While I’m waiting for stuff to happen in the kitchen (bread to rise, apples to cook down), I grab a cookbook and browse. Today I picked Marcus Samuelsson’s The Soul of a New Cuisine. Samuelsson is an Only in America story: Orphan in Ethiopia gets adopted by a Swedish family and becomes a successful restaurateur in New York. This particular cookbook is about the cuisines of Africa. The foreword was authored by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and contains this resonant excerpt:
“We say in Africa that a person is a person through other persons. A solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. We are made for togetherness, for friendship, for fellowship. Food is a part of that fellowship. We are created to live in a delicate network of interdependence and we are different precisely in order to know our need of one another.”
Food for thought today. Happy Thanksgiving.
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