Words: Gemma Janes
Date: 03.09.2026

A meal is never only a meal. Around the table, we inherit rituals and carry traditions forward. But what makes these rituals worth preserving? In her latest for Aeyde Magazin, guest editor Gemma Janes explores the enduring importance of gathering around a table in an increasingly automated world. Set against the backdrop of Berlin’s Sale e Tabacchi, the piece accompanies Aeyde’s Fall/Winter ’26 campaign, an exploration of tradition amidst rapid change.

I arrive first, the tablecloth still holding its folds. We place the soft paws of our palms on the table, my partner and I, and lean in. As the conversation gains pace, we twist and shift closer or further from each other, paused only by the waiter who swoops in and conducts us.

Restaurants are the simplest theater to engage in, a home that is not our own, where we can both be looked after like children but make decisions like adults, exhibit good or bad behavior before the tablecloths are folded away.

In 1825, food critic and author Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Eating is a social bond; inviting someone to dinner means taking charge of their happiness for the duration of the stay.” His book “The Physiology of Taste” embarks on an exploration of the customs, tastes, and traditions that keep us at the table. A book of decadence and wild assertions: “A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.” For Brillat-Savarin, eating was centrally a social enterprise.

At home I am a basic cook of assemblage, boiling eggs and placing them upon whatever leaves I can find, smearing peanut butter inside the crease of a long line of celery, slicing my radish in purple half moons across buttered toast. While I rarely cook and gladly am never asked to, I love to bake bread, and to watch it rise and crust in the oven like a kind of magician. Perhaps this is part of what keeps us returning to the kitchen: the pleasure of transforming the raw into something we can share.

We humans are the only animal species that cooks. Fire draws us towards it, to gather around the heat. It connects us to some primal instinct: hunger rising, expectation of an appetite subsiding. The table has historically been a place to restore peace, to cool a bad temper, or to make a deal. Every time we share a meal, we take part in a story.

The tomato is perhaps one of the simplest examples. Now a staple of Italian cooking, the once dubious fruit took its name from the Aztec tomatl, “the swelling fruit,” and was brought to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors in the early 1500s. It arrived in Italy as a suspicious ornament before it was finally cooked, centuries later. Making peace with its new form, the Italians gave it the name pomodoro, meaning “golden apple.” Over time, the once-foreign fruit became a staple, finding its place at the table.

The same is true of so much of what we eat. Renaissance feasts borrowed flavors that reached Europe through contact with Persia: saffron, rice flavored with rose petals, while trade routes carried oil, wine, and spices across the Mediterranean.

The table has always been a place of hospitality, but also of negotiation, power, and even violence. In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Circe welcomes the weary men of Odysseus into her home and, as is Zeus’s law, feeds them before questions are asked. She concocts a kykeon—cheese, barley, Pramnian wine, glistening jewels of vegetables softened and caramelizing at the corners. And as the gluttonous men become satisfied, their jaws loosen and lengthen, their backs curl, and they are transformed into an army of speechless pigs. Circe had laced the meal with a spell. “If you can’t do a little witchcraft, there’s no point in getting involved in cooking…” writes Colette.

Some of my most memorable meals have involved the hunter gathering. The kind of eating that serves as a reward for hours spent hiking into the edges of the Dolomites in search of smoke, signaling where meat is cooking in red wine with polenta, or a fish caught from the side of a boat, grilling on hot coals with mayonnaise from the jar.

The meals I remember most clearly began long before they reached the table.

I stood for a long time, popping peas from their pods alongside my brother, who for a while was working at a farm-to-table restaurant near Edinburgh, a place where a group of friends was reviving forgotten rural skills to build a model of how food, farming and hospitality can thrive together. “15 kg of curly kale,” he would holler at 7 AM as the mist was leaving the vegetable beds. We, eager volunteers, would squat around the rows, adhering to the “no-dig” policy, carefully breaking the fennel from its roots. Later, those vegetables would find the plates of a long communal table, charred on one side. The menu changed daily, in response to the season, and despite guests not knowing exactly what they would be served, the restaurant would be booked out a year in advance.

Recipes act as living archives. They hold the stories of our ancestors, but also the memory of the soil, the seasons, and the places where they were made. The kindest practices work with nature and are guided by the principle of giving back more than you take. It feels natural to thank the farmer, as well as the cook and the waiter, to understand why they chose to grow that particular variety of Tumbling Tom tomato among the hundreds of others available. To eat at a good restaurant is to arrive at the final point of a long chain of generosity: from the place where the seed sprouts, to the hands that harvest it, to the hands that cook it, to the hands that break the bread in two.

But that chain is changing too, and we are yet to taste the impact of this year’s summer on our plates. As I write this, fires are burning across the southwest of France, extending as far as England. Whole food practices and rituals are being uprooted, forcing them to find new ways to adapt. In ancient Egypt, life itself grew around the vein of the Nile and the agriculture that surrounded it. In parts of Spain, farmers are now beginning to follow the agricultural practices of those in the Sahara. The variety of plant life which sustains our planet is being altered irreversibly. At the table, it can be difficult to balance the warmth of gratitude with this lingering salty taste.

What happens to tradition when the conditions that created it begin to change? This is also how culinary tradition has always worked: by responding to the world around it. What will remain is the ancient pull towards growing and gathering, returning to the earth as a place for sustenance.

I remember the unparalleled joy when the first restaurants after lockdown opened, and the giddy bliss of sitting table to table among strangers again. After months of eating alone, or behind closed doors, we were suddenly reminded that what we had missed was mostly the ritual of being together.

Certain recipes and restaurants, rituals and tastes, last the test of time through adaptation. The tomato was once foreign, as ancient recipes were once experiments. The ingredients on our plates have traveled across continents and generations, climates and cultures, but what remains is our tendency to gather.

We’re at the end of the meal, the cloth spread with crumbs where the bread has been broken. The tablecloth is folded away, and the plates are cleared. We leave, and the restaurant prepares for the next group to arrive.

Shop the Fall/Winter 2026 Collection here.