My Way | What I Know
In the Western household I grew up in, a weeknight dinner was a protein, a starch, and a vegetable. If there were two vegetables, someone had made an effort. The food arrived in serving dishes or directly on individual plates — portioned, sequential, done. You ate what was in front of you. When it was gone, dinner was over.The logic was efficiency: one pan, ideally. Thirty minutes, maximum. The meal existed to fuel the rest of the evening, and the rest of the evening was the point. Nobody was sitting at that table for the food. We were sitting there because sitting together was the rule, and the food was what we sat around.
There was love in it. I want to be clear about that. But the love was in the showing up, not in the spread. The table itself was not the gesture.