The meaning of meals

Food is the nexus of relationships. Matthew Croasmun notes that food, and all created things, are most themselves when they are more than merely themselves.

Matthew Croasmun

Matthew is the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (with Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz). He is an Associate Research Scholar and the Director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.

Around a table, against a backdrop of fret-cut wood, three people talk and listen to each other with great interest.

Inside Lina Ghotmeh's À table pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery.

Serpentine Gallery.

This summer’s Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park, À table, designed by Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, invites us “to the table.” The extraordinary, long tables ringing the pavilion invite us to a meal and to conversation. To connect with one another and with the Earth that sustains our lives.

Ghotmeh’s invitation is an important one, if we have ears to hear. Through seeing what meals are, what they ought to be, and what they invite us to imagine, we discover what we are and what we ought to hope for.

Meals help us understand what we are. We can sometimes rush past questions about our materiality. Attending to meals won’t allow us to do that. Food, after all, is fundamental to life. We are what we eat and drink.

Early in the biblical stories of the life of Jesus, Jesus is confronted with this fact of human life. Hungry after forty days of fasting in the desert, Satan suggests Jesus miraculously produce some food for himself out of the rocks at hand. His response, a quotation from Hebrew scripture, “the human does not live by bread alone,” might at first seem like a hyper-spiritual attempt to deny our bodily dependence on food. But I take it that Jesus isn’t proposing that the human live without bread. He’s asking us to take a closer look at bread to see that it is more than merely bread. What he invites us to see will yet affirm that we are profoundly interdependent within the natural world of which we are a part. Our hunger and the food that satisfies it is one of the most visceral reminders of just this fact.

To desire a good meal is to seek to attend to the many relationships at our tables and to pursue nourishing mutuality.

Food, however, is more than merely food. Food is a nexus of relationship. The rest of the verse Jesus cites goes on to insist that food comes by the “word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” Even as we live by bread, we live by Divine words, because the bread we eat—the bread we are—comes to us as a Divine gift. In the biblical imagination, everything comes from God. In the beginning, God spoke and there was. That’s true of the wheat and rye and barley or whatever else we use to make our bread, and it is true also of the human cultures and traditions through which these natural goods come to be bread.

Bread is more than merely bread; it is a Divine gift. In fact, it turns out, that every good thing is like bread in this way: created things are most themselves when they are more than merely themselves. This is just the sort of thing the creation is. It is an interrelated, connected whole, marked by relationship within and without. Created things are most themselves in right relationship to one another and to the God who created them. As a created good, food is more than just food.

And, of course, meals are more than just food. Meals are sites of relationship. Particularly in our globalized world, our simple tables often conspire to hide fantastically complex networks of relationship implicated upon them. These networks interweave relationships among people and places—seen and unseen.

The people implicated at our table include those around the table; those who foraged for, grew, transported, and prepared the food; those whose cultures for generations cultivated the plants, animals, fungi, dairy products and all the rest that find their places on our table; those whose histories and cultures gave rise—through creativity, necessity, or both—to the cuisines that weave together these natural and cultivated elements; and those absent from our tables who yet hunger for food. The places implicated include the fields and wilds and rivers and seas whence the food itself comes; the lands whence the cuisines and cultures hail; and the places we occupy as we share the table.

So, meals are more than just food. But then, meals most worthy of the name are more than just meals. Meals are not just sites of any old relationship. At their best, they are sites of nourishing mutual encounter between people, places, and the God who created them all. To desire a good meal is to seek to attend to the many relationships at our tables and to pursue nourishing mutuality. To seek the good of the wilds and streams from which our food has come—to seek a way of relating to these places such that those relationships are mutually nourishing. To seek the good of the people seen and unseen but nevertheless “present” inasmuch as they are implicated at our tables.

In days like ours, our tables are sites of mutual encounter, but the encounter is not nourishing to all involved.

At times, a good meal in this broken world will take the form of fasting in solidarity with or materially for the sake of those who hunger for what we so readily waste. In attending to our interrelatedness with the people and the places God has created, we begin to understand what it is also to attend to our relatedness to God at the table. Each of us—human, plant, animal, field, river, sea—we become most what we are when we become more than just ourselves. We become most ourselves when we attend to our relatedness to one another, when we attend to the God who created us for mutual flourishing.

