The word 'companion' comes from the Latin prefix 'com', meaning 'with' or 'along with' (also seen in community, commonality, and communication), and 'pan', meaning bread. Often, simply breaking down words correctly gives a clear indication into what the words actually mean. The whole problem is often simply that the words are being fragmented incorrectly, at the wrong node.
In simple literal terms, a companion is someone you break bread with, someone you eat with.
Already, we see a shift from the meaning we are used to, i.e. someone you spend time with, someone who gives you company (another, and heavily related, 'com' word). But the rabbit hole doesn’t stop there.
Spending time with someone can be incredibly important, but many of us spend a lot of time with a lot of people we don't want to spend time with, such as work friends and colleagues who you wouldn't invite to your own going away party, let alone anything more significant. Schoolchildren and teachers alike spend a lot of time not wanting to be around each other. An applicant in an office where his form is being rejected repeatedly spends a lot of time with the clerks and officers there. Are they, then, companions? Of course not. They're barely there.
Companionship, in the sense we usually use it today, indicates a mutual desire to spend time together, rather than the physical presence of two people in the same place at the same time. But the literal breakdown of the word hints at an idea within the human mind that eating together, especially regularly, is the zenith of the pursuit of spending time together with someone. It seems that to the human mind, the activity of spending time together with someone “means” having food with them.
Part 1: Companionship as the Essence of Compatibility
It is incredibly suggestive within the context of this piece that first dates more often than not involve coffee, lunch, dinner, alcohol, or something else gastronomical. Even the classic movie date is more about the sharing of the popcorn than about what reels are playing on the screen, and one of the most popular lead lines among men to flirt with novel women is to offer them a drink at the bar. Eating and the habits associated with it seem to reveal one's true inner nature, more than anything else.
Consider how much important stuff happens in the Harry Potter books over food in the great hall. Consider how many great scenes in the series are made and elevated by the incredibly atmospheric and lively descriptions of the foods and beverages served up in the great hall of Hogwarts. Would Hermione have thought of the excellent ruse to slip Crabbe and Goyle the sleeping potions in the second book, for instance, if they had not been their companions in the literal sense, even if not in the conventional sense? Would Harry have been able to dupe Ron into thinking he had ingested liquid luck in the sixth book without the ever-so-handy cover of a flagon of pumpkin juice? Would the character of Ronald Bilius Weasley even remain Ronald Bilius Weasley without the copious descriptions of him gorging on whatever food he could lay hands on at any given moment, and Hermione resignedly making sardonic remarks on his insatiable appetite?
A prospective couple happily enjoying a meal together on their first date can be one of the best signs that there will be a second date, if not more. It is actually a worthwhile trick to consider, if looking for a potential marriage partner, whether you would enjoy having three meals a day for fifty years or more with this human being. Sticking to the Harry Potter theme, it is worthwhile to remember Harry’s disastrous solitary date with Cho Chang, where having even one meal together seemed to become an impossible task, while his friendship and eventual romance with Ginny no doubt benefitted from the innumerable communal meals Harry had with the Weasleys, made especially significant by the noted isolation of Harry as a young child.
Consider also the very suggestive fact that P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves is accepted by Bertie Wooster as his valet right after Bertie partakes in Jeeves’s proprietary concoction of a wake-up drink, which seems to drive away all traces of his hangover and preps him up properly to face what had previously seemed like a drab day. It is not the character Bertie Wooster’s mindset that I want to draw attention to here, but rather that of the author, who thought of the entire scene from the perspective of both Jeeves and Bertie.
Comestibles, it would seem, are intimately associated with the judging and evaluating of compatibility.
Part 2: Sharing Food as a Marker of Sociality
The act of eating draws us together. It is one of the few things that unites all of humanity, regardless of pretty much anything else. It is the emaciated stomachs of the Jewish prisoners of the holocaust, of the Indian victims of the British-inflicted famines of the twentieth century, and of the starving children in Sub-Saharan Africa in modern times that draw the attention at first glance, a healthy stomach being the first clear sign of good health and sound body. So many girlfriends and wives have lamented, often fruitlessly, that their husbands and boyfriends don’t take them out to wine and dine, which, despite literally living with the man, remains a much sought after proposition. So many soldiers have bonded over the stability of shared meals in the helter-skelter reality of war. The use of the word "company" in military terminology is quite interesting for this reason: Linguistically, an army company is "the group that eats together; that is assigned to eat together".
