Don't Eat, Love!

Chinese New Year is often associated with abundance and prosperity, which is often resembled in the availability of food. Food has been associated with prosperity and wealth in the olden days. The type of food that you eat determines your social class (rich people eat abalone and shark fin, medium income people eat fish or pork, while poorer people eat vegetables and salted fish (sorry for the generalisation). Over time as the society become more egalitarian, the choices of food become more culturally conditioned than limited by affordability.

Food is a symbol of fellowship and social capital in Chinese culture. Families who have meals together tend to enjoy more satisfying relationships. Not having anyone to enjoy a meal with seems to indicate loneliness or the lack of social network. Reunion dinners are meaningless without good food, and people take great pains to get the freshest and best ingredients and cook them in excess, so that there will be leftovers as this symbolises abundance. My grandfather, an ex-salted fish trader, take great pains to travel 20-30 kilometres just to buy the freshest Kerapu, Tenggiri, prawns and crabs from the fishermen in Penarik Beach everytime there’s a family dinner. Besides, reunion dinners are incomplete without a bowl of shark fin’s and abalone soup, and crab cake (local Terengganu Chinese delicacy).

While I thank God placing me in a family that is so obsessed with food, there are cases where families become disintegrated due to food. There's one family that I knew of that do not longer have reunion dinners after the mother (usually the family cook) died, since there is no one left to take the trouble of preparing for the dinner. Younger generations tend to be over-pragmatic that we do away with extra trouble for the sake of convenience, which sometimes can be harmful to our family and community life.

Such emphasis on food as a basis for fellowship can be dangerous if it replaces real fellowship and relationship building between family members and friends. We can always think of food as a bonding agent, but actually bonding requires more than just having meals together. It is a deliberate attempt to communicate and understand each other, to affirm each other and ultimately to love each other unconditionally.

I remember having meals during school recess with one particular friend in high school everyday without fail. Most of our conversations are mostly superficial, and centred around food and studies. We do not talk much about ourselves, our joys, our pains, our inner thoughts and life. At the end of our schooling years, we went apart with our ways, and lost touch until today. There is no longing or effort to meet up again because our relationship has very little ground to stand with time. Food without relationship is wasted away, food with real relationship is eternal.

Therefore friends, beware of such tendency to replace the real for the superficial. Food is great and everyone loves good food, but food is not an end in itself. It merely helps us to fellowship deeply with one another and to love each other. After all we are called, as Christ followers to love, not to eat.