As K and I were driving back from the Eastern Shore last Friday we were listening to a story on NPR about a new book that’s just come out. Its title is 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement written by Jane Ziegelman. It is a fascinating account of five immigrant families of the mid to late nineteenth century living in New York City’s lower east side, specifically on Orchard Street, hence the title. Most of the city streets were not paved; the living conditions were squalid, no running water, livestock raised indoors; sometimes the small apartments would be home to dozens of people and home to geese, ducks and chickens, the occasional goat. Typhoid and cholera were rampant; many died in childbirth because of medical inadequacies. The description was a far cry from what I learned from our American History books which so romanticised Europeans coming to America. It was, according to this author, to say the least, an ordeal.
The focus of this book though has not as much to do with living conditions, as it does with the history of food brought by other cultures to this country; and how the sustenance of their common life transformed the art of food in America; food a symbol of our cultural identity, perhaps our highest art form, certainly the most vital. The author describes an Italian family having their family meal; husband wife, uncle and aunt, grandmother, and nine children, all had worked somewhere all day long, in sweat shops, along the wharfs…no child labor laws in those days. Everyone had to work for the well being of the family. The mother had bought bread from the market, sliced the loaves, coated them with olive oil, some tomatoes, oregano, and a little bacon and cheese, and baked them in the wood oven…a lower East Side pizza…as she served the hot supper, the room aromatic, she looked at her children and said, “See, never doubt you are somebody!”
I said out loud, “That will preach.” Indeed what a consummate description of the Eucharist. As we distribute the bread and wine in our Eucharistic rite, we just as well could say to each other, “See you are somebody.” The Eucharist is a symbol of all of our family meals, holy meals, each and every meal a cardinal act of justice…meals make somebodies out of people who might think otherwise of themselves. A meal shared is forever a moment of dignity shared as well…and that is what we are about as people of faith, people of the meal…that in every meal shared with family friend and stranger, everyone is somebody nurtured for the way ahead, renewed, recreated as one worthy of God’s gracious favor that is never more palpable than in our gracious meal-taking.
At our next meal graciously shared let us give abundant thanks…and let us forever remember, in a world aromatic with God’s love, that we are somebody.
