Food and Drink at the Heart of the Matter

Beyond physical sustenance, food becomes the matrix of human contact, interaction, and connection.

Food and drink serve as the binding medium of unity. At the family table the Sunday dinner punctuates the week, the holiday dinner gathers the distant or scattered members; ritualized meals and traditional foods of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter designate a spirit specific to menu and order. The Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Labor Day have become days for hamburgers which beckon friends around the B-B-Q, the closest we come to a communal cooking pit.

In between these extended circles of family and friends lie the intimate moments made possible by the glass of wine or cup of coffee when the setting of restaurant, coffee shop or bar becomes the stage for mating rituals, business mergers or casual social connections.

Along with the ritualized consumption of food comes an attendant standard of appearance: how the cake should look, how the dish should be presented, how the hamburger should be stacked. Whether the reality of content (taste, nutrition, value) matches the form is not the issue; rather, it becomes a matter of how the food or drink measure up to the expectations set by our self-image in the context of the social environment.

Food becomes the forum for the babies first assertion of will, the child’s first assertion of independence. And then we find young children learning their early social graces over birthday cake and ice cream. Teenagers can occupy a hamburger stand to create a world of their own. Business men can find a dark corner to drink toward power or submission. Couples can inhabit a very public restaurant table and erect an invisible curtain of intimacy.

Throughout the social rituals we establish, it is possible to decode cultural values. We are revealed by what we order, where we eat, and how we position ourselves in relation to food and drink. Still we exploit the glass of wine to loosen the tongue, the warm soup to comfort the soul, and the chocolate cake to seduce the heart.