Spoiler Alert: It’s the kitchen. Surfaces for Life is all about tapping into a space we all have to achieve the life we want: a physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy one. Here, we explore how the kitchen helps us connect with ourselves and others.
If the year had to be divided by theme, October to December would belong to connection.
This is the time when you’ll find yourself around more people than usual, whether you like it or not. People travel, come home, go home, help someone feel at home, celebrate, and generally gather. And wherever there is a gathering of humans, there is a kitchen involved.
In these people-filled months, our ability to connect – to share time, effort, memory, and experience – becomes central. Yet when we talk about connection, we often overlook the one place where it’s consistently and reliably built: the kitchen.
What’s your common ground? You might not realise it, but it’s the kitchen.
Food and the work around it connect us in both visible and invisible ways. Today, when many of us are less connected to where our food comes from or how it’s made, we tend to forget this. Festivals and special days have specific foods. Each household has its own traditions of what’s prepared and shared. Weddings and holidays bring people home, where favourites are made, dishes are reinvented, and nostalgia gets its time to shine.
The Universal Medium
Food and its preparation are a common language of gathering. Making and sharing food translates across geography, circumstance, and culture. Wherever you are in the world, this time of year draws people closer through the simple act of cooking or eating together.
Homecoming: A return to an existing connection: people coming back after months or years and settling into familiar patterns that always involve food. Favourite dishes get made again, parents cook what they know you love, and friends welcome you with something they’ve saved just for you. Even if you never enter the kitchen yourself, the connection is rekindled through what comes out of it — the tea made the way it always was, the snack that tastes like childhood, the quirks of a home kitchen you haven’t seen in a while.
Hospitality: Sharing that connection with someone else: inviting them into the foods, routines, and comforts that define this time of year for your home. It could be offering a dish your family makes only now, sending something over, or cooking for someone who doesn’t have their people nearby. It’s the warmth that comes from saying, “This is ours; come be part of it.”
Continuity: Keeping connection alive across years and distances: made possible because someone knows how to carry it forward. The ability to recreate a dish, remember a process, or pass down a way of doing things is what allows a bond to continue. Continuity isn’t only in the food itself; it’s in the knowledge, memory, and practice that let the connection stay intact.
Not everyone’s version of connection looks the same, but food and the kitchen reach into all of them. Whether exchanged, prepared, gifted, or shared, it creates a sense of participation; a reminder that we share this rhythm of nourishment and care.
The thing we forget is that the kitchen isn’t only for those who cook. It connects everyone who gathers, eats, or remembers.
The Layers of Connection
Kitchen connection spans many layers:
Within family: Generational continuity through recipes, techniques, and time spent together.
Within community: Shared cooking during weddings, festivals, or neighbourhood exchanges.
Across cultures: Friends hosting each other, cuisines mixing, and rituals overlapping.
Across distances: Shared dishes and rituals linking people across homes, cities, and countries.
Across time and memory: Food linking the present to places and people no longer near.
Within oneself: The grounding, private connection that comes from cooking or preparing something alone.
The Bigger Picture
Ultimately, this season brings people together in ways the rest of the year doesn’t. And in all of that movement – the homecomings, the hosting, the shared meals – the kitchen becomes the place where connection is boosted most reliably. It’s where familiar foods mark return, where hospitality, and where continuity brings comfort. The kitchen becomes common ground, holding the small routines and shared moments that keep us connected.
Surfaces for Life reflects on the kitchen as a medium for things that go beyond food, like belonging and sustaining the bonds between us. It asks how you can use the kitchen, the skills you build in it, and everything it gives you to support different parts of your life. The kitchen is a space that births closeness, care, and the ability to support, appreciate, and celebrate with one another.
Specta Quartz sees the kitchen as a space for calm, connection, fun, and growth. Follow us on Instagram @surfacesforlife for more.
