Dinner Conversations

Two areas in which humans have advanced far beyond any other species are food and communication. We prepare food like no other animal not only by cooking, but by using an elaborate set of tools and techniques. And, of course, our language abilities have developed to an almost inconceivable level when you consider the range of complex and abstract concepts we can efficiently discuss; like what to make for dinner tonight.

We are not unique in either eating communal meals or our ability to communicate. We do stand out, however, near the edge of a certain precipice with another trait: the danger we face by talking during dinner.

The anatomy of most animals’ throats are such that an extremely important flap of tissue—the epiglottis—is directly on top of the windpipe (larynx) and closes it off completely from the rest of the throat throughout the entire act of swallowing. We humans, however, have a longer-than-usual passage above the epiglottis and the air that we breathe can carry with it the food and drink that we’re swallowing. Where animals have a railroad-type switching apparatus to keep food moving along the right track, we have more of an on-ramp/merge/off-ramp highway traffic arrangement; there are chances for both collisions and missing an exit, so to speak. In other words, if we attempt to both inhale and swallow simultaneously we may actually succeed at both—and immediately choke on our food.

Humans develop this “low larynx” after we are born, which creates a physiological hazard but also enormous acoustic and linguistic advantages. Other primates and human babies simply cannot make the same kinds of robust vowel sounds that adult humans can; vowel sounds which are found in almost all languages and are thought to be important for being clearly understood: the /i/ in “heed”, /u/ in “mood” and the /a/ in “palm”. Despite the fact that even today in the United States, choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional death, evolution has apparently gathered more than enough benefit from human speech to offset the losses.

The simple, yet profound pleasures of cooking and sharing a meal with friends and family—talking and laughing in the kitchen and around the table—are quintessentially human. And, uniquely, they encourage a certain discipline: the subtle refinement in behavior of making a separation between taking a bite and taking a breath to compensate for an anatomy that no longer does.