It is in these complex webs of interrelationship that what we are begins to suggest to us who we are: we are sharers of God’s home, members of God’s family, citizens, as Jesus put it, of God’s kingdom. The Kingdom of God is just this: all things flourishing in right relationship with one another and with God their creator. One of Jesus’s favorite metaphors for the Kingdom was that of a heavenly banquet. Seated at God’s table, our citizenship, our kinship, our mutual interdependence is plain.

And yet we are not all flourishing. When I visited last year’s Serpentine Pavilion, Hyde Park was bleached from drought and heat. The would-be lawns felt like deserted wastelands; it was disorienting. Such sights testify to our profound interrelatedness, though against our flourishing. On the Black Sea, wheat that may never become bread, because it is trapped by war offers an analogous testimony. Our lives are deeply intertwined; just so, we are not flourishing. In days like ours, our tables are sites of mutual encounter, but the encounter is not nourishing to all involved.

If all Jesus offered were a vision of the table as it could be—as it should be—our reflection would have to end here. “Look at what our meals might be,” we might say. “Let us make them so! Let us build the Kingdom of God.” War and climate catastrophe, beware!

But Jesus never instructed his followers to build the Kingdom. Rather, he invited them to receive it, and in so doing, participate in its coming.

One of Jesus’ most common ways of inviting people to receive the Kingdom was by inviting them to a meal. These were meals in all our ordinary senses. They were sites of relationship. Particularly as Luke, one of the four gospel writers, tells it, Jesus was constantly offering advice about who to invite to the table. He warned about which absences revealed life-denying alienation. He convened and commended gatherings of rich and poor, religious and irreligious, nevertheless gathered for nourishing mutual encounter.

These meals are not only revolutionary social projects (though they were and can still be exactly that). In the ministry of Jesus, meals become announcements and enactments of the Kingdom of God. Meals become invitations to and demonstrations of the ultimate Home that God is making for God and God’s creation to flourish together. It is this Home that Jesus invites us to inhabit with him. When we share meals that are more than mere meals, when we allow God to transform our relationships with one another and within the natural world, our meals, too, can become sites of God’s transforming presence—the Home of God coming to be among mortals.

So, when we come to the table—whether Ghotmeh’s table or the table in our homes—let’s be aware of the opportunity presented to us. At the table, we are invited to know bread that is more than mere bread, even as we are more than merely ourselves. At the table, we are invited into mutually nourishing encounter with one another, within the natural world, and with the God who created it all. At the table, we are invited to be at home with one another in the presence of God in whom all things are finding their Home.

Article

Change

Community

Eating

Friendship

18 November 2025

1 min read

It’s in Third Places we can be our most human

Gathering in-person fights against the fragmentation

Alex Noel

Alex Noel is a writer and digital marketer.

A group of friends sit arouns a large table eating together.

Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

In my favourite local cafe, I pause mid-step to take a sip of the coffee I’ve just ordered. Setting it down on a table, I slide into my seat and turn my attention to the music playing over the speakers. It’s always good in here. It’s one of the reasons I like this place; they sell records and coffee here. Music is their ‘thing’, and it’s been my ‘thing’ too, ever since I was a young teenager. I’ll often chat about it with the baristas. And in the time it takes them to make me a flat white, we have exchanged news of recent and upcoming gigs, favourite artists, plus recommendations for new (and old) music we’re listening to. I don’t just enjoy coming here, I somehow feel that I belong.

Today though, the young barista on duty is engaged in a conversation about football with an older customer seated across the counter. The former is in his early 20s, and the latter - I guess - is in his late forties. They animatedly discuss their favourite soccer team. This includes the ins-and-outs of ownership and management, the players’ highs and lows this season, and reliving moments of impressive skill. I tune in and out, much like I do with the music in the background.

And so it is that this West London cafe is a Third Place. Of the three Places in society (identified by urban sociologist, Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place), it is Third Places that hold unique potential for finding connection, and even belonging. Removed from the first and second places of Home and Work; Third Places relieve us of the agendas that come with domestic and professional responsibilities. They separate us - for a while at least - from the concerns of daily life. In local parks, theatres, cafes, gyms, comedy clubs, music venues, book bars, volunteer groups, churches, pubs and more, we can find common ground with one another. A corner of our city or town where we can forge social connections, meet people and have meaningful conversations which cut across generations and other demographies. Here we can often find the connection and belonging that might otherwise elude us.

