Why is it so hard to share food with humans?

Becky had her jaw deliberately broken and re-wired and rebuilt. I forget why - I think her jaw was too small or too big. We knew her husband John but didn't really know her. 

When they got married and bought a new house we brought them my homemade lasagna with my homemade spaghetti sauce and salad to have a meal together.

I was horrified at the end of the meal when she put a cigarette butt out on top of the virtually untouched square on her plate. 

John said, Becky loved her skeletal body while recovering from jaw surgery, living on Friendly's AWFUL AWFUL milkshakes. Oh well. I don't know what to do with women like that. 

Why is it so hard for people to share food? I love to cook, bake, eat, give food, it's a love language and most people are completely rude and insane about it.

Perhaps it was my crazy Jewish-Italian family that taught me about the importance of communal food-sharing. For Christ's sake, even the Mafia knows that! It all happens at the table. Just make sure you sit with your back against the wall.

I swam with a woman who told me, I can't swim more than 20 laps or my thigh muscles get too big and I can't fit into my skinny jeans. Wow, and she's seventy-two. You'd think she'd move beyond junior high school.

Liz, another swimmer and former belly dancer, won't keep anything edible in her house. One day there was a blizzard and her meal kit delivery service ran aground. She and her husband were starving for hours. Her husband, a young Italian, said Honey could we please keep food in the house?

I care about fitness and health and I love baking and cooking food at home, even making healthy desserts. Then again I never got over the 70's health-food, ecology, gas-rationing mindset. Former President Jimmy Carter was my hero.

My husband says it's the atomization of our culture that has broken the understanding of culture and community eating. Okay then, I want no part of it. I'm back to the shtetl* and going with the Italian sheep herder's for a meal.**

Our former Brazilian neighbors were the best. They always invited us to join them for Brazilian-style barbecue (on a charcoal grill, adding oil+water to control the flames) with rice and Brazilian salsa laid out on a huge aluminum fold-out table after soccer games nearly every weekend. The whole team would be there drinking cases of Corona with sliced limes.

In the spring and summer Thai & Laotian festivals my neighbors and all of their relatives share half a dozen long tables strung together for days of food and drink and BBQ and ceremony. Perhaps I'll join them again this year.

*What did people eat in the shtetl?

In many homes, potatoes, sour soup, black rye bread and herring were the only foods eaten on weekdays. Excerpted from Hirsz Abramowicz, “Diet of Lithuanian Jews,” in Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II, ed. Dina Abramowicz and Jeffrey Shandler, trans.

**What did sheep herders eat?

the shepherds pulled out baskets filled with tascapane sandwiches, plus sliced salami, cheese and bottles of wine and amaro. The tascapane is the old soldier’s satchel that once held bread and other rations. In this case it’s what shepherds carry with them as a portable meal, and the name is exactly what the Italian term stands for: a pocket made of bread, crumb removed and filled with something savory. The choice was between frittata or roasted peppers.