Bambi’s mother, killed by hunters, in the Disney film
During my long-ago vegetarian phase, I visited friends in Alabama and happened to be seated next to an avid hunter at a dinner party.
He talked in a sweet, lazy drawl about his father showing him how to stalk, kill, and skin animals in the woods, and about how he was now teaching the basics to his little girl.
I was too polite to pick a fight at my hosts’ dinner table, but I remember sitting there with a fixed smile and gritted teeth, simmering with unvoiced self-righteousness, knowing that murdering innocent creatures for sport was vicious, cruel, and utterly abominable behavior.
Then he added casually,
“Of course, I eat everything I kill.”
And I suddenly saw hunting from his point of view, as an honorable way to put food on his family’s table, as taking
responsibility
for the killing that supported his life. I had grown up eating animals that other people had slaughtered, and I was sitting at that very dinner table wearing leather shoes.
My misplaced sense of moral superiority evaporated in a split second
, and I have been grateful to my dinner companion ever since. No, I haven’t started stalking my holiday turkey in the woods with a bow and arrow, but I now understand why good people might.
Paradise Village, a gated community in Mexico
Surrounding ourselves with nothing but kindred spirits and likeminded people is comfortable, but it’s also dangerous, making it entirely too easy to view everyone else with disdain and then suspicion.
I have friends who live in gated communities and exist in a state of constant, low-grade fear
of everyone outside the walls. It’s as if they had chosen to retreat to a medieval castle and worried, every time the drawbridge went down, that the woman delivering the dry cleaning or the guy mowing the lawn was in the vanguard of an invading force. These friends live in constant, barbarians-at-the-gate vigilance, trusting, it seems, fewer people every year.
Getting out and meeting strangers – whether they’re from another country or just the other side of the wall – is the best way I know to let go of that kind of paranoia. As Mark Twain put it,
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”
The Underground Supper Club
Spending time with strangers lets us explore the question: Are
we really so different from one another?
But how can we meet strangers in a safe and congenial environment
– preferably with a glass of wine in hand?
One way to do it is through trendy, non-traditional dining experiences such as food tours, home restaurants, underground supper clubs, and pop-up eateries. “Best thing about Paris was not the Eiffel or the Mona Lisa,” my friend Lindsay told me. “It was oysters and white wine in the Bastille district at
11am
with a local.” She found her local culinary guru through
Vyable
, a worldwide organization offering travelers (and locals) unique experiences in 900 cities. Researching an upcoming visit to England, my husband, Rich, discovered
The Secret Supper Society
, an in-home restaurant in North Oxfordshire offering informal, bring-your-own-wine gourmet meals, and
The Underground Supper Club
, which provides family-style dining in a decommissioned 1967 Victoria Line underground carriage in
Walthamstow
. For more ideas, check out Travel and Leisure’s
World’s Best Secret Dining Clubs
and Delish’s
Secret Dining Societies
. Obviously these places aren’t very secret anymore, now that they’re on such high profile Internet sites, but many still manage to offer a speakeasy ambiance that spices up the meal with a little clandestine thrill.
Breaking bread with strangers – whether in our home town or on the far side of the planet – is often an enlightening experience. Not every chance encounter will revolutionize our thinking about hunting, eating, or any other subject, but by the time the dessert tray rolls around, we may have discovered something new about our companions, the world, and/or ourselves. I’d say that’s worth the price of a dinner!
Unlike some of my better-organized and more practical blogger friends, I have not included any dining clubs (or indeed any products or services anywhere on my blog or website) due to sponsorship of any kind. The places and organizations mentioned here are ones I thought you might find interesting and useful in planning your own adventures.
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