The Night Ozempic Came to Dinner

I love dinner parties. I love attending them, and I love throwing them even more. When I was a child, my parents had lively dinners every week—sometimes raucous, always fun. No subject was off the table, and serious debate was encouraged. Occasionally, arguments would devolve into less than convivial yelling, and the culprit—usually my father, sometimes a guest—would call the next morning to apologize. But there were never any lingering, hard feelings. And besides, the food was good.

As a grown-up, I have followed in my parents’ footsteps, entertaining a great deal. While I am, alas, neither Madame de Récamier nor the Duchess of Devonshire (who brilliantly created a centerpiece with a basket of piglets), I have tried to serve good food and wine, bringing all sorts of people together for real conversation.

When I give dinner parties, I go to a lot of trouble. This is not a complaint. I like the planning and I like to cook. I am well organized, and do most of the work ahead of time, so I can relax and enjoy the evening. Usually, I email guests a week before to find out about allergies or aversions. In the old days, I assumed everyone would eat whatever I served, and be grateful for the invitation. But we are not in the old days, and there is always someone who has an issue with something, so I send an inquiry. Since I check ahead of time (and because I’m a good cook), I have always been confident that everyone will eat with pleasure. 

But then, one evening, Ozempic came to dinner.

When food is pushed around the plate all night and never actually consumed, the chef will be, quite reasonably, upset. But there is also an awkwardness in the dining room, felt even by the other guests. When one, two, or, God forbid, three out of eight don’t eat or even drink because a drug has stolen their appetites, a pall descends upon the entire table. 

A successful, truly sparkling dinner party is a delicate affair. It’s a carefully orchestrated dance between host and guest, a mutual compact voluntarily agreed upon. The host provides delicious food and a beautiful table, and the guests provide stimulating conversation and appreciation. Food in exchange for fun. But the evening is out of balance if one side doesn’t play the game. Even the most charming of guests cannot compensate for an untouched plate.

So what, you say? Ozempic and similar drugs are miraculous. Who cares about your silly parties? Much ado about absolutely nothing.

Au contraire.

Dinner is the foundation of a civilized society. Hospitality is a fundamental human virtue, and the profound importance of coming together around a table over food has been understood for millennia. Welcoming strangers and those who are not already part of the family is central to every religion and culture. Dinners have begun marriages and ended wars. They unite families, communities, and nations.

Western Civilization begins with two poems, one of which, The Odyssey, is a tale about hospitality—who serves what to Odysseus, and how Penelope and Argos are coping back home with all of the guests. So, too, the Bible is the story of God’s hospitality to Man in the Garden, then to Israel, and finally to all of us through the sacrifice of his only Son. The Mass—bread and wine—is the central event in a Christian service, as dinner is or should be the central event in the life of a family. Indeed, many studies have shown that the single biggest predictor of a happy and healthy child is whether the family regularly eats dinner together.

If a child’s parents are on weight-losing drugs and not eating, she will intuit that food, a basic comfort, is somehow dangerous. That child is also very likely to replicate her parents’ behavior, and will almost certainly be at greater risk of eating disorders and a lifetime of destructive eating habits. Children need to see their parents eating with delight—preferably healthy, tasty, and beautifully presented food.

We are embodied creatures who require nourishment for both soul and body. We need to eat lovingly prepared food, while conversing with one another across a table. A culture in which people gobble fast food while scrolling through Instagram is a sick culture. And a culture in which food has been rejected in favor of drugs is even sicker.

Is it any surprise that our country is so polarized? In a time when families do not routinely eat together, when dinner parties in someone’s home are the exception rather than the rule, when the virtues of hospitality and service are so rarely put into practice, it’s no wonder that we have forgotten how to talk to each other. And it is only a matter of time before that forgetting becomes a willful refusal to have anything to do with “the other.”

Not so long ago, in our nation’s capital, Democrats and Republicans used to grandstand and fight all day, but then eat dinner together at night. Friendships across party lines were common, and bipartisan socializing after work was an expected part of the scene. That world is almost entirely gone, and the country is demonstrably the worse for it.

It is easy to demonize someone online. It is easy to condemn those whom one never meets. But imagine if you had to sit at a dinner table with them. Imagine if you had to make polite conversation while sharing food and drink. You might even discover a common interest—dogs, gardening, who knows. What matters is finding something, anything, that can bridge the gap and force a real awareness of the other. If there is any way forward from these divided times, it must surely be at the dinner table.

I do not think it is hyperbolic to posit that anything that further erodes and undermines the shared experience of eating a meal together—as a family, as neighbors, as a nation—is nothing short of an assault on civilization.

Ozempic and its ilk are but another stealthy, sophisticated attack on our very humanity. While these drugs may be necessary for some, it is clear that there is widespread use and abuse by otherwise perfectly healthy people. Moreover, we do not exist in a vacuum. Behavior is contagious. If everyone around you is suddenly unnaturally de-wrinkled (are there any furrowed brows left?) or unnaturally thin, it will soon be almost impossible to resist the temptation to follow the herd. Easier by far to surrender to the seductive forces of anti-humanism.

We take drugs to sleep and drugs to focus. Drugs to calm down and drugs to cure depression. We take drugs to prevent babies, and drugs to prevent puberty. We erase our wrinkles and rent our wombs. We don’t have sex, we just watch porn. And now, we take drugs instead of food. Everything that makes us who we are, everything human, is under attack.

So who cares about my silly dinner parties? Let me suggest that we all should.