The Way We Eat Now

A few weeks ago, I got an invitation from the Harvard Undergraduate Research Association to join the Science Table. The table bills itself as a “revolution against procrastination.” Students can simultaneously check their problem sets and eat—not wasting precious moments of the day on non-instrumental activity. Still, HURA’s homework table is actually not much different from how students treat eating on a daily basis. The House dining halls and libraries have long ceased to be meaningfully separated. It’s largely acceptable to eat and chat with friends in between clicking through homework on a laptop. Asking people to put away their iPhones and Blackberries would be a joke.

This is strange because throughout history meals have been treated as some of the greatest opportunities for happiness and joy. The combined pleasures of good food and company have bewitched everyone from the ancient Romans to Giada de Laurentiis. A great meal is a pageant that requires energetic participation, a bit of performance art that requires actors who can rise to the possibilities of the occasion. Indeed, in the Roman classic Satyricon, banquet host Trimalchio berates the guests who remain silent, considering it an affront to the event he has arranged. “You used to be quite affable at the table. I can’t understand why you’re keeping mum.”
Not every meal has to be transformative, but we often openly treat eating as a joyless obstacle. Recall the experience of trying to schedule a meeting and resorting to a lunch or dinner because, “you have to eat, right?” I have a friend who regularly stays at dinner for an hour, slowly working through a grilled chicken and spinach salad, as he cycles through three or four sets of partners. There is a reason why the “d-hall date” is a legitimate romantic step—deciding to spend more time at lunch than it takes to eat is so foreign to daily life here.
This is a loss, because spending time and attention on meals is an indication that you value food, friends and company. What we’re doing at college is not just reaching academic enlightenment and practicing to be future world hegemons. We’re trying to attain a proper work-life balance. Note: achieving this balance is not the same as having a respectable social life. Being a hermit during the week and staying out all night on Thursday and Saturday is fun and rewarding for your Facebook picture count, but it hardly builds meaningful connections. Those things—those elusive, desirable “relationships,” are made of a thousand boring, silly moments over a hundred days. These moments make us good friends now and will make us good spouses and parents in the future. Thus, if we are the friends who struggle to make dinner with blockmates now, we risk becoming the parents who struggle to make dinner with their children twenty years from now. The siren call of p-sets need not distract us from people.