How Food Brings People Together

ONE of the quirks of the COVID pandemic is that people have lost the sense of taste and smell as a symptom of the illness.

While on one hand, this would appear to be a more trivial issue to deal with compared to the many other complications of the coronavirus, on the other those that have lost these senses have reported great difficulty in enjoying meals or even wanting to bother eating at all.

And as we all know, not only is food rather essential to staying alive and healthy, but it is also undeniably one of the most fundamental human conditions to want to enjoy and share food with each other.

While favorite dishes and styles vary enormously around the globe and by custom and tradition, the simple pleasure of sharing food with friends and family is a human constant. All the world’s major faiths have feast days as fundamental parts of key religious calendar dates – and Christianity’s key sacrament of communion is literally based on sharing food at the Last Supper.

And sharing food with others has been shown to be hugely beneficial to us in many ways. A communal meal lets us stay connected with people, which is vital for our own mental health. The meal creates the opportunity to share the highlights of our day and work through our problems with people we trust. Even in the current climate of having to Zoom friends, sharing a pizza virtually makes the whole experience much more human.

We as humans are a species programmed to explore new things and continue our learning – and food shared is a great example of this. By trying new dishes, recipes, and flavors we are challenging ourselves to improve. And when we find a new food we like, sharing the secret to making it is a great conversation as well as helping us free our creative minds.

Food is also inextricably part of our culture and our upbringing – every nationality has its own twists on cuisine and handing down recipes along with traditions is part of our family and cultural identity. Think of any city with its China Town or Little Italy – a newly uprooted immigrant community of any background will immediately open groceries and restaurants to serve the food they know and love from their homelands, and it does not take long for their new neighbors to want to join in on their delicious dishes. And by sharing our food, we share our cultures and gain a better understanding of our fellow peoples.

It has also been shown that by sharing meals we live longer, happier lives. Because the act of sharing keeps us connected with other people, we are stronger mentally for it – and this mental wellbeing is an essential part of living a long life. A further aspect of this is the comfort food gives us – when we are happy, favorite food helps us celebrate together, and when we are going through harder times, turning to comfort food helps us feel calmer and rooted within security that better times will return.