Sharing, that’s kind

Lotje Deelman was editor-in-chief of ELLE Eten, has been working for Allerhande for almost fifteen years and worked behind the scenes on television programmes such as MasterChef, de Worsten van Babel On Tour and De Nieuwe Lekkerbek. She ate pig’s trotter with Anthony Bourdain and flirted with Gordon Ramsay in his Aston Martin. Lotje is the (co-)author of more than ten cookbooks and, in her kitchen in the Drenthe countryside, is never too squeamish to set something on fire. Every week on FavorFlav, Lotje vents about what keeps her busy. This time: sharing is caring.

There are, of course, lots of ways to tell whether someone is a good person. With colleagues, friends, the guy sitting next to you on the train, your mother, your loved one, your boss, your brother: I always look to see whether they are willing to share their food with me.

I think it’s one of the kindest things there is: someone feeding you, cooking or making something for you, or picking up something tasty for you. I don’t mean that you pay for it, obviously, as in a restaurant, nor that you’re homeless and would otherwise starve to death, but simply because someone likes you. They make or get you a sandwich because they happened to notice that you hadn’t had breakfast. They give you the larger half of a filled cookie because they see that you regret not buying one for yourself too.

Between craving and suffering

Or an orange. I really like oranges, but I don’t like peeling them. Tight skin, white pith, sticky hands. Sometimes someone—just like that, at the office, a colleague you don’t even know that well—unexpectedly shares an orange with you. Just because. Or a bag of sweets in the car, when you’re driving. Every now and then, a wine gum or a pink Cadillac (so not that schizophrenic kind that’s half liquorice and half wine gum, yuck) at exactly the right moment, when the previous one has been gone just long enough and you’re craving the next one, but aren’t really suffering yet. Somewhere between craving and suffering. That moment.

Green bottom

Also kind: when you’re ill and someone (your mother, if you have that kind of mother, or a girlfriend or your man) tries really hard to make you comfortable. With food. You’re ill, but not seriously ill, so you know exactly which sweets you fancy, or which chicken soup (only that one, organic, from that glass jar, with less water than it says on the jar), or perhaps even half a banana—but a slightly ripe one, though not one with brown spots, and definitely not a green bottom, something in between really…

Wine. That’s another way you can tell very well whether someone really cares about you. When the number of sips of wine in your glass doesn’t match the number of bites on your plate, and the other person then pours half of what’s in their own glass (because the bottle is already empty) into yours without asking.

Fries

Sharing a portion of fries suddenly makes me think of this too. Those times when you didn’t have enough money for two portions (did that ever really happen, or am I making it up?), or didn’t have enough of an appetite (you thought), and then took a fry in turns, with the other person deliberately taking the smallest, ugliest, darkest and most crooked ones so you could take the beautiful, golden-brown, straight, long ones. And then that person would occasionally skip the mayo because they saw that otherwise you wouldn’t have enough fries left. That’s very kind too.