Sharing food can broadly be termed as the defining feature of a “social animal”, with the extent of the sharing defining the level of sociality within the species. Wolves, elephants, wild dogs, lions, whales, dolphins, and orcas are among the most well-known examples of social animals, notably marked by an absence of a ‘feeding frenzy’ when a kill is made. A feeding frenzy occurs when predators get so overwhelmed by the neuronal rush of finding fresh food that all consideration for the tribe or 'friendly others' is extinguished, and the prey becomes a wild, lawless buffet that is free for all who can get it, and barred for all who can't. Animals that exhibit feeding frenzy behavior may let their own cubs, let alone those of others in their tribe, starve while literally filling themselves up with food.
Even though the aforementioned social animals sometimes default to the factory setting of each one filling their fill, this only takes place in bigger groups or where prey is unnaturally scarce, indicating a certain level of control over the selfishness inherent in each individual’s genetic makeup. As a norm, these and other social animals are notable for their preference for sharing food with their pack instead of the one who finds food wiping it off all by itself. In fact orcas and wolves in particular are well-known for prioritizing the young and the injured among the tribe when a kill is made, while elephants and whales are known to have long memories passed down over generations and emotional, affective mental states such as grieving their dead and remembering other animals, including humans, after particularly impressive encounters.
The fact that pretty much all animals can be lured, into safety or into confinement, with the use of food, has such a banality about it that we fail to realize its immense significance. The desire for food outweighs the more basic and mutually contradictory desire to remain safe as a motivational agent, while receiving food from the big bipedal monkey establishes a bond of trust, even among purely wild animals with no hint of domestication. This is the significance of sharing food.
Part 3: The Devaluation of Food:
1. Due to the Eradication and Antagonization of Animistic Faith
It is not for no reason that seventeenth century Indian saint Samarth Ramadas called food “poornabrahma” – “the whole of brahma / wholly brahma”, brahma being the basic material of the world as per Hindu thought. This alludes to the incredibly direct, incredibly speedy, and incredibly effective impact of our dietary consumption upon our mental state, whose elevation, expansion, and meditation is said to be the key to spiritual progress and eventually moksha, or freedom, in Indian thought. Ramadas, well aware of the panchakosha or five-sheath system in yogic thought, reminds us that food acts not only on the physical body or the annamay kosha, which is the outermost kosha of the true self or the aatman, but all the way through to the wisdom body and the bliss body, i.e. the vijnanamaya and anandamaya koshas, which are held to be the innermost sanctum of the aatman in yogic philosophy.
The same man, Samarth Ramadas, also called the act of eating ‘yajnakarma’, i.e. the same as the divine rites in Hinduism for humans and other lower-level entities to connect with the gods. This was in spite of the man being well-known for his custom of only eating food that had been granted to him as ‘bhiksha’ (alms) and with no concern for the whims of the taste buds. Incidentally, the system of ‘bhiksha’, when you really think about it, seems little more than a societally backed system of spiritual companionship, built through sharing food, and (in theory, at least) leading to spiritual progress, peace of mind, and virtuous behavior for all parties.
2. Due to Technological Advances in Agricultural Production
In the days of Samarth Ramadas, and before him, when the word ‘companion’ formed, food scarcity was not the aberration that we moderns may consider it to be. Food production was still to a heavy degree reliant upon the mercy of the weather gods, irrigation was often dependent upon unreliable river floods, the use of fertilizers was limited to supplements locally and cheaply procured to fulfill local needs, and the lack of advanced preservation techniques meant that most of the food had to be consumed locally. This made food valuable in a way that the modern mind can scarcely visualize, having grown up enjoying the benefits of the agriculture, dairy, and meat industry revolutions of the 20th century as a birthright.
Many transactions still took place with the crop as the currency per se, with kings and rulers often taking a cut as taxation, while locally, farmers often bartered with other tradesmen with their crop to pay for their own needs. This adds another layer to the meaning of the word ‘companion’, indicating that what you are sharing is not just food, but bare, naked value, in possibly its most pure and most tangible form that humanity has ever been able to produce.
Most of the people reading this would have trouble even picturing a famine, but before the 19th or 20th century, most of the world lived in perfect, often experiential awareness of the disaster of famines and in constant fear of the same. This makes the sharing of food an even more significant activity. Sharing even in the absence of abundance is prescribed as the highest of high moral benchmarks in most ancient religions, built on the lived memories of several generations of observant, studious people, who figured out that it is the spirit of sharing, more than anything else, that ultimately leads to sustainably successful societies.
It is with this consideration that one should enjoy and, should he so desire, share food, and it is only with a sternly reciprocal mindset that the recipient of the sharing, the 'companion', must accept the bounty that is offered to him of good heart. It is not the mark of a good man to offer his own food to whoever comes along. Above all gifts, the gift of food has to be honored in its disbursal and consumption.
