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Hospitality, like any cultural activity, is something that we learn. Embarrassingly for me, I did not learn how to do it until I was in college and I made friends with people from the South, who were nice enough to teach me. Don’t show up empty-handed. A sense of occasion is important, but don’t go overboard or you’ll make your guests nervous. Just make it nice. This means something different to everyone, and that’s the whole point.
Over the past few years I’ve noticed a shift in the expectations of my house guests, especially around food. Families seem to be traveling with all of their own food, to the extent that the host’s food becomes redundant. Maybe the trend started during the pandemic, when people were avoiding restaurants on the road. Maybe it’s a byproduct of inflation, and people travel with all their groceries to save money. Whatever the cause, unloading one’s coolers into the host’s fridge upon arrival seems to be a new norm.
As a host, this presents me with a conundrum: Do they want my food or their own? Obviously this wouldn’t matter if all I cared about was a seamless transition for everyone involved — make my house into your house, if that’s what makes you comfortable! But I am stubbornly attached to the idea that as a host I am responsible for offering some of my things. Maybe my guests won’t like my things as much as their things, but they will be new and different, and maybe that’s kind of interesting.
When I worry that I’m overthinking it, I remind myself that hospitality has always been one of the important ways we express our cultural affiliation. The question of what it means to give and receive it is one of the most enduring themes in philosophy and literature. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus regularly shows up literally nude on the doorstep of some strangers and is invited in, fed, anointed with olive oil, and given a place to rest. European colonizers often justified their massacring of native populations on the grounds that they weren’t welcomed with appropriate hospitality. So rude! Philosophers from Kant to Derrida took up the question of what guests and hosts are responsible for. Emma Cline’s The Guest — perhaps the definitive work of contemporary hospitality literature — is all about what happens when guests ignore the rules of conduct that apply to them.
My problem is that I can’t seem to get a handle on what we consider good etiquette for hosting and visiting with children. We’re in a bickering, transitional moment, when families are motivated to push back against the atomization of nuclear-family life by letting go of the idea that you need a clean house and a stocked fridge to have people over. Moms on social media push an “embrace imperfection” narrative: When visiting, don’t expect anything, and when hosting, don’t deliver anything. Each other’s sympathetic company should be gift enough. We’re fed up with the alienating and useless charade of trying to look good for one another.
Meanwhile, the inverse vision taunts us with passive-aggressive cool: Tradwife content, its reign of terror unfortunately ongoing, reminds us daily that we could be serving better and more beautiful food if only we took the time to make it from scratch. Restocking content haunts me. The abundance of these spotless fridges and pantries filled to the geometric brim with bright units of packaged food, and the weekly restocks of mini-fridges that are purportedly located in children’s rooms, stun me into mute disbelief. This content looks, on the surface, like ritualistic preparations for a visit from an honored guest. But it’s really just prep for another “busy week as a mom.” When your house is like this, what do you expect when you are a guest? I get chills at the very thought.
I find myself oscillating uncertainly between the laissez-faire attitude that feels fair and appealing and the fantasy of the rigorous bounty of the trendily stocked pantry. Has the culture of domestic abundance ruined the joy of receiving hospitality? What does it mean to be a good guest? What does it mean to be a good host? I’ve never been less sure. Whatever I do, it never feels quite right: I’m not arriving with enough for my hosts and not offering enough for my guests, especially when they include young children. But I’m also expecting that people want more than they do.
As many readers are all too aware, I grew up on a commune. I know a lot about the politics and aesthetics of sharing, and I choose that side, most of the time, over the trappings of individualism. There’s a lot of dreamy commune-talk these days, and I get it. But when everything is shared, nothing is a gift, and gifts are one of the most ancient ways that groups of people relate to one another. The commune was the kind of place where guests would just walk in and open the fridge to see what was good. I love this informality, but I’ve always suspected that by leaning too heavily on being loose, the eloquence of generosity is lost.
Is it simply not that appealing to demand hospitality lately? The United States, and the world generally (well, not France yet — shout out to them), is in the midst of a period of tightening border restrictions and less hospitality on the part of nations for their own citizens. The politics of self-reliance are powerfully entrenched in our culture right now, and sometimes I wonder to what extent even those of us who don’t necessarily agree with, say, heavy restrictions on who can enter our borders are drinking from the same ideological aquifer as those who do. This summer, as we drive around the country in our compact SUVs and minivans packed to the hilt with all the right versions of everything we and our children like, we need no one to take us in and offer us anything at all. Hospitality is a central pillar of most religious traditions, and maybe secularization has as much to do with its diminished importance as the economy. Are guesting and hosting considered “traditional” now? Is it elderly coded to expect people to eat your food when they come over?
I hope not, because experiencing hospitality is one of the central pleasures of civilization, and sometimes it feels like we’re forgetting how to enjoy it. I blame it on our fear of being a burden, which has become overdeveloped in many of us, especially those of us with kids. There is a moment when you’re a guest in someone else’s home when you have to release yourself into a little existential abyss of not knowing what’s going to happen. What will they serve us? What will we do after dinner? Will we take a little walk around the block? Will we play a game? Are they a no-dessert family, which sucks? That tiny free-fall into vulnerability is delicious, if you embrace it with curiosity instead of dread.
As opposed to teaching our children how to be good guests by staying out of the way and being self-reliant, maybe we should be teaching them the importance of being an attentive guest who appreciates and thanks their host, notices what’s different from what’s at home, and asks about things that are new. Being a guest is an acquired skill; it’s not just about minimizing your impact.
Caught between the turbostocked snack fridge and the mountain of reusable tote bags filled with half-eaten TJ’s snacks and badly bruised seasonal fruit, here is what I propose: When you come to my house, I think you should eat my food — and, ideally, so should your kids. That being said, it is quite possible that I will not have the snacks your children are accustomed to. Children should probably be taught to expect this. Not long ago a child arrived at my house for the first time and asked me, “where’s the Lacroix?” which, while a fair question (I also love Lacroix), struck me as totally outrageous — a child whose entire world is sparkling, not still. If you don’t like the food I serve you, I’ve given you a gift just the same: the pleasure of the visit postmortem on the way home, when you and your kids critique my stuff. The awareness that you might criticize someone behind their back while loving them just the same is yet another lesson kids can learn from being a guest. Sometimes the drive home is the most fun part of a visit.
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