“We’re all somehow connected to food – as growers or makers or servers and certainly, as eaters. Food and eating are universal and existential. But each of us has a unique, very personal relationship with food.”
Feast of Humanity
Food has many faces. A farmer watching tips of green emerge from spring soil. A young woman wracked by the emotional and physical agony of anorexia. A chef creating a masterpiece from simple ingredients.
Feast of Humanity is a kitchen table of sorts around which people engage and explore their individual and shared food and life stories. To what end? I believe that exploring food and its central importance to our lives and our humanity can generate self-awareness, empathy toward others’ views, and energy for collective action to ensure a wholesome diet for all.
What’s Here?
This website is a place where I can shine a light other people’s stories. Individually, the stories are fun and interesting, sometimes quirky or emotional. Collectively, they are a powerful exploration into the breadth and depth of food in humanity.
I’ve compiled a downloadable mini-collection of the stories for you to enjoy. If you’re an educator, you can also use the booklet and the accompanying lesson plan to guide high-school and college students on a journey to a better understanding of food in their lives and the lives of others.
The blog gives me a place to share my experiences with the story collecting process, thoughts on current issues around food, and insights into my ever-evolving food story. I offer up additional resources that I’ve found useful in my writing and explorations of food and empathy.
Collecting and curating these stories and resources has heightened my sense of wonderment and awe of the richness and complexity of the common human experience that is food. After all, food is not just nutrients, it’s a daily feast of humanity.
Ruth Ann Carpenter
Food has been central in my struggle to define my identity. It provided (temporary) comfort as I flailed through the emotional upheavals of childhood and adolescence. I restricted food to lose the weight I gained from my attempts to numb feelings with Hostess HoHos. Music, drawing, painting, and dancing weren’t my creative outlets – cooking was. And though my food journey continues, my relationship with food has settled into a healthy balance of nutrition, pleasure, and professional achievement.
The seed for this project was sown when I was in graduate school for nutrition and dietetics. As I immersed myself in studies of nutrients, metabolism, and disease processes, I realized I needed to find a way to also celebrate food in its role as a connector and convener of people. Knowing that stories are a powerful way for people to learn and reflect, I took a sabbatical year and interviewed people across the U.S. about their relationship with food. This website and forthcoming book are my ways of spreading the food and eating wisdom others have shared with me.