Part 4: Hospitality and the Human Need to Find Another Just Like Ourselves
The importance of hospitality in ancient culture is also relevant to the original conception of the word "companion". Hospitality, before mobile apps allowing remote hotel room bookings and food delivery apps delivering food to your doorstep, was an essential parameter in the overall 'goodness', or 'virtue', of a householder. Inability to provide food and water to a guest would rank as a dark stain on the character, or virtue, of a householder, possibly extending to his entire clan or bloodline. The duty of the householder, in a community held together by a common set of principles and rules, was not only to maintain his own household. It also carried as an essential imperative the duty to share his bounty with others, particularly those who needed it more.
So many stories, from all the different pantheons around the world, center on a benevolent god taking an earthly form and asking a poor devotee for some food to test their charity. Propitiated by the generosity of the devotee in spite of their material hardships, the god then grants unto the devotee a benefactory boon eradicating their material poverty. The story of Krishna and Sudama is of course intimately familiar to the Indian mind, and speaks to the significance placed upon the sharing of food by the ancients. It shows the significance these cultures placed on the sharing of whatever little there is, on communal partaking rather than solitary enjoyment, as an essential part of their worldview. This, to the ancients, was no laughing matter, but, sometimes quite literally, a matter of life or death.
In a way, it speaks to the fundamental need of mankind to find another just like ourself, to speak to another rather than to oneself, to juxtapose one's vision of life with another's. The supreme gods of many ‘pagan’, ancient, animistic faiths – certainly the Hindu faith – are depicted with a companion rather than alone for this very reason. Brahma has Saraswati, Vishnu has Lakshmi, Shankar has Parvati, Rama has Seeta, Krishna has his eight wives, even the hermit Narada is, on several occasions, tempted by various women.
There is a very real case to be made, though not without sufficient research and painstaking exploration, that it was the paradigm of the monogod, the often male but often genderless singular governing entity of the world, that is responsible for the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and social imbalance that we see within humanity today. As of now, however, this idea remains something to ponder upon, nothing more.
In the days of lawless treachery, backstabbing, and before the holy birth of the Geneva Conventions, eating together would have also served the much simpler, more basic purpose of preventing poisoning by one party, by forcing them to share in the grub. Political meetings, weddings, and other similar conventions of distinct, different groups are lubricated most efficiently by excellent and completely poison-free food and beverages, leading to more fruitful and longer-lasting alliances, social cohesion, harmony, and subsequently prosperity for both parties.
Part 5: Disturbances in the Force – Lack of True Companionship in Homes with Unequal Gender Dynamics
The way in which cultural norms have shifted the meaning of ‘companion’, and thus of companionship and relationship itself, to suit prevailing beliefs is most apparent in the way food is served and eaten in households with an imbalanced power structure between the two partners.
People from India need no reminder that it is often the way for the women of the house to serve the men first before having their own fill. Oftentimes, the womenfolk are relegated not only to eating after the men, but eating only what is left following the men’s meals. If western cultures did not have this particular practice, let it be remembered that it was only because and only when the household came equipped with staff and servants of its own, which allowed the womenfolk to eat alongside the men. This apparent ‘equality’ was replaced by a stark inequality in the way the lords and the servants ate, rather than the men and the women.
It is often the case in toxically patriarchal households that men, supposedly the standard bearers of their families, the capable half of the marriage, the protectors of the whole house and clan, are served first, as befits their stature within this way of thinking. It should not be too hard to spot a causal link between women not having a place at the table alongside the men in the dining room, to women not having a place at the table alongside the men in the living room, to women not having a place at the table alongside the men in a conference room.
The meaning of ‘companion’, in this social context, is often turned into little more than ‘attendant’ or 'servant', as someone who spends all their time in service of as well as in physical proximity of their higher, more glorious master. The difference between these two meanings is brashly buried under the monument of “custom” or “tradition”, right on top of the pile of debris where the worldview that thought of the word in the first place, used to stand.
No one knows the reason for these ‘traditions’ or ‘customs’, because quite literally, there is none – the supposed reasons and the resulting inequality were invented post hoc to justify social, psychological changes driven by unchecked forces that were possibly unplanned and possibly even without malice at the time. But acknowledging one’s own ignorance can often invoke fear and hence anger, a reaction sadly familiar to many downtrodden wives all over the world.
Where women are not afforded the primary purpose of companionship, i.e. the respect and love that comes with a place at the landlord's table, how can they be expected to offer the secondary purpose, i.e. to be there for the man in sickness and health, happiness and tears, hale and sun? How can worthwhile company be sought in the absence of the basic, definitional act of eating together?
