The gift of food has the power to turn enemies into friends
Among the FAQS listed on the website of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, are “Do you have a dress code?”; “Do you accept walk-ins?” and “Can I book the Red Hen for a private party?” To this list, another query should now perhaps be added: “Will I be served if I work for President Trump?” To which the answer proves to be, “Not on your nelly”.
On Friday evening, a family party of eight, including the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, pitched up for dinner at the Red Hen, a diminutive 26-seat restaurant whose thing is farm-to-table dining. No sooner had they got stuck into their $12 (£9) starter of cheese, than a member of staff recognised Sanders, and put in a call to the restaurant’s co-owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, who took a staff vote, and asked her to leave.
As restaurant slingingsout go, the whole affair seems to have been conducted with a maximum of decorum on either side: Wilkinson, by her own account, took Sanders aside and “explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation” – the upholding of which apparently obliged her to ask Sanders to leave. Sanders’s dignified response was, “That’s fine, I’ll go.” She even offered to pay for the cheese.
Sanders is not the only member of Trump’s team to have had restaurant trouble last week. On Tuesday, the secretary of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen, was enjoying “rusticmodern Mexican cuisine” at MXDC Cocina Mexicana in Washington when she was heckled by a group of protesters chanting, “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace.”(a subsequent statement by the department of homeland security press secretary described the protesters as people who “share [Neilsen’s] concern with our current immigration laws”.)
Getting heckled in a public place might perhaps be considered a normal part of the rough-and-tumble of political life. But refusing food to someone with whom you have ideological differences is an extraordinary denial of one of the deepest human instincts – hospitality. The anthropologist Professor Robin Fox, puts it like this: “All animals eat, but we are the only animal that cooks. So cooking becomes... the symbol of our humanity, what marks us off from the rest of nature.”
In the window of the Red Hen, according to the Washington Post, was displayed a placard quoting Martin Luther King: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend”. Well, food is love in tangible form, and as the chefs Yotam Ottolenghi (from a Jewish family) and Sami Tamimi (whose family is Muslim) pointed out in the introduction to Jerusalem, their 2012 cookbook celebrating the Arab and Jewish culinary traditions of the city where they grew up, sharing a meal can be a first step toward mutual understanding.
In their determination to occupy the moral high ground, Wilkinson and her staff seem to have lost sight of the fact that the best way to promulgate “honesty, and compassion, and cooperation” could have been to serve Sanders and her party with grace, despite their political differences.
When language fails, a plateful of the Red Hen’s pan-seared pork chop with goat-cheese grits and caramelised sunflower flats might just have offered a way of starting a dialogue.