The story below is a preview from our November/December 2017 issue. For the full story Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
The magazine’s dining writer puts years of fad diets and food-is-fuel behind her to re-realize what she learned in childhood: the significant value of sitting down with friends and family to a meal well-prepared, in a dining room nicely appointed, with conviviality and fellowship the result.
I’ll never forget my initial reaction when Roanoker Editor Kurt Rheinheimer emailed to tell me his dining writer for the magazine was moving on, and would I consider “auditioning” for the gig?
“Oh,” I said out loud to the computer screen, “bless his heart. He thinks I’m a foodie.”
I am not.
Because I don’t consider myself a foodie, I almost wrote back, Thanks, but no thanks. You’ll want a foodie for that job. Fortunately, I didn’t do that and instead agreed to meet with him. Together, we discussed what dining is. We agreed that while dining is about food, it isn’t only about food. In fact, dining is about much more. Dining is an art form and a fellowship. It is stewardship and community. In short, dining is a meal, a togetherness.
If you’ve read (almost) any of my articles, you know I’m a farm girl from south-central Illinois. My dad raised hogs, and grew corn, wheat and soybeans. We kept a large fruit and vegetable garden that provided the bulk of our produce throughout the year. In the summertime, my mother’s kitchen was an amalgam of garden smells, canning jars and stock pots. I knew what was in season by the sun’s heat on my back as I raided the garden, and the smells of canning vegetables wafting through our home.
Besides the garden, my mother baked our breads and desserts. She partnered with a local food co-op for our dried and bulk food items. Of course, we had plenty of pork with the rest of our meat coming from a local butcher. Our meals truly were the visible fruits of my parents’ collective labors. They were also actual meals: dining together as a family, even if that meant picnicking in the back of the farm truck parked on a field road for lunch, or at 9 p.m. ‘round the kitchen table during planting or harvest times.
Without understanding it, I was being raised with the idea that food is more than ingredients in a dish. Food is part of a larger communion. But as an adult I lost sight of this. Through decades of fad diet crazes, I turned eating into a methodology (paleo or zone dieting) and a mantra (food is fuel). I treated food—in every situation—as means to an end, instead of the soul-enriching experience it is meant to be.
I liken my “food is fuel” years to the story of the Prodigal Son. Intuitively, I knew food was more than fuel, but it took a job I didn’t think I was qualified for, and months of dining in and meeting with owners of our area’s restaurants for my soul to be restored.
It happened as I listened to the story of two Greek brothers who left successful law careers in New York City so they could come to Roanoke (Roanoke!) and share their passion for Greek home cooking. It happened when I heard the story of a restaurant burned to the studs by fire, and the Bedford community that rallied to build it back again. It happened when I sat with my husband and two of my sons in a booth at the Roanoker Restaurant, eating comfort food on a day we would later say goodbye to our beloved German shepherd. It was restored by the owner who calls his dining space a ‘living room’ and the chef who turns preparing bar food into an art form.
I don’t have the space to name every restaurant and its owner, but every single one has had a part in restoring my understanding of food as a fellowship and offering—not just ingredients to be consumed.
This idea of dining as an opportunity at togetherness is one that desperately needs resurrecting in our culture. Maybe this is why I approach dining writing the way I do. By offering to you, the reader, the story of the restaurant—the people and vision that make it go—my hope is you will experience dining in Roanoke as I do: a gift and a fellowship, a meal prepared out of love, presented in earnestness, meant to be enjoyed in conviviality. In the same way that my childhood dinner table helped form the spirit of my family, Roanoke’s restaurants are growing our town’s soul.
Being The Roanoker’s dining writer is a continual gift to me. It is a gift I hope I am passing on to you. The table is set. The meal prepared. Together let us eat, drink, fellowship and become whole.
… for the rest of this story and more from our November/December 2017 issue, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
