At the Table’s Edge

On December 6, 2024, Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective met at Victoria College, the University of Toronto, for our annual members meeting. As part of the program, we organized a special roundtable on commensality, a topic often engaged by journal contributors. Proposed by H. Rosi Song, the theme of commensality is as much to do with whom we eat as with whom we don’t eat. Likewise, commensality’s inclusions and exclusions do not only implicate the space and time of the meal, but also the worlds and infrastructures that allow that meal and its meanings come to be.During the roundtable, titled “Commensality: You Are with Whom You Don’t Eat,” some of our editors shared how these dimensions of “extra” commensality and anti-commensality came up in their research and editorial work. In this submission, we offer a revised transcript of these discussions to provoke conversation and invite future submissions on the integral role of commensality—in all its political and social valences. In the conclusion, we take up some of these specific threads and queries to offer questions and directions for our readers seeking to address the table’s edge—of food studies and the power of the comestible—in their own work.Even with such an integral phenomenon in the social and humanistic study of food, our roundtable came nowhere close to unravelling commensality’s political implications and analytical heft. This roundtable also sparked additional discussion between panelists and audience members—on the crisis of the “family meal,” dealing with waste, solo-dining, struggling with soaring food costs and food service pay—around what gets left out of conversations about commensality and consumption.Considering this roundtable as a set of provocations, rather than finished conversations, we invite hopeful Gastronomica contributors to take up their own engagement with commensality in scholarly and Food Phenomena pieces. Inspired by roundtable panelists’ responses, we offer this set of questions to begin moving a critical conversation forward regarding commensality’s edges and to continue intervening in this often-central dimension of social life:These questions, and more, highlight the indispensable role of sharing food and drink in all its temporal and emplaced dynamics. We suggest that acts of commensality (and their attendant exclusions) cannot be neatly periodized or emplaced. Likewise, we welcome pieces that might probe at those practices or spaces that might have long been overlooked when not conforming to the variability of constructing a meal. In sum, we hope readers will continue this conversation with us in the years—and Gastronomica issues—to come.