Strong groups do not become strong only because they agree on a mission. They become strong because people stop feeling abstract to one another, they see each other as people and friends. That is one reason shared meals matter more than most official culture programs. You don't need expensive workshops and getaways to build a team culture. You just need to be present. Have lunch with your team, have them eat together. Have coffee together...
Team lunch does not magically create loyalty all of a sudden. Forced fun, specially when coming from a manager, is exhausting. But repeated meals do something small and useful that a lot of organizations keep underestimating. They lower formality, build memory, and create the ordinary familiarity that hard cooperation feeds on. This is just how we are, as humans. Ever since... well, ever. We always ate with the tribe, the family, the closed ones. The people we care about.
When people eat together regularly, they stop meeting each other only inside the formal frame of work. You hear what someone's voice sounds like when he is not defending a position, when they're just enjoying their food and tell you about their favorite soccer team. You learn their interests, humor, irritation, small preferences, and the texture of personality. They learn yours. Not out of strategic calculation, but just out of relaxation.
I have seen the difference in ordinary work situations. A team that has eaten together a dozen times is much more likely to survive a hard disagreement without instantly turning procedural. They usually sort it out over lunch.
Military, sports team, do it all the time to build cohesion because it's so simple and works so well. Good work teams often do it without being told. Shared meals create recurring low-drama ritual, and ritual is part of how a group becomes real instead of merely assembled.
Managers often miss this because managers like abstractions they can present. Team charters. OKRs. Values language. Engagement programs. Not steaks, not hotpot, not tacos... Some of that helps, maybe. But team cohesion happens every day, and lunch is a great way to build it. Trust is not manufactured in the crisis meeting itself. It is built beforehand, in enough small moments that the crisis does not turn everyone into strangers.
However, they need to be real lunch. Not mandatory management events. Then the ritual stops being human and becomes corporate theater.
That is also why remote teams struggle more than their managers like to admit. The problem is not just bandwidth or documentation quality. It is the loss of recurring ordinary rituals that make people more willing to carry each other. A shared table is not a magic solution. It is just one of the cheapest, oldest ways to turn coworkers into people who know each other well enough to endure friction.
So yes, people who eat together fight together. Not because sandwiches create virtue. Because repeated meals give a group more human weight. A lot of cohesion problems are really failures of ordinary social infrastructure, and the infrastructure is usually much more mundane than the culture deck suggests. The Spartans knew it, the Roman knew it, the army does it. Now you do it :).