Remembering Emma

Today my friend Emma Renninger would have turned 40 years old. She was killed in an auto accident on the back roads of Central Pennsylvania in early January. On this anniversary of her birth, I offer this reflection on the gift of her life.

Over a decade ago, I was privileged to be invited to a Journey Feast for Gordon Gray. This man, a member of the Chippewa Cree, lived on the Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana where I had been visiting for two weeks. As part of this end of life ritual, the community gathered four days after Gordon’s death, each person bringing food and placing it on a large table, much like a pot-luck supper. Everyone sat on the floor around the room on cloths or blankets, much like gathering for a picnic at an outdoor concert. Servers made their way around the room, giving us a sample of all the food brought; it was expected that you would eat some of everything. I had three plates and four bowls at the foot of my chair. Multiply that by fifty or more people and you get a sense of the enormous quantity. Yet none of this food was to be wasted. To-go containers were provided so that nothing was left over. This sharing of food was not just a polite way of being together in mourning; it was essential, expected.

I was not able to attend the funeral for Emma, a woman who brought people together in unexpected ways. Emma was a farmer, cook, and entrepreneur. She named her Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania restaurant, “Emma’s Food for Life.” She once confided to me she regretted naming the restaurant after herself; such an inextricable personal link can be a burden. She indeed carried that burden, weighed down by the many responsibilities of owning, managing, and cooking for a restaurant as well as a farm. But true to its name, it was “food for life.”

Those who knew Emma as family, close friend, or casual restaurant attendee, still mourn her untimely death as such a loss precisely because her life generated “life” in such a tangible way. She fed us. She gave us food for our journeys. Literally. When I mentioned her death to my six-year old, she immediately grieved the loss of Emma’s “best-ever” pizza served on the colorful kid’s plates. And her yummy French fries. But it wasn’t so much the food itself, amazingly delicious though it was. It was her care for how she sourced her food, prepared, and served it to others that was so life-giving.

Emma was part of the “slow food” locavore movement before it was trendy. She carried out this venture in a part of the country that didn’t fully appreciate this treasure in its own backyard. When I worked as a waitress in the restaurant for two years, there would be very slow days, a table or two at most. Yet those who came valued the slow pace as a kind of sanctuary from the “food for death” culture— fast, commercially-processed food that thrived on waste.

Emma sought to create a different kind of food sanctuary that valued connection. She knew other local farmers who would bring their produce to the restaurant. She raised her own pigs and chickens. For years, our family kept a “pig bucket” at home where we would deposit all of our food scraps that couldn’t go in the compost. When full, we would deliver the bucket to Emma at the restaurant and she made sure it made it to her pigs. (Leftover birthday cake was a particular favorite). 

Emma’s life fostered connection not only between people but also between the earth and its creatures. Materials were not wasted. Likewise, time to shoot the breeze with the restaurant regulars was not wasted minutes, but an opportunity. Because Emma took the time to listen to these folks, many who became dear friends, her restaurant was indeed food for life, food for the body and the soul.

“There’s a hunger beyond food that’s expressed in food, and that’s why feeding is always a kind of miracle.”- Sara Miles.

Last winter when I read a memoir entitled Take this Bread by Sara Miles, I thought of Emma countless times. Miles shares her story as an agnostic woman who discovered the holiness of food in church and out, reaching out to others at a San Francisco food pantry that served fresh food and produce, not the kind of rejected food that took up space in dark kitchen cupboards. I meant to tell Emma how much I saw what she did as a ministry, as a way she reached out to the community and fed them in ways beyond the obvious. I didn’t do that, a regret I now carry. Instead I share these words, a tribute to a woman whose life touched mine and so many others in unexpected, beautiful ways. They were not perfect ways; they were not without anger and frustration, not without regret or deep sadness. But they were beautiful in that she showed how to work tirelessly for a vision, to care for a community, and to create a kind of sacred space adorned with art created by local artists and flowers from her garden.

In the Chippewa Cree tradition, food was not only for the living; it was for the dead. It was taken to the burial ground because the deceased would need it for their next journey. In the Christian tradition familiar to me, eating together is also central to life and death, holy communion an expression of God with us and the people of God gathered together, fed for our journeys now and of those of which we cannot see the ending.

Feeding is a kind of miracle. I give thanks for Emma’s feeding us with her spirit and her delicious meals. I hope those who continue to journey on still sense her presence when they share food and care for the land that gives life.