"'I don't understand how a young couple can begin life by buying a sofa or a television,' he said indignantly to me. 'Don't they know the table comes first?' The table comes first. The table comes first, before the meal and even before the kitchen where it's made. It precedes everything in remaining the one plausible hearth of family life, the raft to ride down the river of our existence even in the hardest times. The table also comes first in the sense that its drama - the people who gather at it, the conversation that flows across it, and the pain and the romance that happen around it - is more essential to our real lives, and also to the real life of food in the world, than any number of arguments about where the zucchini came from, and how far it had to travel before it got here. If our questions of food matter, it is because they imply most of the big fights about who we are - our notions of clan and nation, identity and the individual. Civilisation is mostly the story of how seeds, meats, and ways to cook them travel from place to place. The parts of that story are surely things that everyone should know, if only because they lead us to who we are."
Adam Gopnik, 'A Small Starter' from The Table Comes First
It seems like the only thing people can talk about at the moment is food. I'm guilty. I write about it, I take photos of it, I meet people and we eat it and write about it and take photos of it - not at the same time. It consumes me, just as I consume it. I spend hours on Kinfolk and this new one, Gather Journal. I think about starting something of my own, soon, soon. I put it off, so that I can go out for breakfast. I know that all of this means something but I just don't know what. I buy Adam Gopnik's The Table Comes First. Suddenly, it all makes sense.
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