Cooking and Community: Looking at Taste as a Communal Experience

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Cooking and Community: 

Looking at Taste as a Communal Experience

By Olivia Modica

When I personally think of food and taste I think of the community beyond it. There are so many ways this can apply to life from the communal experience of eating at a restaurant to the community driven experience of eating with family or friends on a holiday. We look to not only what we are eating but who we are choosing to eat with. The experience of food and tasting can be impacted both by what we choose to eat with. For me personally, there are even foods I find I’ll only eat around certain people because they are who are important to me and I tend to associate those foods with them. For example, I associate my college friends with Domino’s because it tends to be something we all pitch in for together when we’re up late. 
Communal eating and cooking can be seen in many other cultures, however the one we talked about the most was West African traditions, especially revolving around Orishas. 
“he receive his offerings at the front door of practitioners' homes and eat first on ritual occasions, to the orishas' choice of dining companions.” (56, Religion in the Kitchen)

We can look at companionship not only in the Orisha but in the participation of multiple members of the family in cooking. Families bonding over cooking tends to be a fairly common occurrence, although it tends to be highly segregated by gender, as women are usually the ones expect to cook. Overall, I think when looking at the importance of taste and food, not only in religion but in life we have to look at the community driven aspects to see how and why it brings people together.


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