The purpose of this paper is to employ the tools provided by political theory in thinking about the relationship between food and democracy. I engage with three conversations. In political theory, the distinction between necessity and freedom places food as an enabling condition for political participation. The gendering of food literature defends the feminized private family table against the encroachments of the global market. The literature on democracy as daily life stresses bringing food under local control by distinguishing and separating use and exchange value. By exploring the Greek notion of common meals in the writings of Aristotle, I intend to show that shared meals based on common use instead of exchange and private markets can counter a range of inequalities that ordinarily undermine the practice of democratic citizenship, such as deliberation and service. The concept of common meals allows me to posit the need to integrate food and democracy with a stress on food as political or democratic sustenance. It points to the need to embrace public ways of using food to build solidarity across differences that are absent at the private table. Finally, the celebration of the local needs to take seriously how democratization processes or building solidarity are different from local markets, e.g. farmers markets
