What about evolution?

Alright so a bit of research today. If you don't believe in evolution you can just stop reading now, 'cause none of this will make sense to you. With that out of the way here we go! Why is it so hard to refuse food from somebody else in a social setting? This question has been bugging me for quite a bit of time. One reason actually could be evolution I found out. So look at it this way, back in the day, when it was harder to get your hands on food, having food probably meant you were one of the most likely people to survive and therefore be able to look after your partner and kids, and survive long enough to have a lot of kids. So this made having an abundance of food one of the things that evolved into being a desireable trait, both for reproductive purposes and social purposes. And how can we tell who has a lot of food? People who have enough food that they are willing to give food to strangers, and probably whomever they are courting. This makes the act of giving food kind of a big deal socially. It is also very true that turning down food would be an undesireable trait because then you would be left with less. How giving and recieving food shows up in our culture is a bit harder to pin down but these are definitely its roots.

In our culture I feel like we still still have an internal sense of how valuable food was, just because that is how we evolved. This manifests itself in the fact that sharing food has become almost a sacred practice in our society. Foer points this out in his book Eating Animals when he talks about never eating with people you don't like. This idea is fairly obvious in our society, nobody ever just goes to a place and eats with strangers, eating together suggests a certain degree of intamacy. Eating is sometimes also associated with one of the most intimate settings, the home. Nobody would ever invite people who they didn't like over for dinner without some ulterior motive, or because they had to. Sharing food is definitely not something to take lightly.

"Interior crocodile aligator, I drive a cheverlet movie the-a-tor" - Chip Tha Rippa