From the Editor
When new or future parents think about growing their families, some people think about planning out their nursery. Others might get excited about introducing the new baby to favorite music, activities, or the family pet. For me, I was the most excited about introducing a new, tiny human to food.
Years before I found out I was pregnant—before my husband and I even thought about having kids—I followed child nutritionists on Instagram and researched the best ways to feed infants. When Robin, my now-toddler, arrived I waited semipatiently for him to hit 6 months old so that he could join us during mealtimes. There was no baby cereal or apple sauce for this kid: Among his first foods were a quartered tomato, whole strawberries, and a chicken wing.
I’m not sure whether this immersion approach to the world of food has affected Robin’s food preferences at all. Now, a year later, he seems to have a fairly typical toddler palette—he has never met a carb he didn’t like but will immediately throw any offending green vegetable off his highchair tray. But I’ve come to realize that my excitement wasn’t about eating the food, exactly—it was more about teaching him to join in this communal experience that is so important to me, that I feel joins me with my family, the Earth, and with God.
On one hand, that connection is quite literal—for the first several months of Robin’s life, my husband or I would often have to scarf down dinner in shifts so the other person could hold the baby. At other times I’d eat one-handed on the couch while nursing Robin or while he slept curled in my arms. Now we have family dinners. We laugh as Robin figures out how to use silverware or at his funny faces while he stuffs his mouth, afraid of missing a bite. He steals bites from our plates and chatters to us in words that are slowly starting to make more and more sense. His first word was “all done!”
But the connections fostered by food go far beyond family dinners. Every time I cook a family recipe or use my grandma’s old measuring cups or juice glasses, I think of how much my grandparents would have loved meeting Robin, and I am glad
Robin is connected to the generations of people who come before him through food. Every time we go to the farmers’ market and Robin helps pick out the fruit and vegetables we cook with that week, I think of how food connects us to our local community. Every time we go to church and break bread together—whether at Communion or during coffee hour afterward—I think of how Robin is part of a global faith community. None of this might mean a lot to him now, but maybe next year, or the year after that, he will start to see how food serves as the ties that bind all of creation together.
The articles throughout this issue tell similar stories about how food drives relationships across ethnicities, citizenship, gender, generation, and social location. In “The Power of Food,” Patrick Saint-Jean, S.J. tells a story about soup joumou, both a beloved family dish and a symbol of Haitian independence from colonialism, and how a simple meal can be a symbol of communion that calls us to work for justice. In “A Global Crisis,” Carlos Barrio writes about the work of Catholic Relief Services in Somalia and describes how global food systems are all interconnected—from the Ukraine to Somalia to us here in the United States. Kelsey Harrington takes this interconnection one step further and, in “Body and Soul,” asks readers to remember not only where their physical food comes from, but their spiritual food as well. “When Catholics take Communion, we are not eating raw wheat and raw grapes; we are consuming a handmade creation, harvested by human hands,” she writes. And, finally, in “The Gospel in Action” José Ortiz tells how his grandparents taught him to live the gospel and drove his vocation to work for farmworkers and their families.
All these writers come from different corners of the globe and from very different backgrounds. But their underlying message is the same: Food is what connects us. It is a way to show love to one another. It teaches us that we cannot exist without one another. At its core, this is the message I hope to pass on through family meals, trips to the farmers’ market, and cooking dinner together.
—Emily Sanna