Food.






It is our suggestion that the medieval body was re-formed in the context of a collective effervescence of social relationships that can be typified a sacred eating community. Pasi Falk has defined an 'eating community' as a 'two-way order' shaped (or 'eaten into') by individuals during their daily lives . . . The Eucharist, for example, involved the incorporation of God as food into the body of the individual, and thereby incorporated the individual into the Body of Christ (the Church."

Phillip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling, Reforming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity, (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 1997),16.








The Mass emphasises the structure of interpenetration. When one eats the body of Christ and drinks his blood, the promise of resurrection is renewed. Because the Eucharist as a ritual focuses on eating, the body of Christ as food becomes a part of the person taking communion; it is intimately nutrition. In communion, the boundaries between one's own body and Christ's body become permeable: one is no longer separate from the other, no longer alone, no longer that is, and isolated self. Taking communion represents a devotional act toward Christ, one is instructed to 'do this in remembrance of Me.' Christ's body is taken into one's own, is re-membered in a human being's own renewed flesh and then formed, through the community, into the renewed body of Christ.

Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: a Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 138.