Last night I was listening to a preacher talk about “ordinary food” and “rice” as if they were two distinct planets in a culinary solar system.
It’s worth pointing out, for this will give some context to his comment, that he is British and white and about fifty.
I say these things because it seems to me that for the vast majority of the world’s population “rice” and “ordinary food” are synonyms, not antonyms.
It illustrated to me how the contexts for our sermons, our jokes, our story-telling are so often culturally constrained by our own ethnocentricism. And that’s nobody’s fault necessarily. If all you eat at a dinner table every night are ‘meat-and-three-veg’ you’re not going to pause and think for a minute that maybe, just maybe, you’re the one eating food less ordinary than the rest of the world’s population.
But it drives home the point that when our story-telling, sermonising and joking is in front of an audience or congregation or person who doesn’t share the same cultural references as we do, then we need to be sure that what we’re saying translates well across contexts, and that we’re not having a conversation misunderstood by a common language.
