The kindness of food.

Providing food for a person is an act of the purest kindness. The nurturing effect of food is obvious, but the nurturing effect of feeding a person is often overlooked. We hear about food being cooked with love but, let's be honest, that is usually an excuse for bad food being forced upon a long suffering family. However, recently I have seen two life affirming examples of what joy the kindness of food can bring.
One of the choirs in which I sing is the local Benefice choir -we meet up for four Sung Evensongs a year, one in each of the four churches in the Benefice. A few rehearsals before the chosen Sundays and a great leader enable us to provide a lovely service every 3 month or so. The highlight for me, as a foodie, is the "bring and share Tea". Between final rehearsal on the Sunday and the evensong we retire to the Church Warden's house, each of us carrying our "best dish" (millionaire's shortbread in my case) and we eat, share and laugh. The last time we sang, many of us we worried for our loved ones or sad through recent loss. The handing of food to each other, everybody a little proud of themselves, drove to the very core of human kindness.
The second kindness was from one of my new colleagues (he and his wife both work at the school - The Couple) after a few chats in the staffroom we discovered that we both have a passion for baking bread. I was delighted, ten days ago, to find a small present of a sour dough ferment waiting for me. I nurtured this, adding a little flour and water every day and at the weekend I baked my first ever sour dough loaf - what a feeling of success. This is the gold standard of home bread making and it was only today that I realised that this massive feeling of success grew from a small act of food kindness.