Reminiscing over those family meals from one’s childhood, (not the daily meals with parents, brothers and sisters, but shared ones, in large gatherings at one of the homes of a family member, with more or less distant relatives, during religious holidays, birthdays, weddings, summer holidays …) is an incredible indicator of what your childhood was like, of what it is still, and of the world ahead.
If it was a happy childhood, what is generally remembered from these meals are the memory of long bursts of laughter, joyful conversations and the reunions that were both curious and tender. If the childhood was less so, what is remembered is the boredom we had to cope with during the moments shared with a cousin, an aunt, and people from whom we did not expect any tenderness and from whom we had nothing to learn. Or, for the worst childhoods, it was a hellish moment, during which adults threw terrible truths at each other, collapsed under the weight of alcohol, incessantly bickered among each other and took out their anger on the children. And at times, perhaps worst, we do not remember these meals at all because the lack of a family or childhood meant that there weren’t any… or that by choice, we succeeded at erasing those memories.
Today, these meals are generally more limited, shorter and rarer. Moreover, these meals generally occur at a restaurant. Perhaps it is because families are much more scattered, or it may be that we do not want to spend four hours at the table with quasi-strangers who reunite sporadically; Or it could be because we cannot, or will not, share a meal with those who are not, like us, vegetarian or vegan, or dieting, or allergic to this or that. It could also be that no one wants to spend five hours cooking to prepare a meal, and that we rather choose our meal than share it. Or it could also be that the size of our apartments no longer allows for it. Or it could also be that other factors are holding us back: our other friends, a show, a match, and so many other things. And that it is no longer possible to force a teenager to spend an afternoon at a table listening to memories, conversations, and projects of quasi-strangers in a drowned world. Everywhere on the planet, the rarity of family meals, which during the last century, at least in rural families, occupied every Sunday until late in the afternoon at each other’s homes under the authority of a patriarch, actually says a lot of what we have won and lost with our new way of life.
It says a lot about our preference for what is fast, ephemeral and selective.
But also, for many, the best of these meals are taken today without hypocrisy, between people who have really selected each other: stepfamilies, sincere friends; without the constraints, if it can be considered as such, of blood ties or imposed social practice.
If it is premonitory of the future, these evolutions tell us the following: be free, choose with whom to be happy, do not give in to rites that are mostly conventional, share moments of happiness only with those you have chosen and with those whom you want to leave the best memories.
As such, family meals will no longer be moments of juxtaposed solitude, but rather a moment when we truly share our assumed gratitude for each other.
On one condition, as any great tradition, we must leave places at the table for the weaker and more solitary among us, from whom we received so much in the past; and for the foreigner; equally welcoming them as a blessing sent from heaven.