Forms of Collective Catering

Abstract

Conviviality, as we know, is a term often used to express positive emotions and situations, forms of euphoric intersubjectivity in which eating together becomes, through the sharing of food, a guarantee of a possible – perhaps temporary – social pacification. People gather around a table in order to establish, confirm, or – even – transform relationships, warding off solitude, isolation, and individual sadness. Social configurations of varying scale – from newly formed couples to long-established ones, from the nuclear family to extended kinship groups, from office colleagues meeting at the corner restaurant to post-gym gatherings at a pizzeria, all the way to the majestic banquets of the Renaissance – are formed and deformed through the sharing of food and drink, dishes and beverages, recipes and sparkling wines. So much so that conviviality sometimes exists without fully existing – that is, without a table and without food – appearing instead as a simple anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical disposition, cheerful and detached from profit or domination. Some have therefore proposed a political interpretation of conviviality, one stubbornly opposed to the economy and society of late capitalism.