ireland less and less time is spent sitting around the table together even one time in the day to share a meal. This was something that, when we grew up, was not just normal, but there was no leeway around it. Everybody seemed to be the same, and mealtime was just that —you sat, shared, ate, appreciated your mother’s cooking and then fought over who did the washing up.

While this seemed to be a total drag at the time, and I could never understand the huge effort that my mother put in, especially on a Sunday when endless pots bubbled, stuffings were made as well as a huge dessert, Mum seemed to know something — that this was important, end of, and eat your cabbage.

With my boys now 16 and 18 we have less and less meal times together, as one of them has the social life of Paris Hilton and the other is in Leaving Cert fun times.

Dinner time moves from between 5pm and 9pm but inevitably, even if my son doesn’t come home until 11pm, he and his brother will cook and eat in the kitchen, I think they once had their dinner at 1am, but they will sit down and eat at the table.

Sharing food and eating together is important. Watching a documentary called Happy which featured communal living in Denmark, the occupants take turns to cook, so adults cook once or twice a month then everybody eats together, how nice, warm and fun that must be.

In our homes we eat with our families, flatmates or maybe partners, or alone. In a block of flats for older people, behind my house, it occurred to me that each person in there probably prepares a meal for themselves and eats alone, every day. It’s not just them of course, this is how we live now.

A neighbour and friend of mine recently has gone through a number of hard times in close succession in her life. I was at the point of “god why have I left it so long to call over, I’d better call over now or I am a bit of an ass”.

I was going to bring a plant but I didn’t have any plants so I thought about what she likes and grabbed a new jar of fermenting kimchi. In case she wasn’t at home I wrote a note of how kimchi heals all, which I’m sure isn’t true but was worth it for the comic relief. She was happy to see me, but even happier to see kimchi.

“A gift of food”, she sighed as she opened the explodable jar and it fizzed up everywhere, lapped up by her appreciative and very surprised dog. Now I know that a jar of kimchi is no apple tart, you can’t exactly slice it up and share it around with a nice cup of tea but it smoothed the path and made way for hugs and chats.

How many times do you go to a friend’s house, maybe collecting a child or just for a quick visit and end up getting fed? Even a sausage sandwich can save your soul when you’re feeling ragged and in need of some love.

If this gives you ideas about baking a cake and dropping it into your neighbour who might be going through some hard stuff, great, do it. Better still, stay a while and share the cake, you don’t know just how much you might be doing.