What is the meaning of food? We humans live by symbols; they help us to make sense of the world, to organize and give meaning to our existence. Our alphabets are symbolic: we agree that a certain symbol stands for a certain sound. Time is another human invention: daylight, standard, leap year. Christianity’s year 2006 is Judaism’s 5765, Islam’s 1427, and China’s 4703. Nobody needed a nanosecond until Bill Gates and computers came along at the end of the twentieth century. So, too, we give food meaning far beyond its survival function. It has been used in rituals to guarantee fertility, prosperity, a good marriage, and an afterlife. It has been used to display the power and wealth of the state, the church, corporations, a person.