The Human at the Table

Humans spend part of their day at the table where they consume their meals. The term “meal” can be replaced with mealtime which similarly, in English, indicates the time that, in different ways and forms, is dedicated to eating. When we talk about eating, we often indifferently use the terms “feeding” or “nutrition” even though, in reality, they express different concepts. In fact, “feeding” refers to the intake of an organism of the foods essential to its metabolism and its daily vital functions; “nutrition,” on the other hand, refers to the set of biological processes that allow humans to absorb and use all the food substances ingested, which are necessary for the survival of the organism. Feeding is strongly influenced by cultural aspects, whereas nutrition is based on biological processes. How and what we eat are linked to the geographical and cultural context in which we feed; what we eat is also linked to the absorption capacity of the human digestive system, for which some foods are edible and others are not. This means that nutrition is connected to the evolution of the species; for example, in the case of humans, the digestive system is unsuitable for absorbing woody substances (Consiglio and Siani 2003; Lévi-Strauss 2016). What we eat does not depend only on biological aspects but is also strongly connected to cultural aspects such as the consumption of the meat of some animals, which is allowed in certain cultural contexts and forbidden or considered taboo in others. Pork meat has a different treatment in the three great Western monotheistic religions: Christian religion allows its consumption, which is instead forbidden by the Jewish and Muslim religions. An example of food taboo is dog meat, which is regularly consumed in Southeast Asia but is a taboo for the Western world, where this animal is considered a pet. In the Anglo-Saxon world, horse meat is considered taboo which, on the contrary, is normally consumed in the rest of Europe. For all cultures the absolute taboo is the consumption of human meat. Eating is often the beginning and cement of friendly and affectionate relationships in general. How many affectionate relationships start with a coffee and are cemented in dinners among friends! The working breakfast testifies to the importance of the convivial moment in working life, when professional speech takes on an apparently hedonistic guise, but, in reality, essential to advance important professional relationships. It can be fully stated that food and the act of eating are elements that pervade different aspects of our life and go beyond the strictly nutritional meaning (Fischler 1992). The role that eating has in quality of life is widely recognized and confirmed by common sense. The survey carried out during the Expo of Milan in 2015 indicated the preferences of the sample which consisted of more than a thousand families interviewed on the sidelines of the trade fair event: for most of the sample, eating is one of the greatest pleasures of life, 8% eat only to live, and another 8% considers eating as the main pleasure of life. Literature as well variously reiterates this concept: “Eating is one of the four purposes of life... what the other three are, no one has ever known” (Chinese proverb), “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not eaten well” (Virginia Woolf), “Meditate well on this point: the best hours of our life are all connected, with a more or less tangible link, to some memory of the table” (Charles Pierre Monselet), “Man is what he eats” (Ludwig Feuerbach), and “The best things in life are either immoral, or are illegal, or make you gain weight” (George Bernard Shaw).