What is it that keeps bringing me back to food? Of course, I love the tastes. I love the opportunity it gives us to create. But there is something so much deeper. Food brings people together. It is marriages, it is births and deaths. It is healing, and not only physically, but socially. In lands where people are polarized due to global labels and perceived imbalances, food brings love unifying those who are separated by their labels.
Estrangement and alienation fall away like autumn leaves when time is taken to be closer to someone that we do not understand. Food is the finest way to bridge the gaps and close the discrepancy. Mothers all over the world call a truce, everyone laying down their weapons of ignorance to show respect and to finally step into the light of finding we have more in common with each other than we do not.
The food placed before me may show me the story of your wars, your famines, your exploration of the seas of the world, your sadness, your joy, your unions, and your losses. It can be such an intimate thing, and when it is, there is no option but to feel and respect and to learn.
When we leave franchise food by the wayside and settle in at the thousands of tables that tell the personal tales of mothers and grandmothers staking their claim on the world by way of an abstract flanking approach because the world was too small-minded to understand their beautiful individuality and mentorship, our existence transforms from 2 dimensions to 3.
Fine dining restaurants feature a dish pioneered by a family on the edge of starvation, and of refugees creating what they can by mixing their heritage and what a land foreign can give them. Take the walk, let no flashy billboards prevent you from making friends, following the food, and tasting the heart and soul of those who gladly give that experience to those who listen to the language that is the food.
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