Yesterday, in class, I asked the students to shout out responses and we brainstormed on the board. First was…What constitutes home?
- comfort
- family
- love
- safety
- security
- bed
- food
Next was… What constitutes food?
- taste
- nutrition
- comfort
- community
- satisfaction
- access
Then I asked the class to think about familiar traditions that are centered on food:
- Barbeque in summer
- candy at Halloween
- emotional eating
- turkey at Thanksgiving
- fasting for religious holidays
- ham at Christmas
These were just a sampling of the responses. Using Thanksgiving as an example I asked, What is important about Thanksgiving tradition? Of course, a lot of the students said it was the turkey in the middle of the table — that Thanksgiving wouldn’t be the same without turkey. I pressed them. Is it the animal and/or the meat that’s important? Is it the familiar flavors of Thanksgiving that are important, which really are constituted by rosemary, sage and thyme? Some remained adamant that they must have turkey on Thanksgiving, that this was the heart of the tradition and “why change a tradition that’s not broken?” Others said that, for them, Thanksgiving was about being with family and friends and that the food was secondary — that the turkey mattered less to them.
I’ve tried to be very careful to keep my own feelings out of the conversation. Something I realized last time I taught this class was that it is much more effective if they don’t feel like I’m trying to push my own beliefs on them. Instead, I try to act as a source of gentle pressure to move the conversation forward—to push them to think more deeply. Through the quarter, I imagine my position becomes clear, just from the readings I’ve chosen for the syllabus. But for now, I don’t want to scare anyone away. And I think change in behavior and belief system is sustained more permanently when it’s something you come to on your own terms. This is, of course, a struggle for me because I want all of them to magically realize that animals should not be used for humans’ ends, period. But this process requires tremendous patience, and also the understanding that some people, when confronted with the truth, will choose to ignore it, or to justify it away, using arguments like ‘tradition’.
This is the reason I wanted to talk about tradition early in the quarter—to get them thinking about what traditions we have, what role they play in our lives, and how they change (or don’t). Yesterday, many students expressed that traditions were static. For instance, to remove the turkey from the Thanksgiving table and change the tradition permanently would take several generations to adopt. My hope for the course is that throughout the 10 weeks, we will work through thinking about tradition in a different way–that traditions CAN change, that they can change quickly, and that we don’t necessarily have to lose the essence of what role that tradition played in our lives. Without a dead bird in the middle of the table, Thanksgiving, for me, is still about being with family and friends. It’s still about spending the day cooking and celebrating a bounty of food. It’s still about those familiar flavors of rosemary, sage and thyme.
What traditions have you changed? What is important to you about tradition?
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