"Eating is so intimate. It's very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you're inviting a person into your life."

The idea of communion in eating in literature is very interesting and, in my opinion, very well-founded. It does find a good base in Kafka's Metamorphosis, the premise of eating serving to illustrate the exclusion Gregor feels as a bug. foster states that eating together in literature is an act of communion, and signifies a close, trusting, intimate, relationship, "The act of taking food into our bodies is so personal that we really only want to do it with people we're very comfortable with" (Foster 8). He says that eating is a very personal and humanly emotive act that the people we surround ourselves with while we do it must therefore be our those with whom we have the closest relationships. At one point in the story, Gregor even gets to a point where he has no such close relationships, he is excluded from all human relation, that he does not feel the need to eat at all, even alone, "he could not imagine anything which he might have an appetite for" (Kafka 20). He not only does not eat with his family, he does not eat with himself. His relation to his own humanity has been so far alienated that he can no longer even eat in his own presence, and the very [intimate] concept of eating escapes him. It's tragic.

Adding on to this idea of consumption being an insanely intimate and telling process in human society is vampirism, and how the change from dining with someone to dining on someone becomes that much more of a horrifyingly evil act. Beyond literal eating, too, rises the level of despicable. Foster writes, "(there rise) more modern incarnations: exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want" (Foster 21). He says, and I agree, that the whole idea of using another person to further yourself while at the same time belittling their needs and existence is an act directly descended from the fiction of vampirism - literally eating and taking life from another human to make yourself stronger - is among the worst possible things a human can do. This action is exacted precisely by Mama and Papa Samsa, and at the end of the story, "almost unconsciously understanding each other in their silent glances, they thought that the time was now at hand to seek out a good honest man for her" (Kafka 27). They undoubtedly see this daughter of theirs as a new subject to vampirize and exploit, most likely from selling into marriage and/or working to death, after they dried up the well of profitability that was once their son Gregor.