In the breaking of the bread

Easter over, the feast of St Gregory is a reminder of the looming summer. For many people, the real Lent now begins.

In a mass of unsculpted, damaged marble, Michelangelo saw his David, ready made. In the coveted bathing suit in the shop window, many people see themselves; all they need to do is chip away at the extra weight that obscures the way they really are.

The self is embroiled in the stakes. The fight is against cosmic forces. The patterns and hours of work are often blamed for the consumption of high-calorie snacking and quick energy-fix food: fat, says the subtext, is a capitalist issue.

The temptations are worth fighting fiercely. A secular salvation is involved. For those who succeed, it is a triumph of character and will. For those who fail, it is a mark of fate (or genetics), a symptom of their resignation to graver ills or else heroic rejection of the evil empire of conformism.

Is such a season inexorably secular? In the agrarian age, Christianity redefined the feast of the rites of spring: the regeneration of life now associated the fertility of nature with the new life promised in Christ. In the consumer age, however, many factors conspire to make summer the season that signals new life.

The rise of the summer vacation and mass tourism, the functional need for coordinated holidays by bureaucrats and factory workers across state boundaries: these are just some factors that have contributed to shifting the climax of production and recreation towards August. In a country like Malta, it has meant that village feasts have almost all been transferred to the summer, making it the season for celebration.

One fasts (diets) to regenerate oneself for summer but it is striking how much summer itself is punctuated by eating. The BBQ or supper eaten in the courtyard, garden or on the roof with friends is one of the dominant images of summer society. Strangely, people try to lose weight with the aim of being able to break a crust of Maltese bread, dip it into a grilled tomato or scoop up the juices of steak fish: under the stars, with friends. The run-up to summer is the diet; summer itself is the conversational circle.

Such a connection between food and conversation lies deep in our human roots. Cambridge archaeologist Martin Jones has suggested that sharing food may be what distinguishes us from other animals (more so than tool-making). Chimps, our close relatives, eat continuously and opportunistically: consummate snackers. We have eating rhythms and eating together is dense with meaning. Early communities grew around the hearth, the "focus" (fire) of group spirit.

The conversational circle persists even where it is invisible, according to Mr Jones. In his recent book, Feast: Why Humans Share Food (Oxford), he shows brilliantly how the conversational circle evolves but does not disappear. Even the TV dinner, or the solitary eater biting into a hamburger in the car, with the radio on, involves conversation, with a global imagined community.

That global community is, in fact, a network whose conversations around food are a meeting point of exchanges of goods, cooking technologies and myths (or good stories, some from afar). Mr Jones shows how Christianity, and its commemoration of the Last Supper, contributed to the development of various networks.

The emphasis on bread, for example, led to the colonisation of fields in the New World for bread wheat, where barley might have been easier to plant. But the struggle to grow wheat, in turn, gave meaning to work and life. In the hands of Mr Jones, characterising West and East as Bread Wheat and Rice is not an oversimplification.

Within the West, some of the most notable social innovations were related to the table. By the time Christianity found its place at the core of the Roman empire, images of the Last Supper had shifted to incorporate a Roman pastoral flavour. On the wall of one chapel there is a fresco with diners reclined, not as they did around the lavish meal but around a curved cushion, with dishes bearing bread and fish (a favourite Roman dish, now a symbol of Christ) and a two-handled cup to be passed from hand to hand. One diner is depicted breaking the bread.

St Benedict, as a youth familiar with the civilised life depicted in such a fresco, adapted this pastoral ideal to forge a new one, based on monastic communities with strong ties to the societies around them, where eating in moderation and community went hand in hand with a transformation of not only spiritual lives but also the relationship to the land and culture.

Benedict is nowadays seen as an early founder of Europe. It is tantalising to think about what might happen if, in Malta's summer months, the cloisters of the convents were to be filled with diners, strangers to each other enjoying a pot-luck dinner at the open invitation of the nuns and friars. Would it simply reinforce the factors making the summer season a kind of secular spring? Or would the new conversational circle serve to develop a new Christian understanding of the seasons?

ranierfsadni@europe.com