Culture shock

As a great fan of both communication and food, I thought it would be appropriate to share a recent film discovery, Eat Drink Man Woman. Though the film is far from new, it is timeless in its ability to tell a relevent story. Ang Lee, director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm, tells a wonderful tale of a father and his three daughters. The father is immediately likable, despite his rigid ideas (or so you think) and his bizarre food obsessions. The daughters vary, like most siblings do, from outwardly rebellious to quiet and composed.

What is striking is, although they ritually eat together every Sunday evening (oh, how the food is beautiful and scrumptious), they never seem to get a decent conversation going. If a conversation begins, it ends with either Father leaving or no one understanding where the conversation was going at all. The lovely infusion of "I have an announcement..." to each meal brings the viewer ever closer to the potential of a stimulating and authentic talk between family.

From the viewer's stance, do families really communicate this poorly? Is our slowly deteriorating ritual of eating together (most often designated to occur merely at Christmas and Easter) further sabatoging our barely-passable attempt at real family communication? The misconceptions of our family members are so easy to settle into, aren't they?

I highly recommend the film and invite this consideration - is communication a part of our family culture? It certainly reinforced for me that what a family dinner looks like from the outside, looking in, could use some work.