How We Eat: 2. Eating with Strangers

The Food Programme

BBC

Food, Arts

4.4 • 977 Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2017

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens when you share a meal with strangers? What chemistry fizzes around the table, what bonds are formed, what happens next? In this programme Sheila Dillon talks to people who believe that eating with strangers is the greatest pleasure in life, and to people whose lives have been transformed by those meals.

She visits the largest Sikh temple in Europe, where hundreds are fed every day for free, and hospitality to strangers is a sacred religious duty. She meets the woman who started the supper club movement in Britain when she began inviting people into her small flat for dinner. She talks to an unlikely couple - with a 60 year age gap - who formed a firm friendship thanks to the charity the Casserole Club. And she visits the Glasgow couple who met as strangers at a supper club for singles - and knew after that first dinner that they were destined to share the rest of their lives together. It was his table manners that did it.

Transcript

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1:01.0	Oh, there's lots of you. Hello. How do we eat these days? Well, differently and often with strangers.
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1:14.0	Are you Tim's wife?
1:15.0	No.
1:16.0	Most people can't think of anything worse than inviting a complete bunch of strangers to dinner.
1:22.0	It's bad enough having a dinner party for anyone beyond your nearest and dearest.
1:28.0	But Kirsten Rogers has been inviting strangers to supper in her flat in Kilburn, North London for nine years.
1:37.0	Tonight, they're arriving for a special meal with a hundred ingredients at 40 pounds ahead.
	...

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