Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Late in this quiet meal Ann looked around curiously at her companions, suddenly awed by the spectacle of human adaptability. Here they were eating their dinner, talking over the low boom from the north, in a perfect illusion of dining-room conviviality; it might have been anytime, anywhere, and their tired faces bright with some collective success, or merely with the pleasure of eating together -- while just outside their chamber the broken world roared, and a rockfall could annihilate them at any instant. And it came to her that the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they came into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created in a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in. And so they ate, and talked, and enjoyed each other's company; this was the way it had been in the caves, on the savannah, in the tenements and the trenches and the the cities under bombardment.

p. 504

I love dinner and the times we get together with friends and families ad we eat and talk. What a special time and how lucky we are to be able to share this time. It reinforces our humanity in so many ways. We celebrate our animal nature with the eating, and yet we celebrate our collective intelligence by doing it socially. How sad it is that some people cannot see this. And Hail to the Baha'is who use a shared meal as the basic religious ceremony.