Unraveling the History of Eating Together

The timeline of how and where the process or the action of eating in togetherness came about to with the Homosapien. As humans are visitors to this planet, we retained nothing. To begin with, our creations have prompted us to build ecosystems and participate in co-living spaces. This is coherent with the progress and decline of dynasties and civilizations. A rather provocative question could be: where did Homosapien’s learn to eat together?

What was initially a trial-and-error method contributed to how humans have understood food and likewise about what is edible and what is not? This developed from the knowledge that transitioned from our ancestors ongoing after their trails of curiosity and questioning everything and discerning tastes, nutrition, and the effect it had on our body.

Humans who resided in caves had to secure themselves from predators, and when they attacked humans for satiating their hunger, the humans learned to safeguard themselves by using spears and diverse objects that they established. This later on expanded into hunting these predators and roasting them in the fire they created for light and warmth inside their caves.

To resolve this question, how humans figured out what to eat and how to eat is just preliminary observation that is transmitted from animals. In Buddhism, they also recognize humans as animals for their ambition and inefficiency to attain peace in their life after being overwhelmed by several negative traits and attributes. Most of our cultural doings and behavior are intimately correlated with that of animals if we look at it with a skeptical purview.

THE PANDEMIC’S EFFECT ON EATING TOGETHER:

The Corona Virus outbreak was a shocker to essentially every living being in the world, and we have felt its impact in all conditions of life like that of Social, Political, Economical and Cultural organizations and industries. The only good side to this Pandemic is how all of us could spend quality time with our families, and how this nurtured our relationship with them and spoke of griefs and issues we had with them, and designed solutions for the same.

Speaking of family, the idea of eating together has gained maximum attention, be it set up barbecues, or all the fast and furious references you’ve come across, the elite restaurants you’ve been to, all that done at home was the best part of eating together during the Pandemic.

Alice Julier suggests in her book Eating Together that dining together will alter people’s views radically: it decreases people’s perceptions of inequality, and diners prefer to see those of different races, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds as more equal than they would in other social scenarios.