Communion

On my desk is a York Peppermint patty, handed to me yesterday on the street by a Christian.

I didn't know he was a Christian. He and his partner were standing by the subway entrance with boxes of candy, so I thought he worked for the York people. (Though he was dressed like a normal person, not like a Peppermint patty or a snack-loving Yeti, which would be more the corporate-publicity style.) With my free candy came a postcard-sized handout, which turned out to extol the blessings of Jesus, not York.

Human nature is like the musical scales, or chess, or language: Unchanging principles, out of which an infinite amount of change can be created. Handing out candy to help evangelize Brooklyn was someone's new idea. But it rests on an ancient principle of animal life: Obtain food. Food good. Pay attention to sources of food.

Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has done brilliant research on food, found that people, when eating, are more receptive and less judgmental about both ideas and other people. Human institutions anticipated modern psychology by millennia, of course. To transact business, arrange marriages, win friends, people all over the world sit down to eat together. Religions have made food central to their message since forever.

I don't like peppermint, actually. But I took it without thinking. Food good!