WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT…
Kay Plunkett-Hogge considers food and togetherness, the zingy freshness of native oysters and the joys of Jamaican brown sauce
food for thought.
COUNTER ENCOUNTERS
Helen Rosner, The New Yorker food correspondent, tweeted recently: “Can we retire the lazy, empty, self-congratulatory trope that ‘food connects people’? Because it doesn’t. People connect people. It’s not the food, it’s the table.” Or the mat on the floor.
I think about this a lot, especially having lived and cooked in quite a few countries. And, while I think Rosner makes a valid point, it’s not the trope that’s lazy, it’s the people saying it. Like those who leave out “the love of” and cut straight to “money is the root of all evil”. The last bit means something entirely different from the whole sentence.