“Where there is love, there is life.” – Aristotle

The other day I opened a little cookbook a 93-year-old friend gave me with the note “The French Bread recipe at the end is the best! Try it sometime.” What I found inside was this beautifully well-written story about how her junior high aged daughter came home from church youth group and said “If I have to eat any more of that food, I’m not going back.” She realized that the balance of the youth pastor’s program to gather junior high aged kids hung on the meals they fed them and took on organizing weekly meals for about 70 kids for 50 cents each (later 75 cents).

It’s the recipes she used but it’s also the story of creating community through food both for the kids and the parents that helped. She included tidbits about the practical jokes they learned from like not putting the Styrofoam cups for milk out early because pranksters would puncture them with forks so they became sieves when the milked was poured. And fed in morsels about the community of watchfulness they provided for some kids who told their parents they would be at the church but in fact were going elsewhere. She printed this cookbook in 1975, it seems like it has both romantic vestiges of a bygone era but also has great meaning of how to build a program to serve and feed each other.

This little cookbook reminded me of how hungry I am – for other people’s stories and for the time when we can come together to eat again.