Eating out has always been a chore – I’d much rather cook and eat at home. It doesn’t take long, it tastes better, and I can do several things while cooking and eating.
When we do eat out, it’s always with friends and always so we won’t be distracted by other things when we eat. The whole point of eating out isn’t the food (although it helps if it’s edible), it’s like a ritual with the entire focus being the other person. We meet, we go to the restaurant, we read the menu, order, talk, eat and talk, tidy up, leave a tip, pay for the meal, and leave. It generally takes about 2 hours. It almost always follows the same routine. What imbues it with magic and power is what we do during it with one another. Words are tools of enormous power. The breath we expend to make them is so small in comparison with the end results. Fuel that power with food and the emotion of friendship, and the magic wrought is among the strongest magics in the world.
Some of the mightiest deeds have arisen over a ritualized meal. Treaties signed, wars declared, peace made – and those are just the gloryhounds of the magic. Novels are created at such meals, charities developed, projects imagined and implemented, business born and nurtured to success. How many times has the humble napkin borne the magic sigils of adventures and good works and formed the basis of numerous organizations and charities? An entire forest of napkins, I’m sure.
Eating out is not something we do lightly.
If the restaurant provides a place to sit, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a pizza parlor or a burger joint or height of haute cuisine. What matters is what transpires between the people.
What happens in a restaurant is precious and important – unless it’s become so routine that eating out is just a way to gather nourishment.
A lot of things we have in America has been made ordinary and boring by its very commonness. We think nothing of drinking a 32 ounce soda, having dessert with every meal and between meals, too. Snacking is a national pasttime, and as a nation, we are highly over-hydrated with our ever-present bottles of water. Some experts lament the loss of the family dinner, and claim cooking is too complicated for the average American. They proclaim restaurants as our “home away from home”. And just like that, the power and the magic fade.
We – and by “we”, I mean Numenists – have incorporated food into our rituals so intensively that it’s hard for us to look at food without thinking of magic and divinity. The meals we prepare and eat at home are full of the power of community, of bonding, of communicating with one another and with Dea Nutrix.
But the meals we eat away from home have a different power – a power of creativity, of innovation and ideas, of bubbling adventure with just an edge of danger.
Eating out too often would destroy that. Dining out would take on the aspects of eating at home, truncated and missing some of the vital connecting activities a home meal provides, but still more an act of community and communion than of daring and adventure.
So, we eat out, but we ration it as we do all good things. And we hedge dining out with formalities and rituals so it keeps that edge, that excitement, that allure of thinking new things.
I just found a box with a lot of those old napkins, and reading over them, I see so clearly the scribbles and sketches and notes that became much larger things. So many of the roots of Numenism are in those napkins – our first inklings of combining food and ritual, of forming our charities, how our Houses are set up – it’s all in those restaurant napkins. The napkins are fragile with age, but the magic they started endures.
