“Food is our common ground, a universal experience.."-James Beard

Food memoir is best ingested through the eyes. A subgenre of autobiography, it has become known to be a form of autobiography, intertwining narratives of family life, travel, growth and the author's representation of an evolving 
self through ones palate. The Shared Table is a haven for self-revelation. Shared implies you are not alone in the experience of eating. Eating is an act that, at time, requires others to provide a context for laughter, tears, and arguments and even silences-punctuated by the chorus of utensils and music of consumption. Yes, the importance of educations and labor is important but we never seem to slow down anymore. Something we should share and experience with each other. Less and less do we stop and regard what life what life has to offer us in the form of food and drink, a part of my daily living.

A shared meal reiterates and supports generosity. It strengthens relationships and reminds us of the basics of life, of human nature. The kitchen and dining room are classrooms, battlefield, ballrooms, bedrooms and libraries. They are places for round-tables, philosophies, debates, confessions and interrogation. Food provides us something to quest for and talk about afterward, giving rise to literature itself. All writers have the ability to bring to life, experiences and ideas that other people cannot. They can make the reader feel connected to a story about a stranger, or a place they have never been. “Food writers make explicit what native eaters know in their hearts, minds, palates.”

Dining, food, eating, the culinary experience allows us to come together, appreciate what others have experienced and relate those experiences to our own lives. One can revive a past experience with family or friends. Food keeps memories intact. We can almost taste a childhood dish and remember where we were, how we felt, what we were wearing, and whom we were with. We remember barely being able to reach the top drawer just below the edge of the counter but wanting, begging to help an adult prepare a meal. We watched wrinkled hands of our grandmother or deft fingers of our parents chop and kneed. We watched their foreheads fold into Vs as they contemplated the precise texture for a sauce or stew.

There is a flaw that has come out of culinary memoir. We tend to assume that to write interesting prose on culinary experiences one has to have experienced lands far and wide, exotic ingredients and have to have the means to do so. However, some of the most poignant stories of food come from our own backyards, or kitchens, rather. Holiday morsels, special occasion meals, and childhood favorites are just as interesting and as significant as that one unforgettable you can still taste as if it were yesterday. The food writer writes about the foods themselves as well as the categorization. They learn how food morphs from its raw form into a prepared dish, as itself or part of another whole, how it contributes, what it’s function is, how, how the foods are prepared poached, roasted, grilled, steamed or sautéed. They contribute to and become part of in the grammar of cuisine by creating something that every individual can interpret differently. Food is the dialogue and the language is how it is prepared, presented and consumed. It was an old Chinese proverb that said, “Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.” I follow with some of my fellow food writers on a similar path, “Those who can’t cook, write.”