Pia K. Hansen: Sharing meals all about the give-and-take

For the 14 years I’ve lived in Spokane, I thought it was just me. Afraid to ask anyone about what I considered a social taboo, I suffered in silence, rejected, uncertain how to proceed.

I love to cook, and I am rarely happier than when friends and family sit down around my table. Sometimes I go all out, cooking for days and serving on grandma’s porcelain, and sometimes I just heat up frozen pizza.

I believe that whatever ails you, from bad politics to heartaches to broken bones and football losing streaks, can be “cured” with a good meal. All right, if not cured, then at least temporarily alleviated.

Yes, I’m using food as an emotional crutch and I’m getting ready to pile on the guilt, but there is no need to sign me up for a weight loss program – it’s the conversation I long for, much more so than the menu.

When I grew up in Denmark, my dinner culture was shaped by the absence of computers, cell phones and 24/7 television programming. No, I’m not as old as Methuselah; I was born in the mid-‘60s. But in my family, dinnertime was sacred.

It was not to be missed under any circumstances, except perhaps death. Your own death, that is.

That 6 o’clock family deadline remains so ingrained that I still get jittery around 5 p.m. if I don’t have potatoes to peel.

We also had dinner guests on a regular basis, and in the farm community of my childhood there was a simple system of reciprocation: one dinner at my house, one dinner at your house.

Community justice was swift and absolute: two dinners at my house with no dinner at your house, and you were not invited back until you had made up.

If I had applied that “rule” here, I would have run out of people to make dinner for back in 1996.

See, I’ve noticed that here in the Inland Northwest people don’t reciprocate. There are the perpetual inviters and the committed invitees, and that’s the end of that.

For years I felt rejected, self-doubt soaring after every soiree.

Maybe I’m socially awkward and even my best friends are afraid to tell me?

Maybe – oh dread – people just like my food, not me?

Maybe the house smells funky? Did the cat bite someone last time they were over?

But then I met a semi-retired couple, who have lived here much longer than I have, with exactly the same experience: It didn’t matter how often they invited people over, they were rarely if ever invited back.

A professional woman, who’s lived here a bit less time than I have, said the same thing.

“It’s not just me?” she asked in disbelief, explaining how she’d hosted party after party, with rarely a reciprocal invitation.

A handful of conversations, with very different people but the same answer every time, left me totally baffled.

Finally, I ran my observation past a friend who was born and raised here. He is my personal Inland Northwest cultural attaché, and he never minces words when I share my self-proclaimed profound cultural insights.

I couldn’t believe my ears when he said, simply: You are right, around here people very rarely reciprocate – they like a free meal.

Is that really what our social life has come to? That we like to entertain only if it’s at someone else’s house? Say it ain’t so.

It doesn’t matter how many world-class skaters we can host if we don’t value having a couple of friends over for dinner on a regular Tuesday.

As we lose dinner gatherings – small and big – ready-made pizza or organic plank steak – we lose part of our community’s ongoing conversation, we forget to listen to our family, our friends and our neighbors and ultimately we become ingrown, unaware and ultimately ignorant. And who wants that?

Not me, for one, so I’ll continue to entertain as long as I can stand on my two feet in the kitchen. And as long as I live here – thankfully – I’ll never run out of invitees.