The internet, and social media, held out this promise too - of being a genuine Third Place. But despite our reliance on it, it hasn’t delivered. A Financial Times report published in early October revealed that social media use peaked in 2022, and has since declined globally by 10%. In an instagram video, Jordan Schwartzenberger, a 27-year-old business influencer and Forbes 30 Under 30, commented that: “it tracks with what we’re all feeling”. He lamented that social media was always meant to be about social connection, but instead it has shifted towards hyper-personalisation and content. We are subject to its algorithms which not only silo us but confine us to our individual feeds. Platforms are now geared to keeping us blinkered and scrolling, as they monetise our attention through advertising. Add to that their ‘enshittification’ thanks to the ubiquity of AI, and you have a recipe which has “nuked the authenticity of the internet”.

Nowhere more has this lack of authenticity been felt than by Generation Z. For those aged 13-28, our digital world is the only world they know, and they’re already tiring of it. As a result, more and more are logging off - craving in-person experiences instead of digital ones. And choosing to swap the dopamine hit of endless scrolling for the oxytocin of real social connection.

The rising cost of living, general retreat into online spaces and COVID closures means that there are fewer Third Places to go. But Gen Z is re-pioneering them. As a result, Third Places are evolving - there’s been a proliferation of in-person experiences as Gen Z head offline to seek out meaningful interactions ‘IRL’. The barrier to entry might not be as low as traditional Third Places, but the principle is the same, to foster socially organic connections in real life.

For example, twenty-somethings in London can take credit for the rebirth of supper clubs as communal dining takes on new meaning, and Sunday mornings are now for curated coffee meet-ups where groups are ‘matched’ according to their interests. Both of these are providing a welcome alternative to dating apps too. Specific offline events favour crafting, book-reading and conversation with attendees putting away their devices for the duration. Meanwhile run-clubs and street-skating groups take to the roads - Third Places in motion. Social media is still used to advertise and bring people together, but the emphasis is on logging off and being present. This search for social connection might explain too, beyond the spiritual enquiry cited by ‘The Quiet Revival’, why so many from Gen Z have been turning up to church. Because we cannot ignore the importance of Place, nor of Presence (whether our own or others’) in creating the meaningful experiences we are seeking. And without this sense of incarnation there is no Christian faith.

The internet, however, is not a place. Something observed by American artist Eleanor Antin, who likened it to “a great void, a black hole”. Since the 1960s, her work has explored history, contemporary culture and identity. Through her multiple ‘selves’ realised in mixed media, she has challenged the idea of having a single, unified ‘self’. For its part - the internet, and especially social media, all too easily enables a fracturing of ‘selfhood’. We are split, divided between our (sometimes multiple) online, and offline selves; both in our attention, and in how we show up. It compromises both our Presence, and the Places we’re in. Who hasn’t sat in a cafe surrounded by people, but been completely absent from it? With fields of vision as narrow as our screens, our loneliness and isolation just increases. This fracturing of self ripples out, into our relationships and society. Our polarisation amplified by what promised to connect us, translating into real world consequences. The death of Charlie Kirk was a case in point. Amongst the diatribe that followed was Utah Governor, Spencer Cox's plea to “log off, turn off, touch grass…”. ‘Touch Grass’ is now, somewhat ironically, an internet meme.

So, if the internet isn’t a place, what is it? Definitions are of a system of interconnected computer networks; endless pathways for the data conjured up and configured onto our screens. But a better definition, existentially at least, is that of being a ‘Non-Place’. French anthropologist Marc Augé invented this idea to explain the systems and conduits which mediate our lives - indivisible from what he termed ‘super-modernity’, part and parcel of our late-stage capitalism. These Non-places - motorways, shopping malls, faceless hotels, force us to conform to their overriding function and purpose. Like products on conveyor belts, we comply. Any interactions we have are mere contractual exchanges. We’re dehumanised. They are everything that Third Places are not.

Third Places, by contrast, are where we can be our most human. Here, we can put our fractured selves back together and be wholly present in them - incarnate - once more. Relating without digital interfaces means we can fully perceive each other and our environments too - using all five of our senses. We were always better at connecting in-person. That is what Gen Z is realising. While Third Places old and new, facilitate this, they really boil down to ‘wherever two or three are gathered’. Any place can become a Third Place if we will be present, turn towards each other, and spark up a conversation. And so it is that our first ever generation of digital natives, might well be the ones to lead us back to places of connection, and belonging, and ultimately back to ourselves.

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