My wife announced on Thursday that we would be feeding eleven people on Sunday. I responded the way any physician of thirty years' standing responds to sudden unbudgeted obligations: I looked at the ceiling and said nothing.
By Saturday I had made peace with it, mostly because the shopping list was cheap. Two bags of dried beans, four onions, a bunch of cilantro that cost less than my coffee. There is a lesson there about the economics of prevention that I have never managed to get into a lecture slide.
What I noticed on Sunday was not the food. It was that nobody left. We sat for three hours. My neighbor, who has not had a physical since the Obama administration, told me about his father's stroke. That is a clinical history I could not have obtained in an office visit.
I am not going to pretend a pot of soup lowered anyone's LDL that afternoon. But something happened at that table that the literature calls social connectedness and my grandmother simply called Sunday.