To lighten the mood a bit, it is worthwhile to note that Queen Victoria, the monarch of the UK during its most glorious years and, as such, one of the most powerful people in the world during her reign, and well-known to be a woman, was also well-known to be a terrible mealtime host. The elaborately dressed and plated food of her era came and went entirely in accordance with her own whims. Queen Vicky was not only served first at the table, but was known to be a rapid eater with no consideration for whether her ‘companions’ had gotten their fill. This sometimes left her courtiers and even her own family members ruefully looking at the retreating plates of food that had been approved, consumed, and dismissed by the monarch before they had even had a touch.
Part 6: Sharing Food (Companionship) as the Neurological Basis for Kinship
Eating together on a regular basis – companionship, in the literal sense – seems to be a staple of happy marriages and relationships. The mutual respect afforded by the act may play a solid role in bringing and keeping the two parties together, and preventing them from drifting apart. Where women have a place alongside the men at the dining table, place is also usually kept for women alongside the men at the living room table, and at the conference table. The importance of who you eat with is also seen conspicuously in other expressions like “eating at the kiddie table”, indicating that eating alongside the grown ups is not a divine right but a privilege to be earned. Eating at someone’s table can be a high honor or a grave insult. It is important to note that Queen Victoria was not known to implement the same table manners in the company of her beloved husband Albert as she did when eating alongside those she didn’t consider worthy of affection or consideration. Prince Albert got more than his fill, don’t you worry about him.
Could it be that the oft-romanticized image of a family throwing away the gadgets to eat together is more than simply an old people’s whine but plain, hard, psychological fact staring us right in the face in these times of isolation, depression, panic attacks, and frozen meals for one?
Eating food together may well be what defines a 'family', in the neurological, psychological sense. The tendency of pet animals to nag their human for not just their scraps but their main menu, and the parental bonding that takes place among animals when feeding the young, are examples of this selfsame phenomenon. For abandoned young birds and animals, the big bipedal monkey keeping them secure and well-fed may genuinely occupy the brain space dedicated to the parent bond, making the human caregivers truly ‘family’ as far as these animals are concerned. The heart-touching stories of inter-species parenting that we often see on Instagram are also the result of the same phenomenon, with the significance of the sharing of food being such that anyone you share food with is, on some level, considered ‘family’ by your brain, with more frequent communal eating further strengthening this neural connection.
Part 7: We Are What We Eat: How What We Eat Affects How We Act
It is important to remember that we, as living breathing human beings, are basically one big digestion tube, with the rest of the organs plying their ware around it and to its ends. From mouth to anus, we are a single unbroken tube, backed up by the spine and reinforced by all the vital organs around it. Various parts of the digestive tube play a participatory role in speech, respiration, cardiovascular function, blood health, urination and excretion, and endocrine activity, while the microbiome of our guts affects our behavior and mental states in such mundane ways that we remained blind to their very presence until not that long ago.
Humans are also deuterostomes, which means we begin our life as a tiny little anus, developing out of it, rather than developing out of the mouth towards the end. It may well be the case that knowledge of this phenomenon led to or added to the conceptualization of the muladhar chakra in yogic thought, which literally means the chakra that provides 'original, first, radical (root-like) support". Five of the seven chakras of yogic science lie right along the digestive tract, with only the ajna and the sahasrar lying without. The digestive system interacts with all of these, making it one of the most influential systems within the human body, alongside the cardiovascular-respiratory complex and the neural network.
This interconnectedness of the digestive tract with the whole of the rest of the body makes this long tube worth more than its weight in gold.
Modern science has not yet been able to figure out who or what it is, precisely, that controls our behavior. We know the brain is involved in it somehow, but beyond that, we really have very little clue about most of the things that go on in our own body. Feel free to verify this from your doctor, if you think I am exaggerating. We are only now beginning to figure out the myriad ways in which our gut microbiome interacts with the rest of the body, with the vast majority of its contribution still being very much a mystery. It is only now that western medical science is starting to see food as the first line of medicine rather than as a completely separate domain, and it is still miles away from recognizing food as the core of what we become, i.e. purnabrahma, as Ramadas put it.
Perhaps, then, the worldview that sees food as ‘wholly divine’ and compares digestion to holy rites to commune with the high gods, deserves another look-in.
