Commensality: Networks of personal, family, and community social transformation

Abstract

Commensality is a term that has been used by social scientists to address the practices that lead people to share a meal at a common table. Recently, food scholars have focused beyond the actual act of sharing a meal to specifically study the networks of relationships that come together to make this sharing of a meal possible. Through the analysis of three food-centered oral histories I gathered in 2018–2019 for El Paso Food Voices digital project, part of the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso, I illustrate how an individual’s evolving relationship with food gives form to everyday commensalities. To understand the kinds of social transformations that emerge at the personal, familial, and community level, I am calling these commensalities ancestral, embodied, and responsible. The stories I present emphasize how each individual reached a turning point that changed them as cooks, infused food with culturally specific symbolism and socio-economic realities, and transformed cooking into an act of social responsibility. The overall goal is to stress that food is transformative and acts of significant social change are experienced through individuals’ everyday culinary practices.