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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5112716" data-attributes="member: 4937">#1: Food is consumed communally and socially.One of my favorite send ups to this is in 'Good Will Hunting', where Matt Damon's character is invited to maybe go have coffee, and he responds, 'Or we could go eat carrots'.  Of course, deep down we understand, 'We could go eat carrots' isn't a proper stage of food consumption this early in a relationship, which is precisely the joke that the character is making (which falls flat because its an egghead joke, and autistic tendencies are not something you are supposed to demonstrate to the female to impress her because well, they are 'aberrent').Another thing that I find really funny about this one, is whereever you go in the world, the locals will insist that this aspect of their culture - the communal convivial production and consumption of food - is unique to their culture, or at least, that its uniquely important to their culture in a way that it isn't to the surrounding cultures.Of course, this just relates to the fact that presentation of food is a source of pride in humans probably at a very deep biological level. #2: It's funny when bad things happen.See comedy.That's just the first two that popped into my head, but there are probably 10's of thousands of similar universal human cultural positions which probably wouldn't be shared by other species.  For example, I was watching a bonobo troop the other day, and I noticed that when food is shared among bonobo's, there natural tendency is to want to split up and move into separate locations where they feel secure in their privacy.  I'm not a bonobo, but I conjecture that for them, having someone watch them eat is inherently stressful... probably because they feel and fear that that someone might try to take it away, but also perhaps (if they are capable of more advanced emotions) because they may believe that tempting their friend to take the food away is impolite.That answer probably isn't the one you were looking for, but let me think about it abit and I will certainly be able to come up with some more complex universal human outlooks.</blockquote>

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