How food brings us together

“With good friends…and good food on the board…we may well ask, When shall we live if not now?”

M.F.K. FISHER, THE ART OF EATING

‘So what do you do?’ 

It’s a simple question that I don’t have a straightforward answer to. I'm a Cordon Bleu-trained chef and I’ve been running Rachel’s Kitchen Cookery School since 2010. I'm also a facilitator at Curve, planning and running brilliant workshops for companies big and small.  

Like so many seemingly unrelated things, the two are similar in many ways. Through both cooking and workshops, we bring people together. Learning skills as they go, they build personal connections, come up with new ideas and create something new. They leave happy and with a sense of accomplishment.

As well as teaching cooking to individuals and groups, I also use cooking for team-building. The goal of team-building is to bring colleagues together through an activity that takes them away from their work and out of their comfort zones. Research by Alex Pentland at MIT shows that the best predictors of productivity are a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings, and that energising groups with such activities creates teams that communicate and perform better.

By using cookery as a team-building activity, people share experiences and create stories together that allow them to build trust and connection. This in turn strengthens their relationships at work. It's also a leveller, with everyone getting messy, sticky and stuck in - no matter what their job title is.

I've seen this firsthand - the meringue bowl is tipped upside down over everyone's head and we all laugh. The best piping is done by someone unexpected and we enjoy the results. The results taste even better for the sense of pride that comes from making them, step by step. 

Cooking together brings people together.

Food is a timeless way to not only satisfy physical hunger but to enable connection as we relax and enjoy eating together around a table. Research from the University of Oxford shows that the more often people eat with others the more likely they are to feel happy and satisfied with their lives.

In Spain there is a name for time at a table - the sobremesa is the time spent after a meal, talking and telling stories, and it encapsulates the joy of stopping and enjoying the company we find ourselves in, of eking out the pleasure of dining together.

“Food is more than survival. With it we make friends, court lovers, and count our blessings,” says Victoria Pope in this beautiful article in the National Geographic. The article explores the role of food in our history, from the evidence of meal preparation in a 300,000 year old cave near Tel Aviv, to Scott’s Arctic expeditions where a feast was prepared to celebrate Midwinter Day. “With such a dinner,” Scott wrote, “we agreed that life in the Antarctic Regions was worth living.”

Cooking and eating together are such unifying forces, yet since last year when Covid hit we have been apart, connecting through screens and hit by Zoom fatigue and a whole host of 'new normals'. 

So how does this play out in a pandemic? Most of us have spent the past year alone or with the same family, partner or housemates. Life has been altered but we still need to eat and we need human connection as much, if not more, than ever.

The biggest change for Rachel’s Kitchen in 2020 was that all classes moved online. I created simplified classes that needed minimal equipment and fewer ingredients that were easy to get hold of, along with alternative options for both - different kinds of flour that would all work, a wine bottle instead of a rolling pin, and an anything-goes mentality. I started teaching weekly lunchtime classes for WhatsApp, and one-off classes for companies who were aware that their staff were struggling with difficult situations, while isolated and unable to see each other in person. 

My biggest hit cookery class of 2020 was a remote Mulled Wine and Mince Pies class for the festive season. I taught hundreds of people how to make these festive staples as an alternative Christmas party and a way to gather remotely with colleagues, friends or family.

One of those remote parties was for all of my colleagues at Curve. Curve partner John Monks reflected on why this is such a powerful experience:

“Rachel gathered a group of people who, even though we'd been together daily on Zoom, hadn't been together in a physical sense for more than six months. We did an icebreaker to create connection, and then Rachel introduced us to the ingredients and the activity. She’d sent us all wonderful packages with mincemeat and wine and we’d all been to buy the extra ingredients. We turned our cameras to one side and started cooking - sometimes chatting, sometimes not - not looking directly at the screen, but feeling intensely together. But really, it was a real step-up of the togetherness, because we were doing the same activity, and it was practical and everybody's hands were sticky. It enabled us to connect in a completely different, much more enjoyable way, and with our families taking part as well. When the cooking was done, we put the mince pies in the oven, poured our mulled wine and drank together. The whole flow, anchored by the food and the cooking together, created a powerful sense of human connection.”

I’m amazed and touched when I see the photos of the food that participants share after classes. Usually, after an in-person cookery class we gather around the table to eat together as a team, a group of friends or family, or individuals who’ve only just met. In this online version, the experience and sharing of food is multiplied across countries and continents. I continue to be moved by the scale of it all. 

This doesn’t need to be something that’s facilitated. Teams can come together and share a favourite recipe with each other, and families and friends can do the same. There can be relief in being guided through our screens to make something without having to face the screen head-on.

My challenge to you is to bring a group together, whether it’s colleagues, family or friends, to share a recipe and cook together in this way, and to see what happens. Our worlds are opening up as I write this, and things will continue to shift, but let’s make the most of our connectedness and break bread together across countries and continents, and see the difference it makes.