When I was growing up in a Muslim household, food was rarely just food. As the youngest child, my job was to bring out a large water jug with a matching basin pot and soap to help the family wash their hands. Mum would distribute freshly baked breads to everyone to have with the soup or curry. Dad would have me sit next to him as he presided over the gathering – asking questions, giving directions all the while passing food and utensils around. My older brother would take turns helping everyone wash their hands.
There was even a small ritual around something as ordinary as a piece of bread. If it fell on the ground anywhere in the house or was even seen on the ground outside, we would pick it up, clean it, kiss it respectfully and place it somewhere clean and safe. Food was not to be treated carelessly.
And sending a guest away without offering them a meal is unthinkable – almost a sin.
As a child, I didn’t think of any of this as “spirituality”. It was simply what you did. Eating alone felt like punishment. It still does.
Only later, after leaving Afghanistan and building a life in Australia, did I begin to understand what those ordinary habits carried with them: gratitude, hospitality and a sense that food was something to be celebrated – and shared.
Islam is hardly alone in this.
In Judaism, the Shabbat meal brings families together around food, prayer, conversation and ritual. Christianity has the shared meal at the centre of one of its most powerful religious symbols, while the Gospels repeatedly depict Jesus eating with others, including people considered outsiders.
Across Hindu traditions, food is associated with gratitude, hospitality and community. In Sikhism, the tradition of langar makes the social meaning of eating together particularly explicit. People sit together and share a free meal regardless of wealth, status or social position. Everyone is fed. Just as importantly, everyone eats together.
The traditions are different, of course. But across them runs a familiar idea: food can bring people together in ways that go well beyond satisfying hunger.
During a fieldwork assignment, a group of strangers and I were thrust together for an orientation meeting over lunch.
Nerves stopped everyone from taking the first bite. So our team leader smiled and said: “Buon appetito.” I replied with the Afghan equivalent: “Ishteha-e-khoob” – enjoy your meal.
Halfway through eating, our team leader suddenly apologised for his habit of eating quickly. He explained that he had grown up as the youngest of nine children in a poor Italian family, where you learned early to eat before the food ran out.
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Others began opening up and telling their own stories about food.
For some, family meals were about far more than what was on the plate. They created a pause in the day when parents and children sat together, listened to one another and traded stories. In an era before smartphones, and when many families turned the television off at dinner, the table was the centre of family life.
I left that lunch thinking about how much can be contained in something as simple as sitting down to eat.
These days, more often than not, I find myself eating lunch on the go – in my car, on a Teams meeting or while scrolling on my phone. Once, amid community engagement work and endless spreadsheets and trackers, I forgot that I had left my lunchbox in the car.
That’s modern life, I suppose.
Food is easily reduced to fuel: something we need to get through the day before moving on to the next task. We don’t always have the time to wait for others to join us. We don’t always ask whether someone has eaten. And yet we seem to spend an extraordinary amount of time looking at photographs of food online.
Perhaps there is something slightly strange about that. We have never had so many pictures of beautifully presented meals yet so little time to sit down and enjoy our food with the people we love.
Buon appetito. Ishteha-e-khoob!