Part 8: A Journey in Time:
1. The Shifting of Standards and an Unprecedented Generation Gap
Words like 'companion' take us back to a time, which to the mind is the same as place, when interpersonal relationships – not individual growth – played a dominant role in determining a person's social standing, and sharing was built into the fabric of society as an all-encompassing value. The popularity of Nordic concepts such as 'hygge', along with several other spellbinding customs and traditions that are well worth an entire afternoon's wikipedia surfing - take it from me - in modern culture points to an invisible longing for a return to communal times; times built on the need for society being acknowledged as a primal evolutionary drive that has served humankind from well before speech and imagination gave us incredible powers that truly drove us ahead of the rest of the animal kingdom.
The main problems with times of plenty are not those directly, linearly caused by the abundance, but those caused by ignorance or forgetfulness of the natural difficulty of life. It is not the diabetics and lung cancer patients and supermorbidly obese individuals who are the heralds of the artificially propped up modern bubble of abandon and plenty, but those who forget that it didn't always use to be this way.
This latter category is often used to a different set of standards than pretty much the entire rest of humanity that has prospered and flourished on earth throughout time. Their self-serving nature, and the resultant fall into depression, anxiety, and the likes, is valid behavior given their parameters - the parameters that they are used to. You can tell kids born in 2015 that there was a time when telephones were big and static, but they, having grown up with smartphones as their standard, will not be able to picture this at all. They may believe it, they may listen to all your stories about it, but their mental model has been built with satellite-powered smartphones, not grounded landlines. It is not really fair to criticize a generation for not living up to standards that have changed between the time they and their parents were born, particularly if the parents themselves have forgotten the true meaning of the standards and cannot demonstrate the same to their children through their own behavior.
The purpose of this series is partly to fix that: To bring the standards back where they used to be.
2. The Importance of Jargon
The words that we use in the English language today come straight from Roman Italy, Charlemagne's France, the Germanic states of the Holy Roman Empire, the several and glorious revolutions and wars of France, the exploration of North America, the forests of Central America, and, of course, good old England, which has itself undergone innumerable changes in its geographical, social, political, economic, religious, and ideological makeup over the years. Just to illustrate the timescale of what I am talking about, Christianity, which ruled Britain for the longest time and still holds deep ties with day to day life in the region, hadn't even formed yet when the Latin-speaking Romans landed on the Celtic island of Great Britain.
Tracing these words back to their origins doesn't just satisfy idle linguistic curiosity, but takes us back to those times: Times when everything was scarce, everything was made by hand, by a human person, who you were probably expected to invite to lunch the next Sunday, where you would use your own ground wheat to bake your own bread to share with your companion, as you discussed the malfeasances of the local bishopry, the quizzical turn of the weather hurting the harvest that year, and the impending war with one of your territory's several covetors or one of your king's several rivals. When to build a home meant literally just that, when food couldn't be transported long distances because it would spoil, and food cooked in the house had to be consumed by nightfall because while Prometheus had given us fire, he hadn't given us refrigeration yet, and preservation was limited to certain techniques and certain foods only.
If we use words from the corporate boardroom on the football pitch, or words from the theater at family dinner, or words from the opera at our Friday night drinkout with our buddies, we know we run the risk of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and resultant strife. And yet we continue to use words from the virtue, honor, and glory-obsessed Romans, the grandly imperial British, the strangely quixotic French, the passionate but articulate Germans, the reckless American pioneers, brave generals, poor peasants, popes and bishops, kings and queens, their subjects, and the servants of their subjects alike, with no regard for the risk of the message getting lost in translation, only to end up crying and miserable because ‘nothing makes sense anymore’ and ‘the world is not what it used to be’.
The nativity of language means that every time and place, every setting, every culture, has its own jargon, a unique set of words and root sounds that express specific intentions and emotions that may not travel at all beyond the confines of their birthplace. A new culture, especially one as antagonistic to the ‘shackles of tradition’ as the modern liberal culture has shown itself to be, needs either a new lexicon or the humble willingness to align with the true connotations of the existing lexicon, which go well beyond political divisions and ideological factions.
To stand on the shoulders of giants lends us greater vision, while forming a new column of giants, built from scratch, gives us the freedom of pioneers, of explorers in uncharted lands. But to stand on the shoulders of giants while denouncing all that they represent and stand for leaves us with nothing but erosion of that which held us aloft quietly all this time, and with nothing to show for it.
Adios for now, and for god’s sake have more meals with your loved ones!
Next week, we will be taking a look at another 'com' word - Comfort. Be warned, though - it might just turn out to mean exactly the opposite of what you have been taught it means. Until then, fare ye all well!
© Tanmay Viraj Tikekar
22 Apr 2025
tikekar.tanmay@gmail.com
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