Notes on Commensality
Or, why we should sit together more around a kitchen table
KING CLAUDIUS:
Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?
HAMLET
At supper.
KING CLAUDIUS
At supper! where?
HAMLET
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain
convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your
worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all
creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for
maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but
variable service, two dishes, but to one table:
that's the end.
(from Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 3)
1.
Commensality is the practice of individuals sharing a meal together, but with an emphasis on the social and cultural aspect of this activity. In modern times, it can mean sitting around a table together, eating, and talking.
Sociologically, the meal acts as an intermediary between the private and the public spheres. Eating, at a basic level, is a self-interested, individual, biological need, to fuel energy. But shared eating connects that individual need to a public good, through sharing food and conversing with others. It links the individual experience to a broader socio-ecological imagination. It opens up the short-term, momentary experience of eating, with a broader, long-term, pattern of society and its environmental ground.
In ancient Greece, the banquet was the origin of the political community: an oxen or bull was ritually killed, cooked, and divided evenly among the participants. What was important was not the ritual killing itself, but the shared eating that followed: that is the act that incorporates a person into a political community. Citizenship was conferred upon those who ate together.
This practice prefigured the development of democracy in Athens, when the common meal was a symbol of their political life: food was distributed via the process of sortition (lottery) which was also the process by which members of the deliberative assembly were chosen.
This continued throughout history, from the sharing of ritual meats, distributed in equal portions, to the later practice of eating from a shared pot of food; to later still, with the use of individual plates (even here, the plates themselves were circular, and of equal size, to continue the equality and sociability of eating together from a common pot).
This practice is associated with the notion of ‘hospitality’, which derives from terms ‘host’ and ‘guest’, which in turn comes from ghostis (stranger) and hostis (enemy); it is also a cognate term to ‘hostile’. But shared meals require generosity (to prepare food for somebody else) and trust (having somebody else prepare your food), and so become a site where ritual hospitality replaces open hostility.
2.
And yet, this history was overshadowed by a more dominant idea of separation and division. The Judeo-Christian bible, for example, argues: ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4). This underpinned the idea that eating was a lowly activity, distinct from higher, spiritual activities. Hence the notion of fasting, generally, but of ascetic religious practices (of bodily self-denial), in particular. Later, in the Roman Catholic Church, the ritual of the last supper, is only permissible via the process of transubstantiation, with the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ (i.e. something other than simply bread and wine).
[See our previous discussion on askēsis, where we traced the contours of this practice across eight centuries of the ancient world, ‘from its emergence in early agrarian and proto-democratic Greece, through to its expansion and continuation in tragedy and the democratic practice of the polis, as askēsis, across the counter-currents of aristocratic and anti-democratic rhetorical schools and the emergence of philosophy, its deformation and fossilisation in the Alexandrian, Hellenistic and Roman periods following the collapse of democracy, and its usurpation by the emergent Judeo-Christian tradition, where finally askēsis becomes asceticism.’ ]
This also drew on the (anti-democratic) ideas of Plato, separating the rational mind from the alimentary body. A mind-body dualism that became more prominent in the 17th century ideas of Descartes, which produced the framework for much of modern philosophy. This Cartesian framework, via Kant, underpins much modern aesthetics, within which the idea of ‘taste’ became a metaphor for artistic discrimination, but wholly intellectual, separate from actual physical, sensual taste, associated with eating, which is relegated to the body (along with touch and smell) – and separated from the mind, which privileges disembodied vision, subordinate to rationality.
[See our previous discussion, A brief history of (not) touching art; or, how the apotheosis of sight and rationality has rendered art obsolete, for a longer description of this process of disembodiment, this subordination.]
This disembodied rationality also became the context within which the modern market-economy emerged. Increasingly, food became reduced to simply a commodity or a fuel source. Commensality was replaced by commodification. Particularly since the Second World War, as work hours increased, home hours decreased, and meals became reduced to their market value only. The intermediary between private and public spheres collapsed. The link between individual experiences to a broader socio-ecological imagination became broken, and that imagination diminished. Eating returns to being simply fulfilling a self-interested, individual, biological need, to fuel energy.
In this context, sociability collapses, and meals become framed by single-use convenience and speed, outsourcing the preparation of food to an industrial practice, to artificial processes and disposable packaging. Crucially, these are the conditions which undergird, and drive the commercial use of plastics, particularly ‘single-use’ plastics. It is these plastics that then make their way into the environment, and from there, are ingested back into ourselves, exacerbating the isolation of our loss of commensality.
How to overcome these conditions?
3.
We need to re-establish the intermediary between private and public spheres; reconnect the link between individual experiences to a broader socio-ecological imagination. In short, we should sit once more around a kitchen table, and share a meal.
Foodwork, shared meals, table rituals, and sociability (conversation) need to become, once more, a training ground for civil society, and environmental protection, modelling democratic behaviours.
For children, the kitchen table is a daily training ground and dress rehearsal for adulthood. Manners and patience are learned, how to hold conversations, know your turn, review events of the day and interpret those events, how to ask questions and how to answer. They learn to submit to the rules of the table, but also how to question and make those rules anew, to practice negotiated decision-making. The kitchen table is not an authoritarian place, but an authoritative place.
For adults, shared meals become a private (back-stage) testing ground for ideas before they go public (front-stage): it is a dress rehearsal for democracy. The table is a private space, not itself public, and yet it is, as Janet Flammang argues in The Taste for Civilization (2009), ‘constitutive of politics’. It may appear counterintuitive, but just as every (superficially) inclusive space is constituted through a process of exclusion, (substantive) public spaces are constituted through the existence of vibrant private spaces – especially if those private spaces are places born of commensality.
The kitchen table thus becomes a site for reawakening the socio-ecological imagination. Land/environment and foodways become once more long-term concerns, not short-term commodities to be exchanged and consumed. The single-use, the speed, the outsourcing of the preparation of food to an industrial practice, to artificial process and disposable plastic packaging, thereby become inconvenient to what is otherwise important.
The kitchen table becomes a site for deliberative conversation, which expands political imagination; because new ideas, new ways of thinking, new habits of thought, are encountered and, through the course of conversation, become adapted to our own ideas, ways of thinking, habits of thought.
Aesthetically, ‘taste’ needs to be returned to its physical, sensual basis, connected with other bodily experiences, without losing its function as arbiter of artistic discrimination: it simply judges art as something that is not wholly visual, subordinate to rationality.
This accompanies a reconfiguration of the hierarchy of senses to a more democratic ground. Conversation and discussion are mental activities, yes, but not disconnected from the needs and limitations of the body. The kitchen table integrates the senses, keeps together the mind and the body. Foodwork brings together not only taste, but touch and smell, as well as hearing and sight.
Food preparation is hands-on and messy, like eating a king.
But so is art. And so is democracy.
HAMLET
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a
king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
KING CLAUDIUS
What dost you mean by this?
HAMLET
Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar.
(from Hamlet, Act 4 Scene 3)
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Is this your way of accepting my invitation for pig-face pasta?