I finally watched Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987), a Danish movie about a French housekeeper, Babette, who organizes a big and sumptuous feast for her employers, two elderly single sisters. We are in a 19th century small Danish village where the community is very pious, the sisters live entirely to uphold the legacy of their father, a strict minister who believed in Paul’s and Augustine’s ideas that we should strive for spiritual rather than earthly goods. Yet, the congregation that the sisters try to keep together lives in quiet tension with each other, with unresolved petty grudges and regrets.
One day Babette wins the French lottery and convinces the ladies to use that money to prepare a feast for the community, with ingredients imported by ship. She wins them over “Give me the chance to do my very best.” Ah, but earthly pleasures. Isn't it sinful? They are determined not to like it. They are determined not to even talk about the food. But slowly, as they eat and drink the masterpiece of a multi-course French dinner, they begin to warm to it, to each other, and they end up singing and reconciling.
The way I outline this it sounds cheesy, but the movie delivers it, in a quiet, gentle, unspectacular way. The multi-course meal provides rhythm and structure: the turtle soup, the quail in puff pastry, the delightful cake, the glasses of exquisite wine and champagne.
They remind us of what, at the height of the human experience, is properly called feasting. Feasting—eating together, drinking together, talking together. This is a profound part of who we are.
Babette’s feast is an ideal that we rarely approximate. I was thinking of this as yet another covid wave is engulfing us (good thing we have this awesome endemic state and hybrid immunity; I feel so reassured as my immunity is going down with chemotherapy.)
Many people who—like me—don’t think our present covid situation is desirable or sustainable say that others are happy to sacrifice disabled and immunocompromised people “for brunch.” Oh, they were so keen on their weekly brunch they were happy to throw caution to the wind and pull us in this never-ending misery of sickness, summer waves of illness, long-term work absenteeism, record levels of teacher and student absenteeism, and hospitals under permanent pressure.
However, this objection misses two points.
First, how humans in society behave and organize themselves is not merely the outcome of individual decisions but is carefully orchestrated. You will remember how frightened people were of covid in 2020 and 2021. They wiped down their groceries with lysol. It took a lot of mood massaging, which included platforming minimizers with little knowledge of epidemiology, messages by the CDC that downplayed risks, politicians appearing maskless, protective measures on air and public transport and in other places forcefully ending. Then, as vaccine uptake was low and did not offer the promised long-term protection, it took considerable orchestrated effort to convince people it was safe to catch covid repeatedly. Reports about immunity debt, a concept with no factual basis, were peddled to convince the public it was in fact good and proper to get infected repeatedly.
Second, there is also our strong drive to be together, which expresses itself in a variety of ways. Masks allow for many ways to be together, but unfortunately you cannot eat and drink with them. Eating and drinking together, which find their summit in feasting cannot be done risk-free. All this is captured in the pejorative “brunch.”
Restaurant food is often not very good, and our brunch and other experience rarely approximates the artistry and connectedness of a genuine feast. Yet, I was reflecting, as I am now too ill to go anywhere, about my taking some risks to eat with others the past years.
I mask up whenever I can. But in my capacity (professor, editor etc) I did sometimes go to restaurants or conference dinners and ate with others. One time was very shortly before I had the severe symptoms that led to cancer diagnosis, with an old friend (Bryan Van Norden) whom I had never before met in person. We sat together and we ate a meal at a decent St Louis restaurant. It was a good time. One of my colleagues was there who had been in China (Wuhan) when he was also there. It was a delightful conversation. I’ve often thought back of this, wondering if this is the last such occasion we’ll have together. I hope not.
In Babette’s Feast General Lorens Löwenhielm, an outsider to the community and former unsuccessful suitor of one of the sisters (pictured above), gives a short speech near the end of the meal. He says that humans, in their stupidity, think they have to make a choice. We worry about our choices, about whether we made the right ones. But then, we realize that grace is infinite. What we choose, we will be given. But what we refused initially, we will be given, also.
The context of this speech is that the pietist community feel they must make a decision between the flesh and the spirit, between earthly and heavenly goods. This Christian mindset feels alien even for many contemporary Christians, and yet it is not. Many people who continue to take precautions against covid feel they must make a hard choice, and their choices involve abandoning the pleasures of human life and a partaking in community. They look with horror at family members and friends who live their former, normal lives. The spirit against the flesh. Health versus brunch.
But, I think we need not choose. We need to find a way to stop mass infection without abandoning feasting. We need to make feasting possible for vulnerable people again. That is by mitigating risk through unobtrusive means, the main one being better ventilation and clean air infrastructure. It’s already implemented in e.g., the UK parliament. Better vaccines are coming. We must speed up their development. There are tests in development that you can assess the air for covid and other pathogens. These will help us to assess risk. Most of all, we need to restore public health, which has been sacrificed on the altar of economic short-term gains. Public health removes the need for hard individual choices by instituting boring norms such as vaccine schedules and cleanliness standards.
In a similar vein, our political leaders also felt they had to make a choice: normalizing constant reinfection as the price for economic normalcy and less disruptions to everyday life (and ultimately, guarding against political disruption too).
But again, this is a false choice: years later, covid is disruptive in a way that is much more impactful than only on people who are deemed expendable because ill or disabled, i.e., who can fall “by the wayside.” Turns out everyone is impacted: schools, work, individual healthy people become more sick, the risk of heart attacks, brain damage etc in the whole populations. We need not choose. We need not sacrifice one good for another. It is possible to have it all.
It is difficult to think you can have it all. Yes, we get the fake simulacra of having it all in our pale imitations of the good, but we have this nagging feeling that something's got to give whenever we think of things that really matter. (Classic example: for women, having a fulfilling career and a family). The idea that you can have the truly worthwhile goods, all of them, is just too hard to wrap your head around.
This is I think what Lorens in Babette's Feast means with grace. In religious context, grace is a divine gift we do not merit but yet obtain. In a secular context, grace means that we must dream bigger and that a lot of the tradeoffs, the choices we make, are needless hardships.
In both contexts, the only thing you need for grace is faith: a faith that it is possible, that we are worthy of good things. This faith spurs us to action so we try to implement what seemed initially impossible to achieve. We have done amazing things in the past by starting out with self-trust and a sense of possibility.
Making an even bigger picture, once we have this faith in our collective self-worth and in our intrinsic value and the importance of health, wellbeing and feasting, we would no longer be content with the occasional brunch as a pale reflection of feasting. We'd be thinking of ways to restore community, to bring people together, beyond the strict confines of monetary transactions in by and large uninspiring environments.
Think also of climate change. We feel we must renounce pleasure to mitigate it. But do we? Many deep pleasures of human life do not require huge carbon expenditure. Mass tourism, for instance, is not necessary for flourishing lives. We can work to make our cities more liveable, interesting, and enjoyable.
It's my hope we will get there, slowly but steadily, but before we can begin to do this work, we must first have a collective faith in its possibility. That is the true meaning of grace, and I feel, a central message of Babette's Feast.
(This piece was inspired in part by a conversation with Conor Browne. Many thanks to him)
What a beautiful and inspiring essay. Babette’s Feast is one of my all time favorite films. Now watch, for reminder of the fragility of life, love, choice, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”