Tuna

About eight years ago my family and I went on vacation for a week in the summer to Chatham, MA on Cape Cod. A family friend of ours, an avid fisherman, had recently moved up there, bought a boat and wanted to take my father and me tuna fishing with his son Anthony. However, tuna fishing isn’t as easy as fishing for, say, striped bass. We had to wake up at 4AM to load the pickup truck with all of our gear and drive over to the marina to set up the boat. Around an hour later we set off into the still dark waters, and wouldn’t start fishing until we were about 30 miles off shore. With the lines in the water and all of us fully awake, we were talking, listening to music and enjoying each other’s company. As the day wore on, all of us except Anthony had caught a fish. At one point we were all loudly singing along to Sweet Caroline while Anthony had gone inside the cabin of the boat to go to the bathroom. Suddenly we had a fish on the line and, of course, it’s Anthony’s turn to reel in the fish. We’re all screaming at him to get outside and reel it in as he hurries out from the bathroom with his pants still around his ankles. From then on, I would always associate the song Sweet Caroline with that story of all of us fishing, Anthony caught with his pants down, and having those tuna for dinner with the rest of the family that same night.

            As Kniazeva and Vankatesh explain, there is a large socially positive aspect to food. In this setting, the taste of the food is no longer the focus, but the bonding power of meals that adds significance to any gathering. While the tuna was certainly delicious, fishing with my father and our family friends is certainly more memorable. When asked about the best meals someone has ever had, people started to describe the occasions at which they were consumed, and not of the food itself. Put more eloquently by Kniazeva and Vankatesh, “The social dimension that includes preparing and then enjoying food with other people while sitting and talking underlines the longing for good, unstructured communication.” And again by Belk, 1988, “Sharing food is very characteristic of ritual consumption behavior, and in that function food performs as a symbolic way of sharing group identity and bonding through food.”