Learning Discussion: Relationships & Food

40 min.   Fasten your seat belts, Maureen and Pierre discuss food. 

What is love of food?  How does food become a connection between two people, within a family, and more broadly create social fabric outside the home?  How is culture manifested through food - shout out to Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist.

What are people’s relationships with food? Pierre’s Italian / French family elevated the dinner experience to ritual.  The Italian side of his family "Tucci" is, to put it mildly, food obsessed.  Perhaps you’ve seen Pierre’s cousin on CNN and in the movies?  

Maureen relates Rajashree Choudhry’s take on food as a centering piece of Indian culture.  There are spiritual and sacred practices associated with food preparation and eating.

Pierre brings in Claude Levi-Strauss’ book The Raw and the Cooked, and Maureen and Pierre dive into the historical traditions around food watered down with modern approaches -fast food, snacking, eating on the go.  All diminish ritual, diminish connection between people and diminish connection to land and nature.  

A wide ranging conversation around food, regulating, and co-regulating, social fabric, child rearing and ritual.  The periodicity of food.  We eat three times a day, we have special meals weekly, we have holiday meals.  How do meals function in child rearing? How do meals function in religion?

Towards the end of the podcast - whoa wait, Pierre dives into Tolstoy and Anna Karenina?  Whoa.  What?  Check out the podcast. If you get to the end you’ll have a new take on Anna Karenina from its different translations and learn how this podcast actually started.

It’s a long listen, but a pretty interesting meandering from food to anxiety to podcasting to Anna Karenina - this is conversation kids!