Eating your heart out
Food, would you believe, has a social side. You don't necessarily scoff yourself, though many people do, to the brim of your neck, just for the sake of it. People indulge in food, merely because there is a habitual, customary social side to it.
There is a gregarious quality about food; it brings people together, making them more talkative and suggestive. In the old days kings and queens in Europe like Henry VIII of Britain would take hours over a dinner banquet, stuffing himself to the last morsel!
I dare say however politics and the affairs of state were also talked about during these marathon banquets. I no doubt that food and banquet still have the same social, political and economic functions.
Kings, queens, politicians and even businessmen still talk over dinner, when they are cutting pieces of chickens and meat with their knives, or when the folk sort of mechanically move from hand to mouth.
Eating is a quality for conducting business. The term "over dinner" is very true. It's supposed to create a soothing, relaxing, even chummy atmosphere, where the most intractable affairs of state or complex business deals maybe ironed out, or at least draw out the length and terms of the negotiations, rather than mere slams and absolute no, no, no.
Besides food being for the high and mighty, and the peak of social echelons, and thank God for that because it would mean there is a stratification aspect to it, there is variegated ranking to eating. Ordinary people eat and enjoy food at parties for instance.
Plenty of food, usually light snacks and sandwiches is eaten and drenched down with drinks while the conversation is kept going in between the slight movement of the mouth and munches. This is the social side and context. People generally do not like to eat in their own especially if they had gotten used to eating with others, and in large crowds.
This is the social side to eating and food, it's almost mundane and repetitive, that is natural and normal making us what we are as humans, eating for pure social pleasure, and not just for the sake of it.
