Meals: More than Eating Food

How meals transform the lived experience.

Oct 16, 2020

Posted From: The Bronx, New York, United States

The biggest change from living at home to living outside the home involves food. More specifically, two aspects of food.

The first involves sustenance: where will I get my energy from, now that my parents are not purchasing, preparing, and organizing food?

The second entails time: whom will I share the meal time with and in what manner?

These two aspects invoke the greatest changes in my life when being away from my immediate family’s home.

Food is an essential component of life

We need energy to live. We derive that energy from all other organic life; fossil fuels, plants, animals. We need to consume ~2,000 calories from food a day. Without this intake, we will not be able to sustain our actions and thoughts.

Don’t take it from me; every human eats while living. In fact, anthropologists have determined that eating cooked foods played an essential part of the evolution of Homo Sapiens.

Where food comes from, literally

Food derives from the Earth and its natural processes. All food consumed for our health provides energy (defined in the unit of a “calorie”) and enables us to perform our day-to-day actions. We evolved over the course of time to consume such energy for our usage — provided by the Sun through billions of years of fusion, we live off its prowess. In fact, the “solar energy from the Sun provides 173,000 terawatts of power to Earth, continuously. That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy use.” (link) Thanks to evolution and the ecosystem’s balancing, photosynthesis converts that solar energy to sugars, which we are able to consume and process for our own energy usage. Food (energy) comes from the Sun, yet there are many intermediaries along the way to convert solar energy to the food we come to love.

Where food comes from, figuratively

While reading “Stone Age Economics” by Marshall Sahlins, the anthropologist notes that food derives from cultural processes. Food can be conceived of as a quest that is:

“intermittent, leisure abundant” (page 14)
early revolutions in humans were driven by “new ways of relating to the existing energy sources” (page 81).

To note, the energy sources tens of thousands of years ago are the same they are to us today: plants and animals. More commonly now, energy from older plants/animals, derived in the form of fossil fuels.

Of other importance, food sources generated a wider sphere of exchange than other things, as food allowed humans to move beyond generalized reciprocity and sectoral limits, thus generating the basis of society we have come to know and love (page 217).

“Food has too much social value-ultimately because it has too much use value-to have exchange value” (page 218).

Thus, when we think of food, we are actually thinking about a socially contrived artifact. When I asked family and friends, “where food comes from,” they answered: restaurants, in-home kitchens, food carts, grocery stores. From our hominid perspective, this seems to be true. However, examining the cultural notions behind these answers, we find that food derives from human-created places, and ultimately, by fellow humans.

Meals as a time to cherish

Often skipping breakfast because I had to catch the bus at 7:04 am, I neglected recognizing breakfast as “the most important meal of the day.” Often rushing through lunch because I had no time to eat after buying from the cafeteria, I neglected recognizing lunch as an essential meal. Rather, I felt as if pretzels and goldfish, when I arrived at home after school, were a more satisfactory meal.

This trend continued through high school and college. I enjoyed Costco’s microwaveable burritos for their simplicity and “healthiness.” I favored protein bars for an on-the-go “hearty” meal when walking to class. In 2020, both of those foods I can no longer eat; my body truly rejects them (they taste awful; even the picture below makes me cringe).

I now realize that I made mistakes in the past several years regarding my conceptions of meals. (To note, I made many more mistakes during that time than my conceptions of meals.) Instead of treating food as something that had to be eaten for energy, I treat it as a time to cherish. Food has become meals. But what caused this change?

Food + People = Meals

In a book I read in 10th grade (for summer reading), a chapter revolved around food acting as a communion in literary works. The act of breaking bread with another person symbolized a connection between the two actors; they now shared a bond. Likewise, when my consumption of food from shifted from the solo to a higher-level unit, in this case, my family, a daily ritual took place; strengthening of ties between those around me at the table.

Going back to Sahlins, this makes sense — the social value of food is incomprehensible, as it takes on a whole new, incalculable value when shared with those around.

Combined with reflection, my past experiences now enable me to see this viewpoint. I realize people in Singapore, young and old, ate their lunches with others as a societal activity. I appreciate late night baking with friends at college served as the focal point for laughs and deep discussions. I comprehend dinners consumed without family, due to late night sports practices, did not feel like meals.

Dinner, as epitome of cherished time

A constant event in my household involves sitting down at the dinner table with my four siblings and two parents. While I am no longer living at home, I now realize the outsized influence this daily occurrence had on my development as a person. More specifically, it reinforced the notion that:

Humans require food to live.
People create social constructs around food.
Food + People = Meals

Sitting down at the dinner table, at ~7:00 pm, is a staple in my life. While this ritual was often interfered with Greek School, football practice, and debate tournaments, more or less, my family and I ate dinner, all seven of us together, at 7 pm(ish).

Never did I cook the food. Rarely did I assist with the preparations. Occasionally did I go shopping for the meals. Intentionally or not, my family hid those experiences from me. Every night, though, I partook in the eating with my family. In addition, I constantly viewed, albeit from afar, the effort it took to produce the meal we ate. From shopping, to preparing, to cooking, the food took a lot of work to make it a meal.

With this in mind, dinner became my favorite meal of the day. It was not simply because I enjoyed that type of food best (I do), but rather, because I enjoyed the meal the best. Hearing about my dad’s job, discussing the county’s newest school education programs, and talking about current events; we partook in each nightly around the dinner table.

All food consumption as meal consumption

Living apart from my immediate family forces me to recreate the mystic of dinner meals. Fortunately, I now share a home with a fiancée. Nonetheless, it is difficult to create a recipe for success to transform food to meals, as my family had back at my prior home.

We attempt to ensure all dinners and lunches (when we are both home) are meals. In this manner, we can consume the majority of our food as meals. While not an immediate habit, it has slowly and surely transcended — we now look forward to the time spent together hearing about each other’s jobs, discussing the city’s newest COVID measures, and talking about current events.

Enabling our consumption to be of meals, rather than food, empowers our lived experience to transcend to an anthropological state. For that, I feel happiness, and also, human.

G and the World

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