Feasts

Feasts are food made public, they are food as power. Even in the most benign of situations, the host has a special status above those feasted—unless, of course, there is a guest of honour. But that role reversal just underlines the factors beyond amity and commensality that may be involved in hospitality.

Feasts are a feature of human foodways found in virtually all cultures and can be treated at various levels. The simplest is that of enjoyment of the combination of ample and delicious food with congenial company (the term being rarely used of just one or two people eating, and applying more often to a company of, say, 10 to 1,000). At what might be considered to be a deeper level, feasts have attracted much attention from sociologists and anthropologists, who consider their symbolic significance, whether this is explicit or not, and discuss the role which they can play in cementing human relationships. A scan of Homer, Suetonius, Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Froissart is enough to convince us of the potency of feasts throughout European history.