Earlier this month, St. Andrew’s hosted the perfect warm up to Thanksgiving with a day focused on food as a pathway to community. Baker, writer, and food and theology scholar Kendall Vanderslice spent the day on campus, where she visited with Rev. Thomas Becker’s Sacred & Sensory class, and led a bread-baking workshop with faculty at the home of Head of School Joy McGrath ’92.

In Becker’s class, Vanderslice led discussion around the idea that food and meals are powerful devices for storytelling, memory, and community-building. Students shared stories about memorable meals, from the hilarious—like the time a friend of Alvin Xie ’26 dropped his phone in a hot pot and the group spent about “thirty minutes trying to pick the phone up with chopsticks”—to the meaningful, like the Turkish meal Brooke Simonsen ’26 shared at the home of fellow Saint Bahar Bekirdfendi ’26 that brought Simonsen closer to her friend’s culture. “I tried the most delicious foods,” Simonsen says. “It was so grand, and then afterward, there were like 10 desserts to choose from.”

To prepare for Vanderslice’s visit, students read her book, We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God, which examines how churches worship around the table—a concept familiar to St. Andrew’s students. “My biggest takeaway from the book is how eating in a community is so rare right now,” Simonsen says. “Meals are now a task, something we have to do instead of enjoy. People eat in front of screens more than they eat with others. Her book made me even more grateful for St. Andrew’s because of how often I eat with my friends. I don’t know the last time I ate alone.”

The visit was the perfect complement to the work students had been doing in Sacred & Sensory, which focuses on how different cultural and religious celebrations are centered on food. “Food is the connecting thing in all these different religions,” Simonsen says. “While Christianity and Judaism are so different, they both have holidays focused around food. This is because food is a vulnerable, connective aspect of life. It can bring together people from anywhere in the world.”

“The stories that food tells us are as beautiful and as complicated as the families and the faith communities that we come from,” Vanderslice told students. “Behind every food is a story of gender, of class, of race, and of place.” She quoted Tejana poet Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros, who calls meals “generational storytelling with an open mouth and a heating spoon.” That idea inspired students to consider the stories told around tables in the St. Andrew’s Dining Hall each day. With table rotations switching often, an intentional choice to place Saints at tables with others across grades, students admitted it could sometimes be awkward when you’re getting to know your new table mates. That’s where Vanderslice encouraged them to lean in. She noted her work requires her to break bread with strangers often. “I’ve learned to embrace that awkwardness,” she said. “I think it eventually leads to people talking and sharing stories that wouldn’t otherwise be told.”