Dan McDermott
Guest Contributor
In this best of all possible worlds, food has the power to connect people from vastly different cultures, classes and ideologies. Food can even be an instrument of healing, as it communicates with love, our hopes and dreams for a better tomorrow. In our relatively benevolent universe, food can even be considered a healing medicine and a universal language unto itself, perhaps even a vehicle of exploring life and love.
Celebrating life and love conjures many memories of mealtime with my brothers in MDI. The most savory recollections include serious hash slinging, followed by thankless dish duties of many a men’s event. I can even still hear wise and jocular tone of Paul “Gaddy” Gadebusch’s voice: “Only gotta worry about three things when feeding the men; It needs to be HOT, there needs to be PLENTY, and most of all, it needs to be ON TIME.”
Years later, It’s all coming back to my corpulent mind in bittersweet reveries of frantically feeding troupes of men.
- Miraculously serving piping hot chow for the masses on snare drum budgets
- Scrubbing for hours the burnt chili off the bottom of a huge pot
- Anxiously clock watch rushing to beat the inevitable push-ups
- The anticlimactic exhaustion
- And occasionally, even the sound of applause
A whole decade has already danced by since my men’s event chow days in sunny San Diego, with fond images of charitable events, feeding hundreds of women and children. Fortunately, we live in a country currently rather unaffected by war, where both food and charity avail.
Despite all these pleasant memories of food and feeding others, I confess to feeling a deep sadness. I just can’t shake the reality of the world’s despair and desolation, and of all those starving because of human conflict.
How can we feed a world hungry for peace, for resolution and for healing?
How can we even resolve our own nation’s sharp political and socioeconomic differences?
Like an enticing restaurant menu, our responsibilities to serve, protect and provide have been well defined in words like honor, integrity and selfless commitment, allowing us to be men for others, and on a good day, even quiet heroes.
Unfortunately, the world is not a restaurant where we can just order food for the hungry and peace for the war-torn. Feeding and bringing peace to the world means hot and messy grilling and hash slinging, followed by thankless dish duties.
Cleaning Up
So gentlemen, brothers, fathers, sons, before we begin to recover our planet and heal the world with a good meal, we need to begin with washing our hands and getting cleaned up. A good clean up allows us to FEEL, to be sad, angry, frustrated and afraid. Most of all, a good clean up lets us sit with ourselves and face our behaviors, understand our deeds and how what we’ve said or done could have been wrong or harmful to someone else. Let’s identify our patterns, recognize our wounds, and how we’ve dealt with them our entire life so that we can start to heal. Start to apologize and altogether improve things.
And finally in our manifesting of the vastness of a universe so capable of feeding and healing bodies and souls, let’s re-open our hearts and minds to reverberating selfless benevolence for all.
Meanwhile, we just need to keep Gaddy’s recipe for success in mind: Keep it HOT. Make sure there’s PLENTY of it, and be sure it’s ON TIME!