Bread, Biscotti, and Cappuccino: Tabling the Conversation of Culture

Abstract

Culture is more than food and folk music, charged one participant of a recent conference celebrating Canadian writers of Italian descent) The comment was made over a late lunch and, since most of us were munching bread, one eye fixed firmly if discretely on the next mouthful - bread in our left hands, butter knives in our right - we nodded rather than voiced our assent. We all agreed. How could we do otherwise? Not only would dissent have been a rude slight to the central assumption of the conference - that culture was the soul and not the surface of a community - but we were all, at that very moment, participating in a ritual that proved his point. We were not just eating bread, but breaking it together in a ritual of community building. Besides, it would have been awkward had we spoken with our mouths too full and more awk- ward still had we not responded at all. So, together, we negotiated the fine balance required by such an occasion: the bread course of a lunch shared between approximately twelve scholars, most of them Canadians of Italian descent. Conversation, by the way, was English, spiced with the occasional Italian phrase. Given that the lunch was held in Montreal, it might have been a French language affair. That it was not was an unspoken but not insignificant negotiation.