Food Glorious Food

Chemistry is the magic that catalyzes ingredients into food. And food can be the inexplicable that joins father and child.

Certainly that was the case when "Mike on a bike" visited the Colorado soup kitchen and was recognized by his 17-year-old daughter who he hadn't seen for years and was volunteering to bring food to the hungry. As he put it to the Grand Junction Sentinel, "If it wasn’t for the Soup Kitchen, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. "And if it wasn’t for the Soup Kitchen, I wouldn’t have reunited with my family."

It is also food, that ties the Anderson, S.C., Pig Daddy's BBQ team (who are competing in the third annual Piedmont Blues and Hash Bash) to their forefathers. As humble team leader Richard Medford told The Index-Journal, "Our dads used to watch their dads cook, so we built our first cooker 25 years ago, which is what we still use. We’re just doing what we were taught growing up and hoping we do better than last year."

Thanks to the Fortune Society, which helps ex-cons transition into positions of service to society, food strengthens the lives of single dads and their children. Teaching former fourflushers to work in four-star restaurant kitchens builds a life for both dads and offspring.

And even when ingestion isn't the answer to the tie, food can still strangely connect the father and the child, as it does for Formula 1's Kazuki Nakajima and his father Satoru, who also raced on the Grand Prix circuit. Apparently, they both drive like natto, soybeans.