My Mother Calls It Church, I Call It Dinner

Brianna Schindler’s last UVA Essay

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Brianna’s Founder Stole

In honor of Brianna’s graduation from UVA this past weekend, we wanted to share something incredibly special with all of you - the final essay she wrote at the University of Virginia.

This semester, Brianna was recognized as a student entrepreneur and received a Founder Stole through UVA.

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A Complete Surprise

Then during graduation weekend came a complete surprise - she was awarded the Edgar F. Shannon Award from the Z Society, an honor recognizing students who have made meaningful contributions to the University community.

“The Z Society Shannon award has recognized the “best” graduating student from each school within the university since 1958. This honor is bestowed upon Brianna because she has drawn the attention and admiration both of the Z Society and of her peers, professors, and administrators. In lecture halls and unseen moments, invisible leadership and unseen acts of care, Brianna has come to embody the highest regard this community can offer.”

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As proud parents, those moments were incredibly emotional. But even more meaningful was reading the words she chose to leave UVA with.

Her essay, “My Mother Calls It Church, I Call It Dinner,” beautifully captures so much of what we are trying to build here every single day - not just scratch-made food, but connection, presence, conversation, family, and community around the table.

There is one line that especially stopped us in our tracks:

“The table is still there. All of us, myself included, have to choose to come back to it.”

If you’ve ever walked through our doors and felt something different - slower conversations, real food, connection, warmth, community - this essay explains the “why” behind all of it better than we ever could.

We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read it below. 🧡

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My Mother Calls it Church, I Call it Dinner 

Our wooden dinner table

What my wooden dinner table taught me about human connection. 

Growing up, our kitchen table had one stern rule: the whole family at dinner, every night, no electronics, and no exceptions. 

On paper, this sounds simple enough. But reality included navigating these meals around two working parents, three kids, varsity sports, homework, after-school jobs, friends, and the general chaos of a family of five (and a dog) being pulled in competing directions. As we got older and busier, it was hard to remember the point of this. What difference did sitting together make? 

It turns out, a lot. 

Although we’re not a religious family, my mother has always equated our wooden kitchen table with church. The connection, the grounding, the sense of belonging - she believed that these things were accomplished as we sat together every night, and didn’t require us to be around a pew. They simply needed us all to show up, and so we did, every night. The five of us talked, we laughed, we argued, we caught up, we slowed down, we looked at each other, and we enjoyed the time together. 

One of my father’s favorite sayings is that the best problem you can have is a table that is too small. Running out of space and chairs, for him, means you’re surrounded by people you love. I didn’t understand the gravity of what he meant for a long time, but now I do. 

Food was always central to my family’s table, and not incidentally. My father is an anthropologist, archeologist, and ancestral chef who has spent his life studying how humans have nourished themselves for hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing processed ever entered our kitchen, and my dad created everything from scratch. Sourdough bread. Fermented cheeses. Butchered meats. Soaked peanut butter. You name it, he made it. 

His research also took my family around the world, and with it, to the dinner tables of communities most people never encounter. We ate weaver ant omelets in Thailand, drank blood milk with the Maasai in Kenya, shared khachapuri in the mountains of Georgia, and gorged ourselves on everything and anything manioc in the jungles of Brazil. Every time, in every place, what struck me most wasn’t the food; it was the people around it. The way that sharing a meal - regardless of language, geography, or culture - created something hard to name but impossible to miss. Perhaps this is better described as the feeling of being seen, being together, and being connected. 

I’ve realized now that I took this for granted. 

When I went away to college, nobody told me to eat with others - so, mostly, I didn’t. Growing up, I never had to seek that out, it was just how my family did things. My freshman roommate and I would make a box of Annie’s mac and cheese (the perfect amount for two) and sit in our twin beds, facing each other. After we both transferred, even that fell away. 

When I got my own room, meals became something I did alone, standing at the kitchen counter, scarfing something down on my way to the next destination. At some indiscernible point along the way, food became fuel to me, and the connection around it became secondary. Even now, it’s a running joke amongst my roommates that I never pull out a chair and sit down. 

Although not that much time had passed, the long, loud, unhurried dinners of my childhood shrank to the handfuls of pepperoni and cheese I grab on my way out the door. 

Here’s what I have spent the last few months grappling with: my generation is supposedly the most connected generation in history, and yet researchers call us the loneliest. Entire generations are growing up with the world’s population at their fingertips, yet somehow feeling less connected to one another. Although I’ve spent months studying this, I wasn’t living what I was learning. I wasn’t prioritizing this connection, and it’s increasingly becoming something you have to seek out. 

In a seemingly unrelated life experiment, I recently bought myself a Brick - a small device that blocks apps and forces you to put your phone down (this was my attempt to limit screen time and hours of doomscrolling). For $59, and something that sheer willpower alone should handle, my expectations were low. 

What I found instead were dozens of small moments I’d been missing entirely - brief conversations in line with a stranger at a coffee shop, eye contact with a passing friend on the way to class, and the quietness before a lecture that used to be filled with students actually talking to each other. What the Brick forced me to notice was that I had been so busy reaching for my phone that I forgot how to simply be somewhere. 

I now understand that my mother refers to our dining table as her church because of what it asked of us - our presence, our attention, and the willingness to show up and stay. I think she was right. I also believe a lot of us, myself very much included, have quietly stopped going. 

I interviewed my grandmother earlier this semester. She’s seventy, incredibly social, and has lived through every technological shift in modern communication, from payphones to FaceTime. When I asked her when she feels most connected to others, she did not hesitate: “At a table,” she said, “Sharing food, reading each other’s faces, sitting in silence together.” She didn’t need a research study to tell her that, and neither do any of us. 

I don’t have a simple or tidy solution. I’m still a college student, juggling multiple priorities and running around, like everyone else. But I’ve started making small adjustments: intentionally sitting down when I eat, putting my phone in another room, and coordinating with my roommates so we can enjoy our dinners together. These aren’t groundbreaking gestures; they’re simply the active decisions to treat every meal like it matters, because it does. 

The table is still there. All of us, myself included, have to choose to come back to it.