Food for thought: Labor and the feast

"In the oldest system of images...both labor and food were collective; the whole of society took part in them. Collective food as the conclusion of labor's collective process was not a biological, animal act but a social event. If food is separated from work and conceived as part of a private way of life, then nothing remains of the old images: man’s encounter with the world and tasting the world, the open mouth, the relation of food and speech...The soul of the people as a whole cannot coexist with the private, limited, greedy body."

--Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965)