This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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Dating back to the first Thanksgiving, Americans have formed community around the shared enjoyment of food. While ours is not the only country that does so, Americans’ traditional enjoyment of the potluck is in many ways characteristically democratic — the medley of tastes and textures shared at a potluck speaks to a national character that is less concerned with aesthetic refinement and a hefty price tag than with full bellies and good conversation.
If you are unfortunate enough to never have enjoyed a hearty potluck — unlikely if you were raised as an evangelical, particularly Baptist — it’s important that you envision the most opulent hodgepodge of sides and mains and desserts you have ever seen. The dishes are as diverse in tastiness as the loving hands that prepared them are diverse in personality and life story. Some people bring a bag of chips and salsa. Others bring their grandmother’s famous chili. Still others bring the dishes that will be wiped clean before second-rounders jostle their way to the front of the line with Costco-sized paper plates in hand.
Dessert comes in two courses: first, the cookie you teeter on the edge of your mountain of dinner food, and second, the more serious dessert helping. It’s the one you grab after throwing out your paper plate and making your way back to the potluck line after allowing a polite pause following everyone’s first helping. Every Sunday that a church hosts a potluck, no electrical outlet is left unused as the church’s mothers line the halls with steaming crockpots of barbecue meatballs and seven-layer Mexican dip. The intriguing medley of smells makes its way to your nose just as the final hymn’s refrain is sung.
The seminal 2000 book “Bowling Alone” by Robert D. Putnam could easily have a companion volume titled “Eating Alone.” For many Americans, even many who live with spouses and children, food is eaten over phones or across from TVs. The attention of the eater is split between screened entertainment and the food itself, rather than his own family and the food itself. Faced with a culture where enjoyment of food is no longer a social activity, individuals, particularly mothers and homemakers, are less likely to spend time cooking a meal that is consumed with such casual dismissal. From this, the culture of Uber Eats and single-serve microwave dinners has taken hold, further cementing our lonesome culture of eating. The American potluck bucks the trend of eating alone.
In a world where social gatherings, when they do occur, are built around the coming Instagram post about the event, the idea of setting up white folding tables and mismatched crockpots for your friends to eat a delicious meal that has no common theme may seem out of place. And it is. We are starved for socialization, but the perfection thrust upon us by curated lives on Instagram can make it seem like only people who have their lives, homes, and cookbooks in order can socialize around food that isn’t bought at a restaurant.
But the American potluck allows you to socialize with a large crowd in a low-pressure environment. You can contribute to the gathering without the entire planning and execution of the event falling on you. With the potluck, your only task is to bring one dish, a dish you would probably have cooked anyway if you had stayed home (assuming you weren’t planning to order in again). Maybe your house really is way too tiny to host, and your cooking skills really are too lacking to draw a crowd. Even so, the potluck lets you form community around food while only contributing a cheese, salami, and cracker platter from the grocery store.
For those who can cook, or who are interested in learning how, the potluck fosters community around home-cooked food. It is different in this way from a group of friends who make a habit of trying the best Thai restaurants the city has to offer every Thursday night. It’s not that this might not be a great way in itself to avoid a culture of lonely eating, but it is too expensive for most and unrealistic for families with young children. The democratic genius of the American potluck lies in the fact that every income level, family size, and age can enjoy what it has to offer with equal vigor.
What’s more, the potluck fosters a community of recipe-sharing, a phenomenon that is dying out with older generations of parents. There is something far more personal and friendship-inducing about asking Mrs. Johnson for the recipe for her au gratin potatoes than asking her for the name of the restaurant you saw her at on Instagram. Recipe-sharing expands our abilities as cooks while encouraging a community that offers distinct food options that we have created ourselves in our own home kitchens.
Churches are perhaps the most obvious place where potlucks can and should happen. But any group can host a potluck. The host need only provide some plastic cutlery and paper plates, instructing each guest to bring enough to feed his or her family and a few more. If you have never enjoyed a potluck, let me be the first to assure you that it is the most low-risk yet high-reward way to begin investing in real relationships that build lasting communities in a uniquely American way.
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Sarah Wilder is a wife and mom living on a small homestead in Michigan. She is a cultural commentator and a writer, and her work is regularly published in outlets such as Chronicles Magazine, 1819 News, and American Mind.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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