James Salter once wrote, “Life is weather, life is meals.” The veracity of this statement is undeniable; meals are the prelude to love, the sorrow in a goodbye, the joy in a lifetime. They are the elastic that binds a meal, the glue that holds a day and the human life together. Without them, life would be but nothing, for our entire history has at times been conducted over a dining room table, across a cup of tea, through the steam of a rich Cassoulet.
Like the many before us and many that will ensue, the act of partaking in a meal will be ingrained in our culture for as long as we exist. Celebration is in our nature, and what better way to celebrate than to indulge in the fruitfulness of the earth—the sweet kernels of corn that only grow in the summer time, the bucolic, milky Mozzarella di Buffola, the acidic yet unreservedly sweet Maine blueberries.
It fascinates me how intricate meals are: The preparation for a meal alone is cumbersome: who to feed and what to feed them with, how to create and when to do it, our instinctive methods vs. instructional ones. But the art of dining together or of eating alone, the remnants of domestic family dinners, of raucous drunken evenings, of quiet solitary breakfasts give breath to ours lives.
I have found solace in the habitual Italian culinary lifestyle—meals are valued here. There is no sense of rushing, no sense of haste. To take the time to enjoy a mere morsel of truffles is to take the time to enjoy life. The simplicity of eating together, the intimacy of preparing a meal for others is not something to brush aside but instead something value deeply, for as Virginia Wolf once wrote “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.”

I recently threw another dinner party in my apartment at a table built for eight. We fit twenty-five of us around the old mahogany set-up, elbows squeezed into sides and knees careful not stray in the web of legs. A mixture of languages lingered liltingly through the kitchen as my roommates and I prepared multiple dishes. Our Italian friends mingled with our American friends, bridging the cultures together, both relating over a common cultural rite: eating.
The meal had been prepared with a great propensity of eagerness. As I chopped the red onions, sautéed the garlic in oil, bathed the mussels in white wine, questions plagued my mind. What if our newfound guests despised our take on the Italian classics such as Mussels Al Fresco or a Pasta Carbonara? What if the conversation came to an abrupt halt, the language barrier baring its true colors? Would they like the wine, the cheese? Would there be an immense amount of awkwardness that comes with the territory and reality of being a foreigner?

But as I simmered and stirred, I glanced out the kitchen door towards our guests and looked at their faces: The preparatory beginnings of the complex dinner trickled out of kitchen, adorning the table of the dining room. The scents danced puckishly around the hungry noses of each passerby, prying open eyelids, widening nostrils. The conversation had grown so loud that our older neighbor had “shushed” us, muttering something about “Polizia”. All of my fears had dissipated.

As soon as the food was placed in front of our guests, they dug in with the fervent enthusiasm and uninhibited joy, every cook hopes for. Of course it’s entirely plausible that in some dishes the sauce was too thin or too burnt, the vegetables too mushy, but no one seemed fazed. Voices echoed throughout our cozy, barren apartment, ricocheting off empty platters and bouncing about the room. Hands brushed reaching for more wine, conversations went from platonic to romantic in seconds, cheeks flushing with contentment.

It seemed and seems that here in our stark and cold Italian apartment, and thus in Italy, that life is more than the food that decorates our plates, more than the hunger that dictates our tummies. It is the conversations that stem from good company, the enjoyment of a rare bottle of wine, the purely delicious, briny mussels, the resolve of a fight, the makings of a future. Here in Italy, the meal is life. It is the most significant, vital part of the day, the epitome of existence, the love poem to living.