Commensal Attraction: Eating Together as a Social Tool

Abstract

Social and human sciences have demonstrated again and again how commensality—the practice of eating together—has substantial implications, across time and place, for how social life is configured. Closely related phenomena have also been explored in biologically oriented sciences focused on human behavior. Yet, there is still little dialogue between these and the mainstream social science analysis of food and eating, despite their shared interests in the role played by food and eating in the organization of social life. The paper strengthens this dialogue and proposes that eating together be analyzed as a social tool: an innovation for the organization of complex behavior. More precisely, the proposition is that the habitual, routinized, and ritualized communal eating we see today developed into a social tool for exercising a diverse set of biologically evolved social traits. Through in-depth analyses of food sharing, meal sharing, and feasting, I propose three distinct propositions of commensality as a social tool: social coordination of needs (mainly nutritional); social order and complex interaction (primarily conversations); and the symbolic display of stratified social relations. Understanding communal eating as a social tool thus opens up for a unified theory to explain seemingly disparate social phenomena, such as the underlying sociality displayed through different meal arrangements. For a thorough understanding of this, intensified conversations across the borders of scientific paradigms are required. Commensality is a social tool that satisfies both the social and biological appetites.