BON APPÉTIT

Eating in solitude is a symptom of disease, insanity, disgrace, untouchability, and personality malfunction.
We were not meant to eat alone, we are social animals. Eating with someone is a manifestation of connection and belonging. And shared food tastes better.

Eating lunch at one's desk, or going to a restaurant by oneself, is not dining with other people. It's barely better than simply sustaining the body.

People in psych wards and hospitals eat alone - when you think about it, the tray brought to the bed of the invalid is perhaps one of the most brutal aspects of modern medicine.
Nothing says "outcaste", "plague carrier", "possibly soon dead", and in any case "discardable individual" quite so much.


"Here's some fuel. If you get better, we CAN get rid of you. If you don't get better, we WILL get rid of you.
Now obediently shovel it in, and please don't bother us while you're doing so. We really don't give a damn."


Lone wolves and rogue elephants eat alone. Both belong to social species with recognizable group dynamics. Yet neither solitary creature has companions with whom to dine.
Whether or not they nourish themselves or starve is not of concern to others of their kind.
They could just stop eating, really, it wouldn't matter.


The single-person-serving has to be one of the sickest manifestations of social custom ever invented. It says that one does not want to share, any others at the table are merely background noise, and in any case they are almost certainly too selfish and culinarily eccentric to want any part of what one is eating.
They're just there, but they might as well be not - there is no commonality to be found among them.
Such deliberate demarcation and delimitation makes a mockery out of breaking bread together.

"No, that's okay, you can go ahead and eat all of that weird nasty muck which we despise, really...... and you can't have any of ours! Don't touch me!"

When you think about it, it kinda puts a damper on lunching with a group, doesn't it?
You're supping in company by pure coincidence, you don't have any tastes in common, you're not eating the same things.

Shared food is sacramental. Solitary food is, more or less, carrion.


What are you planning to do this evening?


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