SHOW YOU CARE
Luxuries of extravagance don’t cut it anymore. Feeling nourished with moments of intimacy and togetherness take centre stage now.
If you were to ask me what the new luxe looked like at the start of the year, I would have said it was all about less is more. In the face of climate change, the refugee crisis and the politics of food supply, showy displays of extravagance just didn’t cut it anymore. In these complicated times, post-covid, I think we can add the idea of supporting each other and feeling nourished with moments of intimacy and togetherness as things that make us feel well-treated.
Fifteen years ago, writer Francine du Plessix Gray wrote a piece for the New Yorker entitled “Starving Children”, which described the importance of dining together around the table. Her words seem even more relevant today: “The fact that we may be witnessing the first generation in history that has not been required to participate in that primal rite of socialisation, the family meal. The family meal is not only the core curriculum in the school of civilised discourse, it is also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and our animal greed; and cultivate a capacity for sharing and thoughtfulness. Dinner rituals have nothing to do with class, or with working women’s busy lives, or any particular family structure.”
The author dined with families in all kinds of different situations around the world — family dinners with boiled potatoes in Siberia, bowls of watery gruel in the Sahara and platters of deli cold cuts with welfare mothers in Chicago. She says “the unifying factor was the grace with which they were offered and the sight of youngsters learning through experience the art of human companionship”.
Let’s not forget, though, that cooking does take time and effort. As du Plessix Gray says, “The home meal requires genuine sacrifices of time and energy, large expenditures of those very traits it nurtures — patience, compassion, self-discipline.”
Perhaps it is this, this simple idea of giving of your time and care to nourish others with the food you have thoughtfully prepared, that best expresses an idea of what luxe means today. Time, after all, is our most valuable asset. Coupled with an idea of provenance — knowing where the food we eat has come from and that it has been grown and prepared ethically — is essential to creating a sustainable future for us all.
Celebrating fresh, locally grown food at home around the table is a simple way to tread more lightly on the planet. It also helps support this country’s economic recovery and is a good way to reduce the intake of (often imported) processed industrial food in our diets. Most of all it says: “I care.”
Welcome to the new luxe, where it’s all about eating fresh, eating local — and eating together.