Feasting and Fasting – Empathy and Connection
By Eileen Budo, CEO, Last Mile Food Rescue
Food has always been a focus in my life. Cooking and sharing meals means deep connection – nourishment on the most basic level, serving those you care for, and a chance to be creative as well as needed.
It’s a big reason why New Orleans is my favorite city. I’ve learned a lot about the role of feasting through my regular visits there. After many trips, I finally understood that the purpose of the King cake is to encourage gatherings.
The cake, with a small plastic baby baked inside, is served at every event large and small from the Feast of the Epiphany until the day before Lent. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of socializing. Whoever gets the slice with the baby brings the cake to the next shindig. Ensuring that there will be a next one.
The Feast and Fasts of Lent and Ramadan Begin This Week
While feasting is associated with abundance, it is, in fact, a way to build community. That’s why so many of our religious rites – weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, funerals — center around a meal. They’re a way to draw people to each other for joy, celebration, or support.
Rites that include feasts traditionally call on us to include the least among us. They ask us to consider the poor, the stranger, or the lonely and invite them as equals. Mardi Gras – most Americans’ definition of the ultimate feasting ritual — couldn’t be more equalitarian, more joyful, or more inclusionary.
Feasts encourage us to reflect on what we have that we can share. Before the sunrise prayer on Eid al Fitr, the feast at the end of Ramadan, Muslims give Zakat – charity — so that all can participate.
Ramadan pairs daily fasting with nightly feasting. Lent’s forty days of discipline lead to the great feast of Easter. Both embed service within their practice – deprivation as a way to create shared understanding with those who are suffering. For me, Lent’s call to almsgiving reminds me why this work matters. It’s not as charity, but as a practical solution to a problem that should not exist.
Whatever Your Tradition, We Welcome You to Join Food Rescue
For many of the staff at Last Mile, food is the connector to family and home. Their best memories involve the food they grew up eating, the food their ancestors have shared for generations. The importance of food for nourishment but also for connection and community is a thread that pulled us to food rescue.
Consider joining us during this season of feasting and fasting. Download our app and help us move an abundance of food to the places where it is lacking — and expand our feasts to the whole city.
