One of the great lessons of social history is that food, and the rituals surrounding it, both express and instruct in a society’s values. Food is not mere ballast; it carries with it, unavoidably, a society’s values. Which is why this news from USA Today is depressing:

 We eat what we want, when we want. No more of this breakfast, lunch and dinner stuff. We snack all day. We casually skip meals. And we want to customize everything we cram into our mouths.

It’s as if our social-media habits are going right to our stomachs.

A culture hungry to put its personal stamp on everything it touches is driving some foodmakers and restaurant operators bonkers. At the same time, it’s offering all kinds of opportunities to those willing to sprint ahead of the food curve. Nowhere is this trend more palpable than with Millennials.

“Eating weird is the new normal,” says Shawn LaPean, executive director of Cal Dining at the University of California- Berkeley, which serves students 30,000 times daily. “If students eat any square meals per day, it might be one. The rest is filled with snacks and food on the go.”

These may seem like quirky, student eating habits, but they’re evolving into lifetime traits. The numbers are mind-boggling. At least 35% of the meals eaten by Millennials aren’t meals at all, but snacks, reports consultancy The Kruse Company. Four in 10 Millennials snack more than once daily, reports research firm Technomic. And only 5% of all consumers eat three square meals a day, says Technomic.

… There are no traditional eating hours anymore, says Wade Thoma, vice president of U.S. menu innovation at McDonald’s. “People eat at all strange hours of the day.”

It’s hard to be traditional about food rituals these days. You would think that my family would be ordered along these lines, but it hasn’t worked out that way. For one thing, one of my children has sensory processing disorder, and can only eat a few things (fortunately, the same things, and easy to prepare). Another of my children appears to have the same problem. More importantly, though, until I took the job at Templeton, I was never able to be home at a predictable hour. My newspaper job sometimes got me home by six, sometimes by nine, but never on a predictable schedule. That was the nature of the work, but it made family dinners impossible to schedule. Now we can do that, given that I work from home, but it’s hard to break old habits — especially given that the kids usually don’t eat, and won’t eat, what their mother and I eat.

Still, the whole snacking between meals thing is something we resist in our household. So there’s that.Anyway, we are losing, and appear to have lost, food traditions. Food is not religion, of course, and besides, as Adam Gopnik points out in his book about France and food, when a food tradition ossifies into pure formalism, it loses its vitality. But the opposite — to thoroughly reject any formal tradition, is also imprudent, and not to be desired. To be in Louisiana and to decide that gumbo, jambalaya, and boiled crawfish are no better and no worse than Big Macs is to lose a sense of oneself and one’s culture. It’s to say that one’s culture has no claim on one, and no right to educate one’s culinary sensibilities. And, it’s the jettison the idea of taste itself.

Worse, to completely lose the idea of the family meal, or the meal as a social event, strikes me as a quite different and far worse thing than preferring to eat different foods. Here’s Leon Kass, in his terrific book “The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature”: 

Precisely because human beings usually eat together, the customs of eating govern not only what human beings eat but also where, when, with whom, and especially how. The manner(s) of eating, even more than what gets eaten, expresses the humanity of the eaters, at least as they have come to understand it. Though the specifics differ markedly from one society to the next, all cultures have explicit or tacit norms governing the “how” of eating — norms that serve to define the groups, ease interpersonal relations, and help civilize the human animal.

Social rituals around eating are one thing that separates us from barbarians, and indeed from animals. More Kass:

To be at table means that one has removed oneself from business and motion and made a commitment to spend some time over one’s meal. One commits oneself not only to time but also to an implicit plan of eating: We sit to eat and not just to feed, and to do so both according to a plan and with others. A decisions to have a sit-down meal must precede its preparation, and the preparation is in turn guided by the particular plan that is the menu. Further, to be at table means, whether we know it or not, to make a commitment to form and formality. We agree, tacitly to be sure, to a code of conduct that does not apply when we privately raised the refrigetrator or eat on the run or in our cars, or even when we munch sandwiches in front of the television with our buddies who have gathered to watch the Super Bowl. There we eat (or, more accurately, feed) side by side, as at a trough; in contrast, at table we all face not our food but one another. Thus we silently acknowledge our mutual commitment to share nto only some food but also commensurate forms of commensal behavior. To be sure, the forms will vary depending on the occasion; the dinner table at home with family, the dinner table at home with guests, a banquet table at a testimonial dinner, adn a picnic table in the park have different degrees and (in part) different kinds of formality, as do the family breakfast and the family dinner. But in all cases there are forms that operate, regulate, and inform our behaivor and that signify our peculiarly human way of meeting necessity.

A table, all by itself, silently conveys the beginning of this meaning. … The set table in the home is in fact an embodiment of the community that is the family.

What USA Today reports is, frankly, the advance of barbarism. The fact that it is chosen, and it is convenient, doesn’t make it any less barbaric. And yes, you’re right that my title here links the collapse of food culture and ritual to the collapse of religious orthodoxy into Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Consumerist individualism has dissolved all these formal structures. People now don’t understand why they ever did these things, or why they were thought necessary.

UPDATE: Thought experiment: Would it still be Thanksgiving if everybody got together this Thursday and ate hamburgers from McDonalds and sat around the living room watching TV? If the food you eat and the manner in which you do it are unimportant, why would it matter at all? If it does matter, then ask yourself: why? And is there something in that recognition that should guide our everyday lives?