Commensality and its psychological implications

Eating is the first thing we do at birth. Our first independent act? And for this reason it is something so broad that it could be said that our entire history is assembled and built on the act of eating.

It is not a partial activity. It is the mother of all of them. Our way of bonding with others has to do with it.

Love begins by incorporating what we are given. It is liquid and sweet. It is the first acceptance. Then things of other flavors will come, and with surfaces that offer more resistance. And we will accept them out of love. Or not. At that time love and pleasure are born together. And they soon break up. But not totally. Like the sea and the river are united again and disunited at key moments but not without meaning.

Understanding commensality

the pleasure without love leads to death. Food under the exclusive empire of pleasure, too. Already Freud describes how before the recording of pleasure everything yields. Until the need subsides for a while. This is why eating is so linked to loving, loving, breastfeeding, sucking, sipping, biting, craving, waiting, and sometimes despairing.

Eating presupposes a couple, a pair. Even in the loneliest act, eating rebuilds a lost other. The anger of a child who feels hungry and is not assisted in his voracious immediacy is the same irrepressible and indelible anger of the eternal anger that destroys all will.

Eating without filling in all the gaps is a mature job; As a result of the famines that once punished humanity, the question “did you fill up?” still in use in many places. Learning to give up a bite too many, to enjoy what is just, is an activity where the outline of the will is exhibited.

Saying "no thanks" or accepting something new and unknown are gestures of love. This requires the renunciation of the known. To what has already been lived. To go through the miracle of knowing again.

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Eating is an act of great passivity

It is the passive par excellence. When one eats "it is filled". How from outside of oneself, complying with who knows what an external, unfathomable mandate.

Then one goes on renouncing this position of being an object of worship and adoration, of transcendental projection, to use our own shortcomings as our first genuine attributes.

What we lack is the primarily active. Giving up offering the body is accepting the decision to have a beginning and an end.

Choose. Enjoyment is renounced, by acquiring control of one's own pleasure. The body as inhabited implies a renunciation of the body as an object to be filled.

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Eating is an act of blind surrender

Then it becomes a social act integrated into coexistence and shared pleasure. The third party that breaks the mother-child dyad is accepted, and it is even celebrated with the banquet where everyone eats and everyone gives themselves up to show the lack that the other can help to fill, or to calm the less.

Hunger is a human sign. It supposes that someone can, from the outside of my own bowels, manipulate my nothingness, my everything, and the whim of what I want and what I lack.

When a child accepts a meal, he meekly surrenders to the customs of his parents, of her environment. It is a battle won against the inertia of voracity.

In the ritual of shared meals there is usually an acceptance of giving up certain meals so that the others eat it, and I can also renounce my measure to respond to the image of the others eating. It is eaten and imitated in the same way. Eating is a totally primitive way of imitating, loving and agreeing.

a sign of trust

And finally, when one meets with others to share a meal, one confidently exposes himself to the intention of the other. The original gathering to eat and share constituted the act of "commensality."

It is a sign of trust to eat with others. Peace is celebrated with food. No one in the middle of a war shares a meal.

For all this, rethinking the function of food when we reduce it to a secondary role carried out automatically and under patterns of which we are not even aware, is to ignore the emotional and affective importance, vital, that contains the act of eating and its ability to resist the attacks of the environment that does not take into account its social face mixed with the sieve of the first sense.