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Good morning. A study in the British Journal of General Practice suggests many parents are unaware that their children are becoming obese. According to the National Child Measurement Programme, around a third of 11-year-olds are too heavy. But it’s not just children. It seems as a society we’re losing our sense of a healthy weight.

It’s not only that our work and play have taken on a more sedentary character. Something’s changed about the way we eat. Food is less often a public, corporate thing that we prepare and enjoy together, holding one another accountable as we refrain from taking all the roast potatoes and learning manners as we hold back to let the guest have seconds. Food is much more now a private, hidden fuel that we snack on to cheer ourselves up when we feel cross or need an energy boost or just fancy a treat. The symbol of the contemporary workplace isn’t the tray at the staff canteen. It’s the half-eaten sandwich at the computer station. Obesity may be less a sign of indulgence and greed than an indication that we turn to food when we find the rest of life dull, depressing, or difficult.

We’re approaching the three central days of the Christian year. They begin with the Last Supper. On the night before he died Jesus gave the disciples a model of how to remember him, how to live together, and how to be the church. He said, simply, ‘Eat together.’ In learning to eat together, the early Christians found they had to acquire most of the other skills that made life a shared project and no longer a lone quest.
Eating together the disciples learned to be grateful for what they had. They found ways to say sorry when they’d let each other down. They shared and recorded the story of the events that had brought their community into being. They articulated their needs and their wants and discovered the difference between the two. They saw who was going hungry and who was being excluded from their table.

We are what we eat. Whenever we offer one another the gift of time, attention and touch, whether in joy, sorrow or everyday cherishing, the simplest and most beautiful way to do so is to eat together. By making the centre of life a shared meal, Jesus said we don’t eat to live – we live to eat.

What are these urgent tasks that induce us to treat every meal as if we were a marathon runner scarcely breaking stride while stretching out a flailing hand to take on water at drinking station? Food isn’t just a transitional object. Sharing food is what turns individuals into community. Our problem is, we’ve forgotten what food is for.

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