Alexis Soyer and Military Food

For each team, the natural, national taste of their country emerges. The Americans cook big, with loud flavours, the Hungarians are honest and peasanty, the French are effortlessly the best. Far more than flags and anthems, food is the metaphor and symbol of where you come from and what you might choose to die for. The breakfast of armies is the most basic communion with what they're fighting for. Soyer was a foreigner who took to being English with an immigrant enthusiasm. He understood that armies don't just march on their stomachs; they get their camaraderie, bravery and patriotism through them.

A. A. Gill - The Dinner Party

We are the only animals in God's creation who share our food with members of our own species to whom we are not related. There is a kitchen adage that says: 'If the food is the star of your dinner party then you're inviting the wrong people.' Let's face it: dinner parties are social events and the company is the main thing.

A.A. Gill - Table Talk (Orion Books 2008)

The Prayer of Humble Access

We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord,
trusting in our own righteousness,
but in your manifold and great mercies.
We are not worthy
so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table.
But you are the same Lord, whose nature is always to have mercy:
Grant us therefore, gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood,
that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body,
and our souls washed through his most precious blood,
and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

This wonderful prayer by Thomas Cranmer which we find in the heart of the service of Holy Communion from the time of the reformation, turns the the experience of the Canaanite woman and makes it our own. We, like her, knowing that we are complete outsiders but are drawing near anyway for the Bread of life - knowing also that His nature is always to have mercy.

The Heavenly Banquet

In the story of the Heavenly Banquet mentioned in Luke 14:8-13, Jesus appears to offer an universal invitation and but not universal hospitality. However our continued presence is not determined by status but by the criteria for remaining welcome - the wedding robe. Which is reminiscent of the clothes put on in Colossians 3.

Dining Together

Dining together is not only a sociable thing to do, it is also an experience through which relationships are formed and learning takes place. Meals invariably involve conversation and conversation involves listening which leads to empathy, challenge and change. Matthew (Levi) organises a symposium and invites Jesus not just to eat but to teach (Luke 5:29-35). In the course of the meal change takes place.

Eucharistic Food

The act of remembrance comes through eating. We may not always remember what we eat but in Christ we eat what we remember. Christ both word and bread. He is the bread of life and always has been. In eating we take it into ourselves, and it becomes part of us and we part of it. The physical and spiritual become inseparable.

Fashion Taste and Eating Out

The fashionability of dining out has meant that the practice has become more than a means for maintaining the body, it has become a source of shared cultural beliefs. For example, foodstuffs have frequently acquired social meanings that refer to properties beyond their nutritional qualities. In certain times and places, the taste for game has been associated with wealth and prestige because it was hunted by the landed gentry; oysters have been regarded as aphrodisiacs; truffles have been seen as embodiments of the mysteries of old Europe. Barthes has described food as 'a system of communication', 'a body of images', 'an intimate part of the protocol of social life'. Similarly, the places in which one eats carry various meanings; a restaurant has distinctions that a cafe, a tavern and a picnic do not. The diner sees in both the restaurant and its foodstuffs some broader social values; for example, a luxuriously appointed restaurant may evoke an aristocratic way of life long associated with the pleasures of being served by an indentured class. Or an appetite for and 'au courant' view that food is not a banal and simple ingredient in the maintenance of life but rather a cultural event and form of aesthetic in which its arrangement and colouring should be appreciated as if they were works of art. In these ways, the practice of dining out in a restaurant can also be seen as a purveyor of cultural values and social images; it is where we can learn to act and feel in accord with the desires of the times.

When people start flocking to a small, inner city bar because they have learned that cocktails are in (again), they also come to see that the hours spent over a gaudily coloured beverage are amongst their most pleasurable; when the pasta restaurant becomes the favourite haunt of the cosmopolitan it has much to do with his/her acceptance of the idea that ethnic diversity is attractive. The different meanings and cultural values attached to the various forms of dining out indicate that tastes in foods and preferences in the style of dining out are not independent of other features of the social epoch. Restaurants have been included in the orbit of fashions.

Fashion, Taste and Eating Out - Joanne Finkelstein
The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory (Polity Press: Cambridge 1994)