Amy Frykholm

I’ve been reading Angel Mendez Montoya’s book The Theology of Food, a meditation on molé and Eucharist. In it, he talks about the relationship in the Spanish language between sabor and saber—tasting and knowing. Both come from the same root, and while that seems momentarily counter-intuitive, it also makes sense. Every parent knows that a child first receives knowledge of the world by putting everything in her mouth. In the Middle Ages, people thought that babies, literally, received wisdom from their mother’s or a wet nurse’s milk.

Somehow, this led me to think about a little restaurant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, whose name I never knew. It was a hamburger joint turned Ethiopian restaurant. When I was a child, this place was a classic diner called Dillinger’s. They served big hamburgers and french fries. Posters of Jimmy Dean and Marilyn Monroe were on the walls. Then when South Dakota legalized gambling in eateries, the quality of the food dramatically declined, but people plunked quarters into the machines in the back room. But in the late ‘90s Dillinger’s became the first Ethiopian restaurant in Sioux Falls, run by a family of recent immigrants. The striped bar stools and plastic booths remained. The posters had been taken down, but not replaced. And instead of plastic baskets of fries appearing in the window between the kitchen and the dining room, servers picked up plates of injeira and spicy lentil wat.

These immigrants first offered the people of Sioux Falls their wisdom through our mouths. They reversed the role of host and guest, and asked us to take into our bodies something that was a part of them. Both communities changed when that happened, and as Mendez explains, that change was both literal and metaphorical. Maybe we had a long way to go to “know our neighbors,” but this first knowing was “intimate and sensory,” and transformative.