Why humans feel the need to feast together

Yarra club peppered with wedding anniversaries and 105 birthday 🎈 

Footprints in Kenya ‘show distant relatives of modern humans coexisted’ Guardian 

For thousands of years, humans have come together in small groups to feast on food. Why is it important – and why do we still continue the tradition?

It's a peculiarly human universal: we like to sit down together for a good tuck-in. Meals out with friends, dinner parties, holiday get-togethers where we regularly overindulge – eating shared meals is so common that it's rarely remarked upon, except when the idea that it's not happening enough enjoys a societal vogue.

Panics about a decline in family dinners, for instance, regularly sweep through headlines. There is some evidence that such concerns are not a modern trend and may be at least a 100 years old. Eating together, all this suggests, is not only common, but somehow deeply powerful. But why?

 Why humans feel the need to feast together

    NYTBR 100 Notable Books of 2024

       The New York Times Book Review has released its list of their 100 Notable Books of 2024 (presumably paywalled).
       As best I can tell, a mere four of the books are works in translation (there were eight last year).. 
       Four of the titles from the 2023 list were under review at the complete review at the time of its release; this year I managed a mere two:

• The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman
• The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk
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1. “The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious… And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness” — Celine Nguyen on what she calls “divine discontent”. Some philosophers will relate. (via The Browser)
2. A taxonomy of different theories of consciousness — by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, based in part on his many interviews of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and others for “Closer to Truth”
3. “I’ve always been interested in those capacities that are understood to be uniquely human, such as morality or rationality” — the NYT interviews philosopher Susana Monsó (UNED) on how animals understand death
4. “Five rules for phone banking as a philosopher” — Colin Marshall (Washington) shares his experiences and suggestions
5. “Anything daring or original is filtered out, either through preemptive self-censorship or in the process itself. What is left is a bland broth of featureless, technocratic, box-ticking” — that’s a quote about architecture, but Alexander Douglas (St. Andrews) thinks it may apply to philosophy, too
6. Can a version of the trolley problem motivate some voters? — Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State) thinks so
7. “The chance that your vote will make a difference is large enough that, in many cases, it is really important to vote” — Avram Hiller (Portland State) explains why