Why do we eat? Of course we eat because we are hungry and need food to survive, but is that the only reason we eat? I was watching a show called Man Versus Food, and it made me ask myself this question. On the show, host Adam Richman travels around the country doing food challenges in different restaurants, usually involving him eating a large amount of food with the soul purpose of proving that he can eat it. This made me think about why we eat food, and I believe that eating has become more of a social activity than something we do to survive.
When I was growing up I remember going to massive family gatherings where, now that I think about it, there really was no reason to get together but to eat a bunch of food and spend time with family. But why did it always have to revolve around food? Why is it always a family picnic or a family dinner? Why can’t we just have a family gathering without it having to be all about food? I think it’s because eating is the best way we know of finding common ground with people. Everyone eats food. But it is not necessary for us to eat at these gatherings, we will not starve to death if we didn’t eat. But food brings people together and gives us a common social environment.
We use food to set the environment of a party or a gathering. We use it to even set the mood when we go on a date. When a guy asks a girl on a date, most of the time it is to dinner or to food at least. But you take her to a fancy restaurant not because you need to eat but because you want to spend time with her in a nice environment and what better place than somewhere that you can eat seeing as you both eat? Something you both automatically have in common. It’s the ultimate ice-breaker. And even later in the relationship when the man purposes to the girl at the fancy restaurant, he didn’t ask her there because he was starving and needed to eat, it was because it’s a social place where they both can feel comfortable. Later they will serve a big feast at the wedding, and have their own family gatherings which revolve around food.
Sometimes we don’t even use eating as a way to break the ice or to set the mood, but we use it simply to pass the time. Every time I go to the movie theatre I always buy popcorn. I never buy it because I’m hungry, just so that I have something to do while I enjoy the movie. When I go to amusement parks or carnivals I buy snacks to eat while I wait in lines or while I navigate my way through the place. At sporting events people go around selling hot dogs and nachos and small personal pizzas, and people buy them like they are going to die without it. When I go to the sports bars I usually get some kind of food to go with the beer. Even when we do go out to eat, we usually order appetizers, a food to eat while you wait for your food to get there.
If we only ate to keep ourselves alive, we would probably not care what we ate and how it tasted, but we do. We have tons of different restaurants, fast food places, food stands, and grocery stores with hundreds of different options of things to eat. We can eat whatever we want, whenever we want. We even have certain foods for special social occasions. We make a special cake that’s only for weddings, and on thanksgiving we mostly all eat turkey, and we even have a certain group of foods we usually only eat for breakfast.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, that’s a whole holiday we devote to eating. Every year my family comes to my moms’ house and eats till they fall asleep. We always have at least one turkey, and huge sides like mashed potatoes, stuffing, corn, chili, and all kinds of other good stuff. But the main reason we make all that food is so we can get together with people we love and reconnect. Spending time with people you might not see everyday is a lot easier when you are eating for some reason. Every holiday is pretty much the same format too; we make a big feast and celebrate by eating.
We even have entire T.V. channels devoted to food and eating. Like the Man Versus Food show, there are many other shows where the only point is to entertain us. We can’t even smell the food, let alone eat it, but we still watch these shows as if we were going to eat the food on them. Sometimes they teach us how to prepare a certain dish so we can eat it at home, sometimes they just show us the strange stuff people eat around the world. All this to socialize and share with other people our own eating experiences.
From the television shows we watch to see how other people eat, to the movie popcorn we eat to keep ourselves busy during the movie, we use food for more than to sustain life. We use it to socialize with others and to have something to talk about. We use it to make people comfortable, and we use it to entertain people. Why do we eat? Because we can. We eat for a lot of reasons and most of them are not because we need to. To be honest every time I come to English class and we talk about food I leave hungry even if I have eaten before class. Talking about food makes people want to eat food, and eating food makes people want to talk. Food is as much a social experience as it is something we need to live.
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