Commensality: please come back

Paradise News, a 1991 David Lodge novel, relates the story of a defrocked priest who visits the United States. American customs seem strange.  Particularly striking is the penchant for nibbling, gobbling, munching, snacking. “Americans seem to like to eat on the move, like grazing cattle.”  As if to vindicate Lodge’s observation, a recent article reports that “The days of eating three large meals a day have gone the way of the butter churn.”

The central term “meal” has actually shifted its meaning.  “There’s a changed definition of what a meal is.” Formerly,  “meal” would have been associated with a

plate of warm food cooked nearby, a table or other communal setting, and people sharing food in that setting.  Today, “I might have a piece of fruit and trail mix and call that lunch.”

National food guidelines in the US still suggest three meals, with perhaps one snack.  That pattern, as the news report suggests, is becoming an ideal more respected in the breach than in the observance.

The move away from meals to snacks is but another manifestation of a philosophical shift in self understanding, one that came to prominence after the Renaissance. It was a shift which tended to isolate individuals, to treat them as separated, disconnected from their social and natural settings.  The notion of humans as isolated units brought important corollaries that remain with us today: an emphasis on “subjects” as the source of meaning, while surroundings become mere “objects”; the transformation of “choice” from a term indicating “selection among options for good reasons,”

to a quasi-magical incantation “thus I will it”; “freedom,” the actual capacity to set a course and achieve it, a capacity rooted in discipline and cooperation, becomes “autonomy,” radical disconnection; finally,  the tendency to isolate leads to prioritizing purity and disembodiment.

None of these favors a meal in the traditional sense. A meal, after all, involves other people, some elements over which we have no control, cooking, which emphasizes mixture not purity, awareness of dependence (not autonomy), and an unbreakable connection with physicality/embodiedness.

By contrast the self-definition as “isolated units” favored

a new player in the industrialized world: advertising.  The older understanding of choice as electing among options was informed by social factors: tradition, family habits,  religious customs, the need to provide a reasonable account of one’s selections. Once these traditional guidelines receded, advertising, appealing to privatized selves prizing individual choice, could advance with hardly any hindrance.  

What we find today is that the new understanding of who we are, i.e. encapsulated selves, is conjoined to well-financed publicity machines.  Not surprisingly, one result has been a decline in shared meals and a concomitant increase in snacking, i.e. privatized nutritional episodes.

The main victim is not, as is often thought, the three-meal pattern. There is no magic about the number 3. Rather the real victim is the centerpiece of regularly patterned meals: commensality, eating in the company of others.  

Such eating both reflects and reinforces a multi-dimensional sense of who we are. The multi-dimensionality of the value landscape in which we find ourselves is reflected in diverse commensal occasions: lunch with friends, with colleagues,  a birthday celebration, a national day of commemoration, or a religious service. Each of these fosters a value-shared link: family affection, friendship, persons associated in a common purpose, special recognition for a specific individual, national pride, sensitivity to the sacred.  

Some historians of food suggest that the contemporary practice of three meals became prominent in conjunction with the rise of industrialization. Similarly, we could say that the snacking phenomenon is taking hold because persons now define themselves almost exclusively as consumers, i.e. as those whose main relationship to the natural world and to others is “buy something, use it up, discard it.”  For the consumer, in its fullest form, a single value dominates life.

Commensality, by contrast, keeps multiple values alive. As a result, it finds itself more and more marginalized in a world world in which humans define themselves primarily in utilitarian, consumer-centered terms.  The commensal and the festive go together. The festive, in turn, offers an important antidote to the consumerist attitude. It says: pause, thank, share, i.e. recognize more to life than the utilitarian side.

The French sociologist of food, Claude Fischler, has gone so far as to hypothesize that a major contemporary problem, obesity, waxes and wanes in parallel with the absence or presence of commensality.  Attempts to improve nutritional health, when aimed at privatized selves seeking to maximize their privatized range of choice, will, on Fischler’s perspective, regularly fail. They actually reinforce the anti-commensal bias which represents a major constituent of the problem.