4.
A Serving of Soul
As the backdrop for a million special moments in your life, meals
pack more than just nutritional power.
What is the hub of your home? For many of us, it’s the family room or living
room. Heck, their very names beg us to hang out there. Family? Living? That’s
where we should be.
Trouble is, these spaces invite us to plop down on the couch with our eyeballs
on the TV, our phone, or a laptop. While there’s nothing wrong with relaxing,
working, or tapping four hundred emojis a minute, I urge families to move the
focal point of their household to the kitchen and dining table—a place where
eyeballs zigzag to people, not pixels. Too often, when it comes to meal prep, the
assigned cook is left to chop, stir, bake, and clean alone, while the rest of the
clan is off somewhere else with their fingers woodpeckering on keyboards.
But what happens if the kitchen and the table serve as the “sun” of your
household—the centre around which everything else revolves? Life gets a little
fuller and more buoyant with talking, laughing, doing. Meals become a powerful
source of familial energy. No matter how big or small the kitchen. No matter if
the meal takes twenty minutes or an hour to prepare. No matter if your home
includes two people or ten.
Lisa and I made a conscious effort to ensure that salads wouldn’t be the only
things thrown together in our kitchen. We also threw around ideas, stories,
questions, issues, and laughter with each other, and later, with our children from
the time they were babies. The result: The space where we cook and eat has
become our family’s Grand Central Terminal, the place where we connect. While