Thanksgiving, Hospitality, and Flavor

If you’re like me, you or someone in your household or family is busy planning an extravagant meal for Thanksgiving. (For me, it is several meals, a week of celebration.)

But aside from the logistics of getting everything on the table and accommodating food preferences and dietary restrictions, how much does flavor, the quality of the food, matter?

I suspect that most people view flavor as of secondary importance on Thanksgiving Day. Although it is a social gathering coalescing around food, the meaning of the celebration is not about flavor, according to conventional wisdom. It’s about celebrating, sharing, and being thankful for what we have. The food needs to meet some minimal standard of quality. It shouldn’t detract from the celebration. But, according to this point of view, to focus excessively on flavor is to miss the larger significance of the social relations that bind us to the bounty of the harvest and our gratitude for the people with whom we share it.

But I think there is another way of looking at the role of flavor at Thanksgiving.

Hospitality requires of us a commitment to our guest’s well-being and that means that what we serve must be enjoyable. Providing food that someone doesn’t like or being indifferent to their tastes is a failure of hospitality.

But less obvious, though equally important, is the requirement that the food be enjoyable to the host as well.

Generosity is a core element of hospitality. If we do not enjoy our own food then giving it to someone else has little significance because we are not invested in it. The kind of giving involved in hospitality is not like giving spare change to a homeless person or donating money to support a cause. In the context of hospitality, food and drink are not given to confer a benefit on someone. If in lieu of refreshment you wrote your guest a check she would rightfully be insulted, regardless of the benefit the money might confer.

Hospitality is a giving of oneself, not only one’s time, labor, or money but one’s passion, intensity, and sensibility. The host gives something of herself, her own sustenance, out of genuine concern for her guests. If your passion is flavor and you have the wherewithal to create it, you owe it to your guests to make it happen.