An idea that captivates me within culinary arts is the sense of immediate community and friendship a person can feel once they sit down around a table in order to enjoy a meal. Whether it is sitting down to enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning with a coworker, or even getting some dinner at a local diner with a loved one, the moment you sit down at a table, a connection has begun between you and the other person sitting at the table. Food and community undeniably have a connection and that has been seen through the history of many countries and their people. From a young age, you are always sharing a meal with someone. This could be being fed as a baby to eating lunch with your classmates before heading outside for recess or heading back to class. This is when we begin our first friendships and understand the idea of sharing food with others. We might talk about the homework we were just working on, or what sports we were going to try. No matter what, the understanding of community started at a young age and it was centered around food and being with others. As we grow older, this idea of food and community changes. When entering college and the work environment, the perspective of sharing a meal with others changes. We start participating in networking lunches in order to get our foot in the door in order to get our shot at a job. While we think we are building a connection, it is often not the connection we truly desire. Connections should be based on genuine interactions and sharing a meal in this way often does not always prove to be genuine. Also, once we do have our foot in the door, we might begin to share meals with other business representatives in order to make a deal that betters the company. This is often where the connection ends and we once again miss out on that true opportunity for community that comes with sharing a meal. However, this sense of sharing a meal and making connections with others suddenly changed when COVID hit. We could no longer meet up with our friends to have a cup of coffee or even have family dinners with your grandparents. This proved to be a hard time for many reasons, but the biggest one of all was no longer having a true sense of community and connection. Humans thrive on being social and having a strong and supportive community around them. Now that we are able to share more meals with others, we have mostly forgotten how sharing a true, genuine meal can feel. Food and community are so important for many reasons because they often help us to heal. To quote Michael Pollan, "Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well." Go out and eat meal with a coworker, a loved one, a stranger. Create your own community through sharing a meal.