Would you care to dine with me?

      Food is everywhere. From the McDonald's on the corner to the refrigerator, consuming food can be as mundane as blinking. This, as Foster tells us in chapter two, Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion, is what makes a meal in literature special. I can't imagine an author having to describe things like, "Tom stabs the piece of lettuce with his fork and then raises it to his mouth, lowers the fork and takes a drink of wine." A meal lasts at least thirty minutes (if it's going well), so that would get old fast. Unless it's a symbol, and more than your everyday meatloaf. Sharing anything can be special, like letting your daughter drive your sports car or taking turns with your favorite doll. The importance is heightened by how sensitive that people are about nourishment. The energy we get from our food and drink is a basic survival need, and humans are right to be picky about what goes in their bodies and who eats with them.

      The meal described in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky is one that does not bode well for any of the characters. Katerina Ivanovna spends over half of all she has on a memorial dinner for her late husband, even as she and her children have been living in terrible circumstances and are on the brink of starvation. She only has the money because of Raskolnikov's generosity. Though she invites everyone, only the worst bunch from the complex she lives in come out to eat. It was intended by Katerina to be a last stand of pride, but by the end of the dinner she is alternating between screaming at her guests and coughing up more and more blood. In this case, the meal is a downward spiral for the characters in the book. A meal is a chance for things to go very well or very badly, and here it was the latter. This failed meal precedes Katerina Ivanovna's death.

      It's a stimulating thought to imagine that sharing a meal can be a form of communion. From splitting a piece of gum to getting drinks after work, sharing food is sharing a part of what you have with someone else. When I read the paragraph about a shared joint being a form of communion, I was reminded of the closing tableau of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Though the Joad family has failed at all the dreams they had hoped for going West, Rose of Sharon is able to share her breast milk with an old man dying of starvation. This communion is the difference between life and death for the man, and a chance for the Joads to finally influence fate positively. This ends the book on a note of hope that if you can still help others, it might be worth it to keep on living.

      Line 649 of Comedy of Errors sums up in a great way that it's not the food, it's the company: "But though my cates be meane, take them in good part, Better cheere may you have, but not with better hart." I haven't yet heard of anyone leaving a meal because the food was bad, if they were with people they cared about. Because food is so vital to our bodies, eating when we are nervous or excited can be very difficult. Eating with those that make us uncomfortable can be even worse. The next time that any sort of meal comes up in a book I'm reading, I'm going to keep a lookout.