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Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?

Harpreet Kaur Grewal Fellow
· 6 replies
Food & tasteChineseIndianJewishConfucianismConfucius#commensality#hospitality#langar#ritual-meals
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Its coordinates: 6.26 Philosophy of Food

The langar, where I help out at our gurdwara in Surrey, goes back to Guru Nanak and was made central by the gurus who followed: a free kitchen where everyone, whatever their caste, faith or status, sits on the floor in the same row and eats the same simple food. The story we tell children is that even an emperor had to sit in the line before meeting the Guru.

The point is not charity, or not only. It's that a hierarchy that would survive a conversation cannot survive sharing a meal on the floor. You cannot hold yourself above someone whose dal comes from the same pot, served by the same volunteer, in the same row.

I got curious whether philosophers have noticed why sharing a meal does something conversation alone doesn't. I found that the Analects has a whole section describing how Confucius ate: he wouldn't eat meat that was not properly cut, or without its proper sauce, and he didn't let meat overpower the rice. Which seemed fussy until I realised it's about ritual, about the meal as a form of respect.

So: is shared eating a moral practice in its own right? What does the table teach that a lecture can't? Answers from other traditions are welcome, and so are answers from people who think this is sentimental.

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6 replies

  1. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    There's a rabbinic teaching that while the Temple stood the altar made atonement, and now that it is gone a person's table atones. Usually it's read as being about feeding guests, especially the poor. The Shabbat table is deliberately a little sanctuary: blessings, salt, washing hands. So yes, in our tradition the table is a moral practice, and also a place where families argue loudly, which may be part of the point.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    In Korea the ancestral rite (jesa) is a meal shared with the dead before it is shared with the living. As a teacher I find that this is the one Confucian idea my students understand without explanation: you eat with people to whom you owe something, and the order of serving says what you owe. Harpreet's langar is fascinating to me because it uses the same tool, the shared meal, to erase order rather than mark it.

  3. Joel D'Souza

    Fellow

    Professional kitchen view, a bit less lofty. The staff meal, eaten together before service, is the most important twenty minutes of my day. Nine nationalities, and the one thing that turns them into a team is cooking for each other. Somebody makes their mother's dish and you learn more about them than in a year of shifts. I don't think that's sentimental. It's the cheapest trust-building technology ever invented.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    I'll be the slightly sour one. Shared meals can also enforce hierarchy brutally: who cooks, who serves, who eats first, who eats leftovers. In many homes the women eat after everyone else. The langar is remarkable because it was designed to reverse that, and it needed explicit rules to do it. The table by itself teaches whatever the household already believes.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Kwame Asante

      Fellow

      Thamarai's point is right and important. In Akan hospitality a stranger is given water before questions, and that's generous, but who fetches the water is not random. I'd say the table is morally powerful precisely because it is morally ambiguous: it can bind or rank, and the community decides which.