World peace: Some food for thought
“Families who eat together stay together” they say so while early humans cooperated in order to eat, today we benefit from eating together in order to be able to cooperate.
By Fanny Bucheli
Sharing a meal has a long tradition of strengthening social structures. While cave men shared meals, sat around fires and chewed sinewy flesh off animal bones they refrained from clubbing each other over the head, at least for the duration of the feast. Herein might lay one possible scenario for world peace, or at least for a more peaceful world.
Human brains started to develop and grow larger than most other primates’ once meat consumption was introduced into our basic diet. Movies showing a team of our fur-clad ancestors bringing down a woolly mammoth to take home for dinner might be a tad exaggerated and historically inaccurate. However, scientists have confirmed that hunting for meat, which had be done in a team in order to be successful, helped not only dietary needs but forced early humans to interact in collective social activities. Professor Glynn Isaac, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley even states, “Collective acquisition of food may in turn have stimulated the development of language ability and of intricate social patterns.”
In a more contemporary social structure, we all know that “families who eat together stay together”. So while early humans had to cooperate in order to eat, today we benefit from eating together in order to be able to cooperate.
Obviously, the concept of eating being a social affair is not exactly revolutionary, we go out with friends and eat, we welcome people into our homes to eat, we celebrate important milestones of life like marriage, birthdays, professional successes and yes, death, over meals. All these scenarios have one thing in common however, we share meals, and often its preparation, with people we already know and appreciate.
Maybe it is time to embrace a new concept, and welcome strangers into our alimentary routines too. Many such experiments are already in operation all around the world. In Malaysia for instance, the Picha Project launched by students, aims at encouraging refugee families to cook their traditional fare and cater to the public at large. We rather quickly change our opinion of a marginalised group once we have tried, and come to appreciate, their food. In Switzerland, Internet platform “Margrit” encourages housewives to open their doors to strangers and offer home-cooked lunch alternatives to busy professionals tired of fast paced lunchtime restaurant choices. A sort of Food-Uber, if you will. A quick search on the web gives you alternatives such as Bookalokal, where enthusiastic amateur chefs throw lavish dinner parties for strangers, or mealsharing.com and eatwith.com worldwide networks providing communal dining opportunities and the chance to meet interesting people from all walks of life.
Different services cater for different needs of course, but they all have one common goal – to make the world a better place, one shared meal at a time.
Fanny Bucheli is an FMT columnist.
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