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.

ADAM HAD ¨EM

“Adam had ‘em.”  Or did he? The “‘em” are lice and, although odd sounding to us, there’s a real theological conundrum here. The bit of doggerel is shorthand for the kind of logical/theological puzzle that medieval eggheads found fascinating.

The conundrum has to do with two possibilities, both of which are unacceptable. Suppose Adam did have ‘em.  Then, the Garden of Eden was not much of a paradise. Even without body lice (they need clothes), there are still head lice and pubic lice to make life uncomfortable.  So, problem one: if lice were around in Eden, the place was not that Edenic.

Suppose, on the other hand, that Adam (and Eve of course) did not have the annoyance of body lice. Then Eden would be a paradise.  This is good. But another problem crops up. If lice were not part of God’s original creation, where did they come from? This gives problem two: If God’s work of creation was complete after the vaunted 6th day, and if lice were not part of that work, then they must have arisen via creation after creation stopped.

It’s quite a conundrum, for Biblical literalists at least.  For the rest of us the conundrum just shifts territory. Parasites, biologically, are fascinating, and the source of puzzling questions.

The presence of lice, as is the case with all parasites, occasions not just physical discomforts but also questions about origins.  After all, parasitism, as a life strategy, is fairly narrow and specialized. Human lice, cat lice, and dog lice, for example, are not interchangeable. Each must find its way to a specific host. There’s also the move from free standing organism to parasite.  Parts of the trajectory can be retraced, but some gaps remain. Was the narrow and absolute dependence on another entity already prefigured structurally when the former free-standing organism lost the ability to exist independently? Was there a prior shift in behavior and/or structure  that made successful parasite status possible? There’s also always the challenging issue of absolute origins. Could it be that parasites have co-evolved with free standing animals and plants from the beginning?

What we do know about lice are the following: (1) They are around; (2) they have been around a long time; (3) they need blood; (4) they have very specific sources for that blood.

Post-Renaissance European philosophy was fixated on autonomy and self-sufficiency.  This meant that parasites were either off the radar screen entirely or were treated as marginal and unusual, the exception, certainly not the rule. Post-ecological thinking has changed the assumptions.  Interdependence it turns out is the rule rather than the exception. Parasites, it is now recognized, are fairly common. Not only that, it also turns out that, despite inflated notions of self-sufficiency, even humans are a species characterized by dependence.

The philosophical fascination with autonomy provides a good example of how a conceptual framework impacts what we attend to.  It shapes how we taken account we take account of our surroundings, what becomes focal, what gets marginalized. The framework does not invent facts. It just make some of them prominent at the expense of others. When autonomy provides the general framework, then attention will move away from dependencies and interconnections.  That is what happened with parasites. It is why parasites were once considered rare.

In a post ecological world the paradigm

has changed.  Now interdependence is the rule and complete self-sufficiency the exception.  The new paradigm has given a boost to parasitologists who not only are recognizing not only the prevalence of the entities they study, but have also discovered how parasites may play positive roles in the environment.  Within wider social and political concerns the language of self-sufficiency remains strong. When it means that individuals, in light of what is good, should make a personal effort to shape their lives, then it is fine. When it moves in the direction of asserting isolation, lack of consideration for others, or downright selfishness, then it is straying not just from who we are as humans, but straying from a deep interdependent tendency in all of life.