As differentiated from eating by the specific of the meal, dinner, and the connotation of doing so in a more formal way. Beyond that is an approach to eating, one different for different people. It has been said that there are three main approached to dining corresponding to the three main socioeconomic classes of society, these attitudes easily represented by three questions corresponding to a finished meal. The lower class question is "Was it enough?" The concern expressed is elemental and needs no embellishment. The middle class ask the question, "Was it good?" People here have enough money that they have no concern of going hungry, and what has taken the place of that worry is the quintessential middle class concern of making sure they, at all times, are getting their moneys worth. Climbing to the top of society and also Maslow's pyramid of needs we come to the upper class question, "How was the experience?" To the upper class there is hardly a question of goodness, anything they get will be good, all that remains is the dining experience. The charm of the location, the aesthetics of the food presented, the novelty of the latest experiment in molecular gastronomy. These are the questions at the top. When all needs are met the only thing left to do is to find out what there is left to do. To seek out the full range of what the world has to offer you. And when that fails to deliver, you pay someone to invent something new to offer you.
But let's return to that first question. "What is it enough?" For most of history the poorest of society lived in a struggle against hunger for a very simple reason: There wasn't enough food. This isn't the case today. America is awash with food. Every populated region has an abundance of supermarkets, each so full of food that much of it must be thrown out everyday. And if there ever was a real problem with having enough there are innumerable ways we could make more. Quinoa could be grown in the Rockies and Northwest, or hippos could be farmed in the Gulf states, as was seriously proposed during the meat shortages of the early 1900s until those shortages were solved by the invention of industrial agriculture and factory farming. No, the amount of food is not the barrier. The system responsible for all this food is, because we have to thank for the amazing abundance of food the brilliant simplicity of profit. Modern societies perfect marriage of science and capitalism has given us more food than our ancestors could have dreamed of while at the same time keeping it out of reach of those who need it the most because they cannot pay and without profit there would be no cornucopia for them to be barred from to begin with. A simple problem without simple solution.