1. On Meal

Because I have MEALS on my mind...This from the Cloud of Witnesses:

The table is, beyond all others, the social furnishing.  It is, to begin with, the piece of furniture made for reunions: being accessible from all sides, the table is made to be surrounded.  People avoid setting it against a wall, so that no side shall be rendered useless.  Instead, it is played in the center of the  available space and thus can be approached at any point on its perimeter.  Here, then, in the center of a common room, the members of the family have a kind os permanent, though tacit, rendezvous.  During the hours when the members are away at work, the unused table in the quiet room embodies an invitation and waits for its own specific 'world.'  It is here that the family, daily scattered, is daily reunited...

Together with chair or bench, the support given by the table enables people to sit in great comfort.  The level surface, the upper limbs resting on it, all mark out for each sitter a space for his/her personal gestures and for countless possible actions.  The physical relaxation of the posture gives full freedom for reflection and speaking.  The faces turn to one another and the gazes meet.  The hands, freed from toil, can lend themselves fully to the effort of self-expression.  Each person involves himself with all the others and communicates himself in the process.  Thus the table is the place beyond all others for dialogue between members of the family; they sit there to talk 'among themselves,' to tell of the day just ending and of the morrow, as, with heads close together, they exchange impressions, confidences, and confessions.

---Edmond Barbotin 1920-2014, from The Humanity of Man (1975)
    Quoted from An Easter Sourcebook, LTP  p31