A Place at the Table: Food and Community in Multi-faith Encounter
by LeAnna Baker, 2025 Summer IRF Fellow
It’s approximately 6:15 pm in March, just minutes before the sun concludes its quiet descent beneath the horizon. My host dad eagerly calls my friend and I downstairs with a familiar warmth, inviting us to begin preparing for dinner. We are both residing with the same family during our semester abroad, and by now, we have grown accustomed to the rhythm of evenings during Ramadan. We rush downstairs, offer to help transport dishes to the house next door, and settle into our seats in the living room, where three tables have been pushed together to ensure enough space for the evening’s guests. As our host-sisters, -cousins, -aunts, and -uncles filter in and position themselves around the table, we relish in shared enthusiasm, eagerly anticipating the evening’s Iftar dinner. At the sound of the call to prayer, we reach for our glasses of water and collectively break fast. The room fills with enthusiastic chatter and movement, as platters, bowls, and plates are passed and shared around the table with practiced ease.
This scene of authentic community is one that I came to deeply cherish during my time studying abroad in Tunisia this past semester. While those months offered abounding knowledge, they were also marked by feelings of isolation and loneliness unlike anything I had before experienced. Maneuvering through a new country, grappling with language barriers, adjusting to an entirely novel cultural rhythm, and navigating the ethical questions inherent to study abroad often left me desperate for true connection. There were days at the beginning of the semester when I longed for nothing more than to be back on my college campus surrounded by the comfortable familiarity of friends and routine.
Then Ramadan arrived. Joining my host family for Iftar every evening, I was privileged to witness the profound sense of community that hovered amongst the individuals occupying seats at the table. In moments where I lacked linguistic fluency or interpersonal familiarity, the act of food served as a potent vehicle for my entry into a sustainable community. As we gathered together to eat and the light outside softened each evening, so too, did my unease.
Eating has historically been a social act, and one that occupies a position of significance in many faith traditions. From the collective Iftar breaking of fast, to early Christian Agape meals, to symbolic Passover seders, Prasad offerings, and indigenous Potlatch feasts, across religious traditions, food plays a meaningful role in incorporating and integrating one into communion with others. It seems only natural that food, thus, can be integral in the process of nurturing peaceful multi-faith relationships. In a world that seems disposed to focus exclusively on differences, food exists as a subtle reminder of shared humanity. It provides us the nutrients we need to survive. The act of joining together to partake in the necessary and ritualistic experience of eating serves to place participants on a plane of similarity, from which fruitful interaction can mutually arise.
This reality extends beyond the confines of the family dinner table. People come together around food, and this is a truth that extends to the world stage. Culinary diplomacy, a form of diplomatic engagement that leverages the power of food, is a tool utilized by both governments and non-state actors to build bridges and promote peaceful cultural exchange. In 2023, the U.S. Department of State relaunched the Diplomatic Culinary Partnership, an effort that understood food and dining as an effective policy tool with the capacity to foster and strengthen diplomatic relationships. This initiative is based on a recognition of food, hospitality, and dining’s invaluable capacity for not only community formation, but for the exchange of values, traditions, and cultural perspectives.
On a micro level, participation in Ramadan offered me an opportunity to bear witness to this concept of Culinary Diplomacy. Positioned at a table with individuals who resided in a different country, embraced distinct cultural traditions, and practiced a religion that differed from that which I had been accustomed to, the act of sharing a meal together created conditions for connection that transcended language and cultural divides.
Throughout the course of my summer as a fellow with the IRF Secretariat, I’ve become increasingly attuned to the vitality of food in inviting seemingly disparate persons or communities into a space of shared experience and willing exchange. On numerous occasions, I’ve listened to those working in multi-faith contexts express the centrality of initiating such interactions through a meal. When planning initial encounters between those of different faith backgrounds, food has been consistently mentioned as having a disarming feature. By beginning multi-faith engagement with an act that is reflective of a shared human need, eating together establishes tangible common ground. “It reminds us that we are all human,” one individual working in multi-faith engagement stated.
Notably, the food-based engagement emerges from the participants themselves. It is fundamentally grassroots. Sitting and sharing a meal in communion with another is a form of interaction that is distinct from the frameworks of external institutions. While councils and summits play an important role in providing spaces for multi-faith dialogue, the act of sharing a meal promotes a uniquely intimate environment for the exchange of ideas and practices. Eating is simple and necessary. The deeply tactile, embodied encounter of the “other” that is enabled through the act of eating encourages a form of interaction that is interpersonal before it is institutional. It is proximate before it is imposed.
Unarguably, the simple act of eating together has immense power. Disarming tensions, cultivating genuine connection, and laying the groundwork for the emergence of new relationships, food fulfills not only the pragmatic role of supplying the body with nutrients, but also provides a space for the necessary materialization of human connection – a character that resembles the fundamental project of the IRF Roundtable at large.
Providing ample seats at the table, that is, offering equal opportunity to listen, share, decide, and discuss, is critical to the function of the IRF Roundtable. When an individual joins the IRF Roundtable, be that through the pixelated images of a screen or at an in-person conversation on Capital Hill, they enter a space where their unique faith identity and lived experiences are not only accepted, but valued. It is, in fact, the diversity of perspectives that makes the IRF Roundtable such a vibrant, rich community from which multi-faceted efforts to advance justice emerge. To sit at the table, whether that be for a meal, a dialogue, or more than likely, both, is an act that brings us together. It unites us around a necessity, forging bonds that propel us towards heightened levels of interpersonal understanding and empathetic encounter.
