Food is love.
Gastronomical love.
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Food is love.
I used to think I had empathy for Musk, but I don't. I don't identify with him, I have agape for him. So I'm feeling like I ought to send him some food.
Eating food offered by the hand of a stranger is an exercise in building trust. It requires a quiet suspension of self-preservation, a willingness to digest what you did not prepare, and an acknowledgment that the person across the table holds power over you, if only for the duration of a meal. To receive hospitality from someone whose world is completely foreign to yours is to take a leap into vulnerable reliance.
To understand why that distinction matters, we have to look past standard definitions. Throughout philosophy and theology, *agape* has been assigned many meanings—tge most beautiful of which is divine self-sacrifice, selfless goodwill, or the purest form of unconditional love. But while it is easy to extend unconditional love to a neighbor, a child, or a like-minded peer, the purest and most challenging form of agape occurs when it crosses a border. In its earliest communal expressions—most notably the historical *agape* feast—it had a far more tangible, radical meaning: **agape is the meal offered to someone foreign.**
