Thanks to good fortune (and with gratitude to my local hospital) I got an initial dose of the coronavirus vaccine on the one-year anniversary of the lockdown. We have run a full lap around the calendar since the last time most of us were able to gather for food and fellowship, worry-free, with family, friends or people we didn’t know.
We have all counted the losses from missed events: birthdays, weddings, festivals, Fourth of July celebrations, the county fair, Lenten fish dinners, cheering your favorite team in person with a hot dog and beer. However, if we tallied up all the experiences we lost, commensality would turn out to be the greatest casualty.
“Commensality” simply means to eat together or to be together at the table. As one English commentator put it in 1826, with a nod to Samuel Johnson, “‘Eating together,’ as Dr. Johnson would say, ‘promotes good will. Sir, commensality is benevolent.’” The 18th-century French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously said, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.” My corollary is, tell me who you eat with, and I’ll tell you who you are.
Scholars who study human cultures and food note that commensality builds community. As a professor who has written about and taught food history for more than a decade, I often tell my students that commensality is the most important idea to take away from food studies. Meals have the ability to break down barriers. They visibly remind us of our common humanity, and they place us in a positive frame of mind as we share the pleasure of food. You may already know this intuitively from experience. When you recall times when you felt close to friends and family, how many of those moments involved food?
Although we don’t often talk about commensality, we sure organize a lot of social experiences around it. What is a local pub, your neighborhood cafe or that place where you meet friends for coffee or tea, if not a setting for commensality?
Life under lockdown deprived us of in-person human interaction, and we are counting the costs: empty school lunchrooms, meals consumed while on Zoom, weddings without receptions. A socially distanced meal, while safer from the virus, has less commensality. Self-isolation and quarantine are more extreme ways of living without breaking bread with others. They are also less healthy for us mentally and, some evidence suggests, in physical ways too.
Thousands of churches have canceled their shared meals over the past year. These communal meals often take place in a space fittingly called a fellowship hall, which provides a glimpse of heaven itself: mounds of delicious comfort food and the joyous company. Decades earlier, before many congregations could build a dedicated space for indoor eating, “dinner on the grounds” cultivated church communities across the nation dating all the way back to the Great Awakening.
When we reach herd immunity, what are you going to do? We can all make choices that will restore fellowship, friendship and family bonds. Having been cooped up for a year, starving for connection, you might yearn to hit the open road, dash to the movie theater, or delight in hearing an umpire shout, “Play ball!” But I have another hope for the coming months. As we begin to gather again around tables, on picnic grounds and at tailgates, let us do our part to rebuild community—the relationships that sustain our health and happiness—by investing in opportunities for all to join the family dinner, to give our total focus on the people with whom we dine. Let’s not take commensality for granted going forward. Celebrate and cherish each meal, whether it is one of hundreds with a family member or the first with a stranger.
James Tuten is a professor of history at Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
