A post by Alain de Botton on the Guardian Word of Mouth blog:
“Our modern failure to properly connect eating with conviviality is sometimes manifest in restaurants. The noise and activity of restaurants typically suggests a refuge from the urban anonymity that surrounds them. With people in such close proximity, we can plausibly imagine that the barriers between ourselves and others will be eroded. But in reality most restaurants make no moves to present us to one another, they have no mechanisms for dispelling our mutual suspicions or for fracturing the clans into which we are segregated. They never extend the circle of our affections.
Sitting down at a communal table with a group of strangers and properly mingling with them has the incomparable benefit of making it a little less likely to be able to hate them with impunity. The proximity required by a meal — something about passing someone dishes, unfurling your napkin at the same time, having to speak — makes it harder to continue to cling to the belief that the outsiders we’d previously spotted only in the train or shops and who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents are inhuman and deserve to be sent away. For all the large-scale political solutions to ethnic conflict, there are few more effective tools to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to have supper together.”
de Botton is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, but I discovered his work only recently. My introduction to his writing was The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which I read earlier this year and which combines a series of case studies of various occupations and a series of photo essays, one for each case study. I then followed by reading Status Anxiety and The Art of Travel. I really wish I’d read the latter before I spent a year on academic research leave in Europe.