Sharing our foods in an atmosphere of simple elegance and goodwill |
A Signature Project of |
Beyond Eating: Ways to Enjoy the Festival
of Potluck Foods
by Jim Boushay & Rickey Sain Sr.
There’s lots of ways to enjoy the Festival of Potluck Foods. During the previous festivals at different sites, celebrants appreciated the experience both in practical and abstract terms. Some enjoyed it as a community banquet, uniquely reflective of Oak Park’s long-term commitment to diversity. Others delighted in it as a funky kind of off-beat feast in a funky kind of off-beat town. Still others appreciated the visually compelling array of foods from polyglot ethnic traditions.
Since the co-founding of the event in 1995, there have been practical and abstract interpretations of the potluck. Potluckers have explained away the gastronomic delights and devilish disasters of a traditional potluck gathering. Just as quickly they have also explained away the spiritual mysteries of a quasi-religious communion experience of everyone feasting at one table.
One refreshing interpretation places the festival context within the ageless tradition of people congregating for the breaking of the bread, for sharing a meal, for feeding the hungry, for giving hope to the weary in difficult times.
Obviously those daily actions are centuries-old, hardly new. Yet they continue to capture the serious attention of a pluralistic and circus-like culture. In response to the widely held belief that there’s nothing new under the sun, a friend's recent reply was on point about the ageless and new in combination. He said, “Everything that needs to be said has been said. Only, not everyone has had a chance to say it.”
Organizers work with activists, leaders, and citizens from all walks of life. Sometimes the festival is our and their chance—through grassroots civic engagement—to say something “new” about the democratic meaning in sharing and expressing ourselves through foods.
Feeding gives life, nurtures, is often seen as an action of social justice that enables community.
The work of planning and organizing the potluck event mostly happens collaboratively. Different kinds of help and goodwill are reciprocally given and received, sometimes under circumstances that are regrettably political or economic in impact.
Yet supporters and potluckers render vital assistance in a multitude of ways and sometimes under negative motivation. To expect otherwise might be dismissed as unrealistic, as naive. Affirmatively do we accept all practical offerings of assistance.
From the challenges of collaboration have arisen renewed understandings of important social justice and democratic ideals. Parity, for one. Equality of opportunity, for another. The sense of all of us in this together, for still another.
The collaborative process of planning and organizing the festival within a committee framework is a process that intentionally values social justice ideals. That process has occasioned newer awareness, newer acceptance of the rich complexity of American ethnic traditions and practices. The hundreds of potluck foods alone give expression to the rich and practical meaning of democracy.
The ideals have the capacity to call out of us the kinds of changes that sociologists, political scientists, and theologians refer to as “life changing,” “transformative,” “transcendent.” The gifts are prepared and shared by potluckers of nearly every social, economic, and religious background.
Democracy is made visible in the fully fabulous feast of foods and faces. The heart of the potluck festival is making real the back-and-forth action of engaging people through their food gifts. Indeed all food gifts are of us, by us, and for us. That involves adopting a give-and-take spirit of goodwill and mutuality.
It serves as an example of citizens of goodwill coming together in peace and hope—that being a clear global challenge. The act of coming together builds citizen capacity for creating strong communities. The feast of foods and faces serves as a practical demonstration of diversity in action.
So that’s what we’ve heard and learned from the festival. You have here our own sense of the marvelous ingenuity that brings things into being. Listed in the column below are additional at-random suggestions—both practical and philosophical—for having fun at the event. The suggestions add to the simmering melting pot of explanations and understandings since 1995.
What follows below are 13 ways to enjoy the festival—from the routine to the magical and mysterious. See them as different manifestations of civic engagement.
• As an experience of neighbors and strangers coming together to enjoy favorite homemade dishes along with music, art, performance, and entertainment.
• As an opportunity to see goodness in each person, with each person both participants and guest.
• As a challenge for those coming to assume responsibility for using their foods gifts to bring goodwill into the setting.
• As an event in which potluckers grow in understanding how their roles create the banquet as an example of building community.
• As an expression of courtesy and goodwill, with those two traits used as mechanisms for displaying mutual respect.
• As an experience in which the meal itself is the meeting—sort of like, Good Eating at the Big Meeting.
• As an indication of how much the practice of hospitality is at the core of the welcoming experience.
• As possession in common of the foods offered by and for all.
• As a test of our commitment to peace through right relationship, the test being in the form of inviting people to leave the protection of their homes to venture into unfamiliar space and to cross boundaries.
• As a picture of one community through the bread we share and break.
• As an expression with rich theological and religious meaning across major prevailing faith traditions.
• As a multi-denominational and interfaith experience of the breaking of the bread.
• As an experience of wholeness greater than any one individual, an idea summarized in the phrase, The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Adapted from a Wednesday Journal article published August 28, 2002
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